practically a compliment in comparison to the things they called her. What should she care if he joined in the chorus? Why should it matter that he did so to her face, with every appearance of believing it? She told herself such things could hardly matter to her any longer. She should be entirely immune.
“Oh, come now,” she said, clucking her tongue. She did not let her gaze drift to that intoxicating hollow between his pectoral muscles, lovingly outlined by his shirt. She did not let her eyes travel further south to investigate that washboard of an abdomen. “You remember—I’ve known you forever. I knew you back before you decided to reinvent yourself, back before you became the most boring man alive. I knew you when you were fun.” She shrugged, knowing she looked careless and amused. Effortless. Blasé. It was her greatest talent. “Back when you were, if I recall it correctly, voted the most dissipated playboy in all of New York City every year for the better part of your twenties.”
She’d run into him, fatefully, at the tail end of that period, she thought, willing those unhelpful and unnecessary memories away. Right when he’d been teetering on the edge of respectability in the wake of his beloved mother’s death. For all she knew, their little weekend tryst had been the straw that broke him. Just one more sin to add to her roster, no doubt. She had given up counting them all.
“Is that why you hate me so much, with so little reason?” she asked then, spurred by some emotion she hardly understood, some small glimpse of something in his expression that she barely comprehended. “Because I knew you when? That hardly seems fair. So does most of Manhattan.”
“I don’t hate you, Larissa,” he said, his voice a rough caress in the small room, abrading her skin, making her arch slightly against it, as if he’d really touched her. “I know you.”
He reached over then, and tracked a leftover droplet from her bath down the side of her neck, across her collarbone, his finger scorching her. Terrifying her. Her gaze was trapped in his. Fire. Anger. And something else, something darker, that she was afraid to explore.
That, God help her, made her want. Yearn.
“What are you doing?” she asked, hating herself for the breathlessness in her voice, the weakness spreading through her. The helpless wanting that even so small a touch could evoke in her. He was an exercise in self-immolation. And he was entirely too addictive, a quick slide into nothing but madness. She’d escaped him once, but she had no reason to believe she would be so lucky again. In fact, she knew better.
But she didn’t move. She didn’t step away.
His lips twitched and a very male triumph lit his dark gaze. She hated that even more.
“It occurred to me that there is very little do here on Endicott Island,” he said, his finger toying with the V-neck of her shirt, teasing her. Yet—still—there was a measuring coolness in his eyes. As if he was testing as much as teasing her. “And we wouldn’t want you bored. I’ve seen what happens when you get bored.” He let out a small laugh. “The whole world has, I imagine.”
“I’m very easily bored, and just as easily photographed, it’s true,” she agreed, forcing the breathlessness back into remission. Covering the hurt she shouldn’t allow herself to feel with a sniff. “I’m bored right now.”
He only smiled.
“While you’re here so unexpectedly,” he said, his fingers drawing out an intoxicating rhythm inside of her, making it pulse deep into her core, “we might as well remind ourselves of the one thing we’re really, really good at, don’t you think?”
She had the urge to play dumb, to ask him what he meant, but the glittering light in his gaze stopped her. She was afraid he would demonstrate what he meant, and how could she possibly survive that? He thought she was the same person she’d been eight months ago, the same person she’d been five years ago. Brittle, hard. Empty. Capable of withstanding anything without truly letting it touch her. Numb. He would treat her like the girl he’d known then, that ghost of herself, that walking shadow. And in so doing, he would ruin whoever she was now, softer and quieter and certainly no match for the likes of him.
She couldn’t allow it. She wouldn’t.
But she also couldn’t let him see that she’d changed. It would end the same way, and she would lose so much more. He would assume it was a trick, a game. He would accuse her of ulterior motives. And Larissa couldn’t defend herself, could she? She couldn’t explain what had happened to her, much less who she’d become—she was still in the process of figuring that out.
And she was so deathly afraid of the answer.
“I thought you said one taste was more than enough,” she tossed back at him lightly, surprised to find that the words still stung. She knew they shouldn’t. What was one more low opinion? She smiled up at him, mysterious, unknowable. The Larissa Whitney promise. Her impenetrable armor. “But no need to worry. Most men, like you, can’t even begin to handle me.”
His smile bordered on feral. She felt it hard in her belly, like a kick, and then his eyes went dark.
She stopped breathing.
“Watch me,” he said hoarsely.
And then his hands were on her shoulders, warm and sure. And she was lost.
He pulled her close, his lips twisting slightly into something too hard to be a smile, and then he took her mouth in a searing, impossible kiss.
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS worse than she’d remembered, when she’d allowed herself to remember him at all. It was better.
So much better.
Hotter, sleeker, rolling through her like a tornado, tearing her apart, making her shake as the wild passion claimed her. Her hands found his narrow hips, the taut, smooth muscles of his back, and despite herself, she clung. His skin was so warm, so firm, blazing through the tight shirt he wore, making her long to reach beneath it.
She felt him everywhere.
He kissed her again and again, as if he was as swept away in this fire, this madness, as she was. As if he never meant to stop. Her toes curled against the floorboards. Her eyes fell shut, her back arched, bringing her closer to his drugging heat. She ached everywhere he touched her, and ached even more where he did not. She melted. She burned.
She was in so much trouble.
She was not drunk this time, feeling daring and careless and out of control after a long night at a chaotic party. She was not numbed and halfway to dead inside. There was nothing to dull the exquisite force of him or her own helpless, needy reaction, and however dangerous she had believed him to be before, she knew now she had greatly underestimated his power over her.
She was such a fool.
And still she kissed him back, angling her mouth for a better fit, moving closer in his arms, pressing up against the hard wall of his chest. She couldn’t seem to help herself. It was as if he’d been created just for her, carefully constructed to make her lose her mind.
But she was not the same girl he’d once known, however peripherally—not the same person at all any longer, and it was that thought that finally penetrated the delirious fog in her brain. She knew what she was doing here, with him—what she was risking. But he was still playing old games,
