should Sophie spend another night just having Tracker in her dreams?
Being a good girl and dating the kind of men that she knew her brother would approve of hadn’t worked. Maybe the only way to break free from the trap she found herself in was to seduce the man who held her there….
1
“LUCAS, WILL YOU TAKE this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?”
Sophie blinked back a tear as her brother said yes. She’d never thought of Lucas as being romantic, but marriage had changed him.
“Mac, will you take Lucas to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
Sophie blinked again as her best friend repeated her vow. As the maid of honor, Sophie stood in attendance behind the bride, elbow to elbow with the best man, Tracker McBride. It was bad enough that every pore in her body seemed to be aware of him—she was not going to cry in front of him!
“By the power invested in me…”
Sophie sniffed as a tear slid down her cheek. The game plan she’d come up with to grab Tracker’s attention was not going well. It hadn’t mattered one bit that she’d arrived with two men in attendance. The Shadow hadn’t appeared until it was time to escort her from the patio outside Lucas’s office to the trellis in the rose garden. And all it had taken was the brief, impersonal press of his hand on the small of her back to reawaken her fantasy of having his hands touch every part of her. Just thinking about it had her skin feeling hot and icy at the same time.
Sophie blinked away a second tear. Damn it! Grace Kelly hadn’t cried in front of Cary Grant. She’d been all smiles and champagne picnics and dogged determination. More importantly, she’d had a game plan that worked.
“I now pronounce you man and wife.”
When Lucas and Mac turned to embrace each other, Sophie felt the second tear slide down her cheek. They shared what she’d always wanted—that closeness with a person you loved and who loved you back.
Hoping that no one would notice, she raised a hand slowly, intending to wipe the tears away. Tracker’s arm brushed against hers when he stepped closer and pressed a handkerchief into her hand, and she felt heat streak right down to her toes.
“You okay, Princess?”
Okay? How could she be okay when her insides had become as liquid as the tears running down her face? And when the man who was responsible was treating her like a kid sister? Dabbing at her eyes, she managed a nod.
Wasn’t that the story of her life? The men who wanted to seduce her were after her money, and the one man she wanted to seduce her was perfectly content to merely watch over her like a protective older brother.
Blinking rapidly, Sophie willed the tears to stop. She’d come here to change that. If plan A—making Tracker jealous—had been a bust, she’d just have to come up with another one. Quick.
As she watched her brother and her best friend turn to face the applause of their guests, she stepped to the side and, for a moment, let her eyes meet Tracker’s. When a jolt moved through her right down to her toes, she waited a beat, then two, for her system to stabilize. Dressed all in black, he exuded an air of mystery and danger. And sex—raw, primitive and irresistible.
She was in trouble. It was one thing to plan a seduction in the abstract and quite another to put it into action when just looking at him turned her knees to jelly.
And it was just her luck that he was a triple threat kind of guy. First, he had a great body, strong and athletic. Second, he had a great mouth. It was better not to look at it too long. And then there were his eyes and the way he looked at her—as if he knew all her secrets and was just waiting for her to make a move so that he could counter it.
It made her want to do something, anything that he wouldn’t expect.
That was the key. Drawing in a deep breath, she stiffened her spine. She had to think of something he wouldn’t expect, something subtle, sneaky. The challenge sent a little ripple of anticipation through her.
“Hey, you two,” Lucas said.
With a start, Sophie tore her eyes away from Tracker’s and glanced at her brother. He and Mac had already started to make their way down the “aisle” formed by the guests.
“Stay close,” Lucas continued, once he had their attention. “We’re going right to the dance floor just as we did at the wedding.”
Yes, Sophie decided as she walked with Tracker toward the platform that had been set up for dancing. A dance was a good start. And maybe an innocent little game…
A DANCE. That’s all it was. Just a polite, social gesture—one of the many rituals that Lucas was determined to repeat for his bride. That’s what Tracker told himself as he steered Sophie onto the dancing platform. It had been a year since he’d held the Princess in his arms, a year since he’d decided that he had to keep his distance from her. However much he thought he’d prepared himself, he couldn’t prevent his body from hardening in anticipation of holding her, the reaction so automatic it was as if he had already been intimate with her.
And he had been very intimate with her in the fantasies that had fueled his dreams every night for the past year. A few of them flickered at the edge of his mind as the music began. Then her hand was in his, pressed palm to palm, and she raised the other one to rest on his shoulder. They touched nowhere else, but he could imagine her strong, slender fingers brushing over his skin, and flames licked along his nerve endings at the thought.
Fantasies were all he would ever have with Sophie Wainwright, Tracker reminded himself. Hardly a day went by that he didn’t review the reasons why he’d resolved to steer clear of her. First off, she was his boss’s sister—a boss who happened to be his best friend and the closest thing to family he’d ever known. Having an affair with Sophie Wainwright was out of the question. And anything else was impossible. They came from different worlds. Only in fairy tales did the princess and the knight who guarded her believe they might have anything more.
But she was close now, and each time the movements of the dance brought their bodies into contact, the hard knot of desire tightened inside of him. One thing was clear. He couldn’t control his response to her any more than he’d been able to keep himself entirely away from her.
Lucas had asked him to keep an eye on her after the kidnapping. There were plenty of men Tracker could have assigned to watch over her. But he hadn’t been able to give up watching over her himself.
That one simple fact worried him. Developing an iron-willed control over his emotions was one of the few things in his life he was proud of. His father had been a violent man, and Tracker knew that he’d inherited some of those tendencies. The work he’d done for the government had proved it. He couldn’t allow anyone to get too close, especially not Sophie, who threatened his control as no woman ever had before.
Even now he couldn’t seem to prevent himself from drawing her closer and torturing himself with the brush of her body against his. Each time she shifted, he felt the movement, along with an ache that began to grow deeper and sharper within him.
He wanted Sophie. To have her this close and not be able to take more was sheer torture.
“It’s just not fair,” Sophie said.
Her
