stern set to his beautiful mouth. That bold fire in his gaze. Worse, she could feel it in the way she simply...melted. Everything inside her turned soft and ran sweet, and she thought she’d never wanted anything more in all her life than the press of that mouth of his against hers again.
Just one more time, she told herself, almost wistfully, as she looked up at him.
But she knew that was the biggest lie of all.
“Don’t kiss me,” she whispered then, too quick and too revealing. “I don’t want you to kiss me again.”
Rafael’s stern mouth was so close then—so close—and that look in his eyes was enough to raze whole cities, and there was no disguising the way it made her tremble, too. She didn’t try.
“Speaking of lies,” he said, and drew closer still, his arms moving around her to hold her there in a parody of a lover’s embrace.
Or perhaps it was no parody, after all.
She braced her hands against his chest, though she couldn’t have said if she was pushing him away or, far more worrying, simply holding him there. “It’s not a lie just because you don’t like it.”
He studied her for a moment, and Lily forgot where they were. What continent, what year. What city. There was nothing but that dark gold brilliance in his gaze, the riot deep inside her, and her ever more fragile resistance. He shifted, raising one gloved hand to smooth over her cheek, the leather both a caress and a punishment, as it was not the lick of heat his bare skin would have been.
She imagined he knew that, too.
“Relax,” he said, and he sounded far too amused, then. As if she was the only one torn asunder by this. The only one so affected. “I’m not going to kiss you here. It’s far too cold.”
“You mean public.”
There was a dangerous gleam in his eyes then. “I mean cold.”
“I don’t understand what the temperature has to do with it.” She sounded far more cross than was wise. Rafael’s mouth curved.
“The next time I kiss you, Lily, I won’t be as thrown as I was on the street in Virginia. There will be nothing but our usual chemistry.” He shrugged, though the hand against her cheek tightened, and she knew then that he wasn’t nearly as unaffected as he seemed. “And you know what happens then.”
She did. A thousand images surged through her then, one brighter and more sinfully wicked than the next. A messy, slick tumult of his mouth, his hands. The thrust of his body deep into hers. The taste of his skin beneath her tongue, the hard perfection of him beneath her hands. Salt and steel.
The ache, the fire. The impossible, unconquerable fire.
“No,” she gritted out, glaring at him no matter how much emotion she feared was right there in her eyes to make a liar of her. “I don’t know what happens.”
He dragged his thumb over her bottom lip, his mouth cruel and harsh and no less beguiling, because he knew exactly what it did to her. The thick heat that wound tight and dropped low, nearly making her moan. Nearly.
“Then you’ll be in for quite a ride.” He looked at her as if he was already inside her. Already setting a lazy, mind-wrecking pace. “It’s uncontrollable. It always has been.”
Lily jerked her head back, out of his grip, much too aware that he let her. That he could have stopped her, if he chose. His hand dropped from her face and she wanted to slap that deeply male, wholly satisfied look straight off his face. She had to grit her teeth to keep from doing it.
“I don’t know what that means,” she told him, her voice as frigid as the air around them. As the dark, mysterious waters of the canal behind him. “I feel certain I don’t want to know what it means.”
His dark eyes were hooded as they met hers. He still looked like they were already having sex. As if it was a foregone conclusion. As if this was nothing more than foreplay—and every part of her body burst into jubilant flame at the sight.
“It means I kiss you, then I’m inside you,” he told her, in a voice straight out of those wild, feverish dreams she lied and told herself were nightmares. She’d been telling herself that for years. “Always.”
“I will take that as a threat,” she threw at him and stepped back, as if that tiny wedge of space could make what he said less true. His mouth shifted, and she thought she’d never seen him look more like a wolf than he did then.
And she didn’t think she’d ever wanted him more.
“You may take it any way you choose,” he told her, all dark intent and certainty. “It is a fact, Lily. As inevitable as the dawn after a long, cold night. And as unavoidable.”
* * *
Rafael thought she might run.
He set footmen at the door to her bedchamber and found himself rather more grim than he should have been as he considered what pointless attempt she might make to escape him this time. Yet despite his dark imaginings as the hours crept by, no alarm was raised.
And when the clock struck the appointed hour, Lily appeared at the top of the grand stair inside the palazzo like every last one of the fantasies he’d conjured up over the past five years.
He’d planned this well, he’d thought. He’d had the gown shipped in from Milan, had dispatched servants to tend to her hair and her cosmetics. He’d thought he’d prepared himself for the inevitable result.
But it was one thing to imagine Lily, his Lily, alive and well and dressed like a member of the scrupulously high-class Venetian society they would mix with tonight. It was something else to see her again with his own eyes.
Rafael had never been so glad of that long staircase that swept down from the upper floor of the palazzo to the main level where he stood.
It gave him time to compose himself. Lily moved like water, grace and beauty in every light step, as she made her way toward him. Her honey-colored hair was piled high on her head, held fast with a series of glittering combs, just as he’d asked. The dress he’d had crafted to her precise measurements cupped her gorgeous breasts and then swept in a wide arc toward the floor, managing to hint at her lithe figure even as it concealed it in yards upon yards of a deep, mellow blue-green that made her seem to glow a pale, festive gold.
He’d never seen anything more beautiful.
And then she stopped at the foot of the stair, this perfect goddess with her heart-shaped and heart-stopping face that made his own battered heart ache within his chest, and scowled at him.
“I want a mask,” she said.
Rafael blinked. And tried to wrestle his roaring, possessive reaction into some kind of manageable bounds. It wouldn’t do to throw her down on the stairs, to lick his way into her heat and taste the secrets she still hid from him. It wouldn’t do to rip that perfect gown into shreds where she stood, the better to worship the curve of her sweet hip and the lily tattoo that he knew danced there, out of sight.
“Why?”
He thought he sounded relatively polite and civilized,
