My Lady Rival (25 page)

He smiled and stepped toward her again. “Then you want me to stay.”

“Yes.” Her heart added, A lways, but she didn’t say it.

“What do you want me to do next, Willa?”

She tilted her head, studying the steady flicker of shadows the lamplight created across his face. Shadows hid in the corners of his mouth as he smiled, sank into his eyes as he watched her, waiting. She remembered different shadows in his eyes before, earlier in the day, at the factory, when he realized the nonsaturation process had failed again. She recalled his smile then, too, the facade she’d realized they both employed.

“I suppose you expect me to ask you to kiss me again,” she said.

He spread his arms wide, palms outward. Nonthreatening. A lways protecting, this man she loved. “If that is what you wish, then I’ll do it. But only if you ask.”

“Perhaps I would like for you to touch me instead.”

“Just tell me where, when, and how long,” he quipped, smiling again. Fleeting, that smile, but the shadows remained.

“I want you to tell me what’s behind your smile,” she said. She stepped toward him, meeting him toe to toe as the smile she named disappeared. She reached up, placed her finger at the corner of his mouth, traced the seam of his lips.

Swallowed as she met his eyes. “We are the same, A lexander Laurie. We use truth and flattery alike to get our way, though only we realize that we are the ones trapped, unable to escape our own manipulations. I know you see me as someone more than the person that I present to the world, someone more than I make myself for the sake of my father’s company.”

She let her hand fall, away from his lips, on his chest and sliding down to still between them. Over his heart. “Tell me, A lexander Laurie,” she whispered. “When you’re not trying to charm someone, who are you?”

He watched her, his eyes traveling back and forth as he searched hers.

She discovered that he was silent. A n observer. A seeker.

His hand lifted. He placed it against her cheek, and she rested her head as they stared at each other.

He was a protector.

She’d known that from the beginning.

He was a nurturer; he tried to soothe her with his touch.

He was a man she could love. He was a man she already loved.

“I am but a man,” he said, his voice low and hoarse. “I am a man with dreams and ambition, a man who needs to assuage his guilt for his failures, who believes he can only do such by proving his success. I am a man with flaws too many to count, and a hope that one day I’ll be as great a man as my father was.” He paused, his breath abruptly silent. A s if he’d meant to say something else but He paused, his breath abruptly silent. A s if he’d meant to say something else but stifled his words.

“Yes?” she whispered, and felt his heartbeat speed beneath her fingers.

“I am a man who wants you.”

She looked into the shadows of his eyes, and she saw the words he left silent.

Or perhaps they were words she hoped for, other words she feared to be true.

I want you more than anything else.

I need you.

Don’t ask more of me than I can give.

Willa pressed her lips together and lowered her lashes, deliberately shuttering her eyes from his gaze. Then she reached over toward the lamp and extinguished the flame. She slid her hands up his chest, over his shoulders. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she lifted to her toes and pressed her lips against his.

“I want you, too.”

Her teeth scraped against his bottom lip, and he let her lead their kiss as he scooped her into his arms and walked forward until his knees bumped against the bed. He laid her down, then stripped off his clothes and crawled over her, his elbows and knees braced on either side of her body.

“You’re naked,” she said, her laughter filled with a sort of delighted wonder as he bent his head to nip at her lips.

“You should be, too. I laid you down and gave you time to undress while I removed my clothes, yet here you are.”

She ran the flats of her palms up and down over his back. “It’s only my shift.

A nd I had a thought that you might want to help me get rid of it.” A lex kissed from the corner of her lips across her cheek. He placed a quick kiss below her ear. “I love the way you think.”

Rolling onto his side, he drew his hand down the length of her body, his mouth pressing smiles into her shoulder as he felt her shiver beneath his touch. He bunched the cotton shift in his fist at midthigh, then ran his finger back and forth along the hem, teasing her.

“A re you sure you want to take this off?”

Her breath fanned cool across his face as she turned her head toward him. “I’ve fantasized about being naked against you, your skin against my skin. My breasts against your chest, stomach to stomach, thighs to thighs. I want to feel you against me, A lex.”

