The Best Way to Lose (11 page)

When he finally turned back to face her, she had shifted her hands to the seat cushion and stiffened her arms in a bracing posture that emphasized the jutting roundness of her breasts. Yet she continued to look at the papers on the table with thoughtful concentration.

“What’s so interesting?” A hint of gruffness put an edge on his question.

“What?” Her dark glance hardly touched
him, but she did shift out of that pose to a less disturbing one. “I’m trying to decide how I could rearrange my schedule so I could attend this auction. They have a silver service by Reed and Barton listed that I’d like to see, as well as some Meissen porcelain.”

“Where is it?” Trace wandered over to look at the flyer.

“Just outside of Vicksburg.” She scratched out the appointment listed on the day of the sale, changed it to another date, and wrote in the auction. Something was marked on nearly every day, and Trace noticed, when she had turned pages, that many of them were auctions.

“You go to a lot of them, don’t you?” He swirled the liquid in his glass to hasten the cooling by the ice cubes.

“Yes. They’re fun, especially those rare times when you find some treasure that the people didn’t even know they had. And there’s always that competitive edge when you’re bidding against another dealer on some piece you’d kill for,” Pilar declared with a faint laugh that derided the seriousness of her statement. Her head was tilted back to look up at him, her features all womanly soft and impishly gay.

“All you’d have to do is bat those long, black lashes at him and he’d forget all about the item on the auction block,” Trace informed her in a thickening voice and took a fiery swallow of his drink to burn out the fire that had suddenly blazed.

“The problem is when it’s another woman,”
she retorted and took a sip of her drink. “It needs freshening,” she murmured and glided to her feet in a graceful motion.

Her path to the table brought her close to him, close enough for the fragrance of her hair to stir up his senses. But as she passed he noticed that she was weaving slightly.

“Maybe it’s time I was leaving,” he muttered, too aware that there was no one else around.

“You haven’t finished your drink.” She gave him a short look of surprise. “After loading all those boxes in the car, you might as well take a few minutes to cool off.” She turned her back to him again, and he heard the clink of ice being dropped into a glass.

Needing a diversion, he picked up her appointment calendar and flipped through a few pages. “You’re going to be in New Orleans the middle of July?”

“Yes.” She turned to see the appointment book in his hand but made no sign that she objected. “I try to go there a couple of times a year just to browse through some of the smaller antique shops in the suburbs. Sometimes it’s an easy way to find a bargain or to locate the fourth chair to some table set of a client.”

“That’s about the time a new towboat is supposed to be coming out of the shipyards. Maybe if the dates coincide, you can come to her launching.”

“Maybe.” She didn’t dismiss the suggestion, but she didn’t appear interested in it either.

Masking his frustration, Trace studied the datebook again. “I don’t see many social engagements listed.”

“Couples are usually invited to parties,” she informed him smoothly and crossed the wooden deck to remove the leather-bound appointment book from his hand. “Single women tend to be the bane of most social gatherings. Half the wives are afraid that I am so sexually deprived that I’ll seduce their husbands if I’m alone with them for more than five minutes. And half the husbands are hoping that I will.” There was a bitter ring of ironic amusement in her voice.

“You could always arrange to have a male escort,” Trace countered. “I don’t believe that you haven’t had volunteers.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, there isn’t exactly a surfeit of single males over the age of thirty in this area. When you find one, I can almost guarantee there’ll be something wrong with him. If he isn’t grotesquely overweight, stupid, or a drunkard, then he’s probably an ex-wife beater. Besides, I’m not that desperate for a man,” she declared coolly.

“Aren’t you?”

Pilar didn’t like the way he looked at her when he said that. There was something dry and measuring about it that set off little twinges of unease. He reached out and lightly rubbed the back of his knuckles down the bareness of her arm. The unexpected caress of his hand stunned her, and she pulled away
from it. The sudden action made her a little dizzy.

“No, I’m not,” she retorted.

“You want to be looked at, but you don’t want to be touched … by anyone. Is that it?” he murmured.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her pulse fluctuated wildly as she avoided his eyes, stiff and resistant to their probe.

“I’m not sure that I do, either.” There was the clunk of a glass being set down. Then a hand, cool from the iced glass, was gripping her arm, its pressure firm but not forceful. Pilar let herself be turned to face him squarely. Defiance ran hotly through her blood. “Maybe you can explain some things to me.”

“If you don’t know what you’re talking about, it isn’t likely I will,” she countered with frosty indifference, but she felt unsteady.

“What am I doing here tonight?” he challenged.

“What a ridiculous question!” Pilar declared with incredulous amusement. “You came to collect things that belonged to your family.” She swung away from him and started to take a sip of the bourbon, but Trace took the glass from her hand before it touched her mouth.

“You’ve had enough to drink,” he stated and ignored the indignant breath she drew in protest of his high-handed action. This time he held both her arms so she couldn’t turn away. “Now, tell me—why tonight?”

“It was your idea,” she reminded him curtly. “I didn’t suggest it.”

“But you agreed to it,” Trace countered, watching her closely. “And you agreed to it believing that Cassie wasn’t home—that she would be out for the evening.”

“So? That has no bearing on it. I’m not afraid to be alone with you,” she insisted and raked him with a look designed to put him in his place.

“And I can’t believe you’re usually this careless about the way you dress. A couple of times I had the impression I was watching the beginning act of some striptease show with all the leg and breast you kept showing me.”

“What?!” She pulled back in shock, her hands pushing at his chest while heat farmed her cheeks. “I didn’t wear this dress for your prurient pleasure. It’s cool and comfortable.”

“I’m sure it is, especially when all you’re wearing under it is a pair of panties. Or are you going to tell me that I wasn’t supposed to notice that either?” His hands shifted, gripping her waist while her straining arms maintained a wedge between them.

“You’re disgusting.” She was so angry she couldn’t think.

“It makes it easier, doesn’t it?” The gleam in his gray eyes hardened. “Easier than looking at the facts. You told me to come, knowing you’d be here alone. The first thing you did was to slip into ‘something more comfortable.’” He put suggestive emphasis on the phrase. “Then you had a few drinks before I
joined you so you could pretend you didn’t know what you were doing.”

“That’s a lie. You’re just twisting things,” Pilar accused angrily but her head was swimming.

“Maybe I am. And maybe this is all a calculated move on your part,” he challenged harshly. “I would have left ten minutes ago but you wanted me to stay. You were the one who introduced the subject of sex and made all the comments about sexual deprivation—not me. You were choreographing a dance, but I threw you out of step, didn’t I, when I didn’t wait for you to provoke me into making a pass.”

It all sounded so damning that she was hot all over. It was impossible to look at him. She felt weak and sick. When his hands slid onto her spine, she didn’t resist the molding pressure that brought her into contact with the lower half of his body.

“How can you say that?” she protested.

“Because it’s true.” His voice turned husky. When she looked up, there was a smoldering darkness in his eyes. The porch seemed to spin crazily for a minute, and Pilar wondered how much she had drunk.

“You probably didn’t consciously plan all of it. Instinct did a lot of it,” he said. “The instinct that wanted to feel a man’s arms around you again—the need to have physical contact with another human being. And you picked me because you knew I had succumbed to the temptation of you once before.”

“No!” Pilar was insistent. “It’s all a mistake.”

“Is it? Then why aren’t you fighting me?” he demanded.

And she realized how passive she was in his arms, offering him no more than token resistance. She suddenly began to wonder if everything he’d said was true. Had she subconsciously wanted this? Her stunned and widened gaze searched the hard, male features that were only inches from her own. She stared at his mouth.

There was a tentative movement toward it, as if she had to discover whether she wanted to feel the sensation of it on her lips. A hand moved up her spine, applying pressure to bring her closer.

When her dazed senses alerted her to the downward descent of his mouth, Pilar stiffened. By then it seemed to be too late. There was an instant of strangeness and uncertainty, an absence of familiarity in the pervasive kiss. But its heat was addictive and Pilar let it consume her, reeling under the waves of warm sensation. She was so empty inside, so raw with wanting that nothing else seemed to matter—not who was holding her, or why.