“A ll right. We’ll take it off.” He exhaled a long breath, his cock equally enticed by the image she painted. He pulled the hem up.

“Lift your hips.”

She did, wriggling as his fingers skimmed over her skin, tickling the sensitive flesh between thigh and pelvis.

“Sit up, please.” She started to obey, and he put a hand to her chest to halt her.

“No, wait.” Fumbling in the darkness, he gripped the thin material of her shift with both hands, then ripped the garment apart from neck to hemline.

“Impressive,” she said drily.

“Impressive,” she said drily.

He grinned and helped her shrug out of the remnants. “That was from one of my fantasies.”

A s were the soft, rounded hills of her breasts, the firm but pliant silken flesh hot against his palms. Her nipples were silken as well between his fingers, but velvet in his mouth, against his tongue.

Willa cried out, her feet finding the backs of his calves as she rolled toward him in the darkness. A lex steadied her with his hand to her hip, gliding it along her back to fist in her hair. She lifted a leg over his thigh, nudging closer and closer, and A lex released her breast from his mouth as she brushed against his cock.

“God, Willa.” He pulled her head back and sank his teeth against her throat—

nipping, then soothing, biting and kissing. She arched her hips and breasts against him, her body undulating beneath his caresses. Impatient, greedy. Exactly the way he felt.

He pushed her to her back, kissing across her breasts and sucking at her nipples again as he moved over her and in between her thighs.

She jerked when he touched her the first time. When he put his mouth on her, she cried out, lifting her hips off the bed. Then he used both his mouth and hands to drive her higher and higher, not relenting until she came for him.

When her body continued to quiver, he soothed her with his tongue, not stopping until she stilled and said his name.

“A lex.”

He couldn’t help but smile at the sound, for she said it as she stretched, obviously pleased with herself. Pulling himself up, he hovered over her.

“A lex,” she whispered in his ear, hugging her arms around his neck. “I want you inside me, all of you. Now, please.”

It was the only permission he needed. She pushed against him, and he slammed forward, catching her gasp in his mouth. A gain and again he pushed inside, then pulled back. Pushing and pulling, groaning at the velvet friction.

She arched against only him twice more, begging his name with another Please, A lex, and Now, A lex, and he had to tear himself away, spilling himself on the bed near her hip.

A fterward he apologized and pulled the blanket off. It was awkward then. Not knowing what to say. Having too much he wanted to say but couldn’t. He lit the lamp, and it was as if the low circle of light brought both their doubts back in the room to hover at their shoulders.

“I should leave,” he said. Hoping she would ask him to stay.

When she didn’t say anything, he moved to stand, but she stilled him with a hand on his arm. “Remember when you asked me what I wanted, A lex?”

“Yes, of course. What do you want now?”

She tugged at him, smiling as he returned to her arms. “I want you to hold me,” she whispered.

A nd he did.

For the third time that night, Willa awoke with a start before dawn could break over the sky.

Something was crawling up her arm. Plodding, as if it had premeditated calculations on what it would do when it reached its next destination. Willa stiffened, then opened her eyes.

A lex’s face was above hers, smiling. He’d lit the lamp, and Willa’s stomach flopped at the sight of him: dark hair hanging over his brow, dark stubble peppering his jaw and disappearing into the creases on either side of his mouth.

Golden light from the lamp washed over the muscled contours of his shoulders, arms, and chest. His eyes were lazy as he watched her, making a study of the texture of her skin, the leap of her pulse, as if she were the most intriguing puzzle to be solved or a wild, untamed land to be explored, and he meant to be the first man to claim such territory as his.

“You shouldn’t smile in such a way,” she murmured, her voice low and drowsy.

“Oh?” One eyebrow arched, and his fingers paused for a moment before continuing their strategic ascent up her arm.

His smile . . . that smile . . . it suggested things to her mind. Images of future mornings before dawn, waking up at his side. Of laughter and shared secrets and surprise kisses. That smile punctuated their past with new possibilities: arguments completed with lovemaking, tempers broken by understanding, rivalry erased by admissions of love.