Her lips were ravished, eaten whole, while her body was warmed and made to live again by the heated male flesh of his long, muscled form. The crush of his hands alternately explored and caressed the shape of her shoulders and the sensitive curve of her spine,
pressing and arching until there was contact from head to toe.

The more she strained against him, the more she seemed to receive. Her fingers spread across the bunching muscles along the back of his shoulders, living steel that moved under her touch. The sawing, driving pressure of his mouth separated her lips and swallowed the faint moan that came from her throat. She was plunged into an abyss of mindless lust, all swirling heat and raging fire.

Nothing existed but the heady taste of him filling her mouth and the musky, stimulating male odor clinging to his skin. She was drunk with sensation and longing for more. She couldn’t seem to absorb enough of him into her to ease all the places that ached.

His fingers snarled into her hair as he moistly dragged his kiss across cheek and jaw to an ear. Pilar shuddered uncontrollably at the rush of his warm breath into the sensitive area that set off a whole chain of excited vibrations. She could hardly breathe herself; it was so heavy and labored, disturbed to the point that the blood was pounding through her veins.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” The male voice was husky and rough, demanding an admission while that burning mouth continued to wreak havoc over her skin.

It was trying to drag her back into reality. Pilar didn’t want that. There was a faint
movement of her head in protest, and an absently impatient frown touched her brow. “Don’t talk,” she whispered with aching insistence. “Don’t say anything.”

Her fingers made a tactile journey to the lean angle of his jaw and tried to lift it and turn it so her lips could find their male counterpart and occupy them with more intimate communication. But she met with resistance, then withdrawal as his head was pulled back. Her eyelids were heavy, but she dragged them open, unable to look higher than the tantalizing outline of his mouth.

“Look at me.” It was an insistent order, pitched low with a graveled edge.

A hand was on her face, managing to touch and stroke with a kind of unwillingness while it lifted her chin to elevate her gaze. There was so much blackness in his eyes that the gray color was a mere silver ring. Behind the hardness of their study, desire smoldered hotly.

“Isn’t this what you wanted when you told me to come here tonight?” he demanded again. “Admit it, Pilar. You wanted this to happen.”

“No.” She had to reject that any of this was premeditated. It was too damning to do otherwise.

A host of perceptions hit her at once from the abandoned way she was straining into the hard contact with his hips, to the way she was arching to flatten her breasts against the
muscled solidness of his chest. The embrace was all so intimate, a prelude to mating. And that face, ruggedly lean and hollowed, staring down into hers knew exactly what it signified.

“No!” Her second denial rushed on the heels of the first, more strident.

With a little push she was out of his arms, but they had made no attempt to hold her. Pilar didn’t stop as she ran to the glassed doors that led into the parlor, briefly feeling the rush of a cool wind over her hot skin. Then she was inside and shutting the doors to back away from them a few steps before turning into the room. But she wasn’t able to shut the inner doors on all the rawness and fierce ache coming from her body.

There was the metal click of a door latch, and Pilar whirled toward the sound. When Trace stepped into the room, a dark shape against the waning outside light, her heart catapulted into her throat. No attempt was made to cross the room as he faced her, his tall body tapering leanly from wide shoulders to narrow hips.

“I was supposed to follow you in here, wasn’t I?” There was a harsh ring to his low voice.

Her lips parted on a quickly indrawn breath, but she couldn’t find the words to deny his charge. There was a terrible ringing in her head that hammered her with the truth. Sexual desire and passion were feelings she had forced into dormancy, refusing to air them or
acknowledge them. Only the dead couldn’t feel the desire for bodily contact, and she wasn’t dead. She’d simply bottled her needs inside until they reached the flashpoint tonight when she’d been presented with an opportunity to satisfy them. On some animal level of her subconscious, she had maneuvered Trace, herself, everything.

“Yes.” The admission came out with a broken little cry as Pilar averted her face, still inwardly reeling from the discovery about herself.