Love? Willa turned her head aside, a chuckle lifting from her throat. Even if he could love her, love wasn’t in A lex Laurie’s plans.

“If I can’t smile,” he said, his fingers rounding her shoulder and trailing the sensitive path of her collarbone, “then I hardly think it fair that you should be allowed to laugh.”

“I thought this was about what I wanted,” she said. “I clearly remember you asking me, ‘Willa, what do you want? I’ll do whatever you ask. A nything for you, Willa.’”

His smile gradually faded to nothing more than a quirk of his lips. His touch became bolder, marching over the swells and valleys of her breasts. “Yes, but that was then. Now it’s my turn.”

“I can’t even have an entire night? Honestly, A lex—” Her breath caught as the movement of his hand changed, gentling, becoming a butterfly’s caress skimming around and around her nipple.

“A fraid not.” He didn’t sound regretful in the least. On the contrary, he sounded

“A fraid not.” He didn’t sound regretful in the least. On the contrary, he sounded extraordinarily pleased. “There are too many things I want to do to you. For example, there are things like this . . .”

His head dipped, his hair falling against her chest and throat now as his lips covered her nipple. He pulled her into his mouth, hot and leisurely, as if he meant to take nights—no, years—before he would give her control again. He tasted her, teased her, rolled his tongue over her nipple as if trying to answer a hypothesis regarding the varied lengths of her sighs, the loudness of her moans, the staggering of her gasps.

“A lex—”

“Shh.” He lifted his head and kissed her lips. “Don’t say anything, Willa. Not a word. Don’t think, not about what I’m doing or what you’d like me to be doing instead or even what you’ll tell me to do next time. Just feel.” He kissed her again, touching his tongue to hers, capturing her lips between his, waiting long seconds to move again and again, until it was no longer a kiss but something much more. Their lips held a knowledge of each other that even their minds hadn’t before: a restful, peaceful intimacy that her soul had long hungered for. She’d never known she’d wanted it or needed it. Now she knew, and even as he broke their kiss to press his mouth along her cheek and throat, a new, overwhelming ache of loss built in her chest.

“Let me pleasure you,” he whispered as his mouth trailed away farther below, coasting past her breasts, then pausing to linger at each rib. “Shall I tell you how long I’ve wanted to touch you like this? There’s never been a moment since I met you when I haven’t dreamed of it, even after I realized who you were. Perhaps I’m mad to admit such a thing aloud. Promise not to hold it against me tomorrow.”

She could feel his smile shaped in the hollow of her abdomen. Though her hands had fisted in the sheet at her sides, she raised one now and placed it over his head.

Yes. I am the same. Though I am too cowardly to say it.

I love you.

He chuckled, his breath warm against her skin. There, too, was intimacy. Many men she’d graced with her smiles. Only this man had hidden his smile against her naked flesh.

“I see you wish for me to stop talking. Where shall I go now? I wonder. Do you mean for your hand to send me below again? I fear you are too greedy, Willa.

You must learn to be patient. I want everything, you see—starting with this.” His tongue found her belly button, and Willa shivered at the unexpected decadence of such a kiss. He nibbled along the line of her pelvis, then smoothed his palms along each leg from upper thigh to ankle, a procession for what he intended to do with his mouth.

Willa squirmed the closer he came to the juncture of her thighs—her quim.

Please. Her hand did tug at his hair this time in an attempt to guide him. He ignored her.

ignored her.

“Patience, darling.”

She sighed loudly, her protest to his puritanical lecture of virtues. He laughed and tortured her with his mouth, scattering kisses along the insides of her thighs.

She moaned. “A lex—”

“Don’t think. Just feel. Feel what it’s like when I kiss the back of your knee. The front.”

She felt vulnerable—more vulnerable even than when he kissed her in the most intimate place of all. Knees were not for kisses, and yet he seduced her into believing hers would never be useful for walking again.

“The curve of your calf.”

Sensitive. How sensitive her skin was there. She’d never known. She’d always remember the slow slide of his fingers and mouth over her calf, her shin, the skin in between.

“The delicate bones of your ankle. God, how fragile you are. A nd how easily you disguise it.”