Chapter Five #2
And it is not until much later—as the party spills recklessly all throughout the villa and I find myself in the atrium once more—that I accept that the music and the splendor and yes, the bubbly, have all gone to my head.
Then again, I correct myself, the night and the gown and the man who held my hand so briefly did that, too. I can still feel it.
As I flex my hand, remembering that touch, I feel a kind of prickly heat move down the length of my spine. I shiver, then repress it.
Then I turn my head to find Luc watching me from across the atrium floor.
And it is something more potent than any wine or pretty house filled with pretty, careless people.
It is something more complicated than the rise and soaring fall of the music that plays all around us.
Something more dangerous than the way water tumbles out of that endless fountain in the center of the atrium, and something infinitely more treacherous than all these people who move like shadows around us, caught up in their kingmaking, and their scandals, and their bright, glittery party.
I should have spent the night making inroads here, like the businesswoman I am. Yet somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I almost wanted to be someone else for a change.
Maybe, the woman I’ve been made over into tonight. That woman I glimpsed so briefly while walking down the stairs toward Luc earlier.
The woman who has no thought in her head but to be this man’s arm candy.
Because a bright and frothy piece of candy knows exactly where she’s ending up tonight. And exactly how he will enjoy her.
But these are not the smartest things to be thinking as Luc cuts his way through the crowd and comes to stand before me.
I open my mouth to tell him that I think we should go, or that I should, but he holds out his hand.
There is something simmering in those dark, nearly bitter depths. And it feels like gold inside of me.
And the kind of helpless I feel right now moves through me a little too much like joy.
I reach out and put my hand in his, again.
When I say nothing at all, when I make no argument and state no case, he draws me out onto the atrium floor to join the other dancers.
We still have our masks on. I tell myself that it’s safe, being held against his body like this. This is perfectly appropriate, I assure myself as he twirls me around and around and his hand at the small of my back sends fire cascading through me.
I tip my head back, so I can look in his eyes.
So it feels as if he is already inside me.
When the music ends, he does not let go. He still holds me, looking down at me with a scowl on his face, as if fighting some kind of desperate battle…
I do nothing to help him.
On the contrary, what I want to do is dare him. To figure this out. To do something. To make this one thing or the other—
He mutters a curse in a language I don’t quite catch.
Then he takes me by the arm and pulls me with him, leaving the glitter and noise behind.
He leads me through the hallways and breezeways of this place, inside and out, until I realize belatedly that this place makes his villa seem snug and intimate.
I’m happier once we step out onto a path that leads away from the sprawling place, the light seeming less like gold and more like something tricked up to be gold instead.
Outside, that clutching sensation in my chest eases a little. The sea air feels deliciously cold all over my overheated skin, and I make no comment as he leads me farther into the dark.
It takes me a few moments to understand that he has found us a path that winds its way along the cliffside.
We walk in silence, listening to the waves caress the rocks far below.
I feel the breeze like it’s a part of the spell he’s weaving, as he leads me through the dark, the only light from the stars above and across the water.
We keep walking until the villa is out of sight, meandering around until the path delivers us to a cottage.
I want to ask him how he knew this was here.
The lights are out but this does not deter him.
He opens the door with a certain hesitancy, but not without familiarity, and I remember—almost against my will—that my running theory is that he wanted to come here because he could come masked. Not as himself.
Not as the man who has clearly been here before.
I want to ask him a thousand questions, but when he leads me with him into this secret cottage by the sea that feels worlds away from the mad whirl of the party in the villa, I say nothing.
And when he pulls me into his arms once more, and murmurs something that sounds like have mercy, I melt.
Then ignite when he takes my mouth with his.
Because everything is pure fire.
It is white-hot, and scalding, and I understand as we move together that my whole life will be divided, forever, on either side of this kiss.
That I will never be the same.
That nothing will ever be the same, as long as I live, because he tastes like fate.
And together, we move like glory.
We kiss and we kiss—moving closer, pulling back. Testing, learning, indulging.
I think I could do this forever, but he sweeps me up against him, holding me high against his chest in the darkness of the cottage. There are no lights on. I don’t care if half the party is hiding here in the dark, because all I can think about is how to angle myself down to keep kissing him.
I figure it out, and throw myself into that kiss again. His stern mouth. The silken flame of his tongue. The way it feels, shivery and intense, when he rubs it against mine.
I don’t care who he is, I think. As long as he’s mine.
I have a vague, jumbled sense of our surroundings.
Some sort of living room space, but then he’s carrying me through a doorway to tumble me down onto something soft.
I have a scant second to register that it’s a bed behind me, but then, better still, there is that huge, hard immensity that is him on top of me.
I can’t seem to fit in my own skin.
“I cannot bear this,” he tells me in a deep growl, dark against my throat. “You’re the one temptation I cannot resist.”
“Why would you want to?” I ask.
“There are matters at play here that you cannot understand,” he tells me with some urgency. “I am not the sort of man who indulges in parties like this, or nights like this, or…”
He trails off. He does not say or you, but I hear it.
“Stop resisting,” I whisper. “Indulge. Just this once.”
And when he groans, everything inside of me seems to quake.
“I never wanted to hurt you,” he tells me in a low, intense voice. “I never wanted to cause you any kind of pain, Annagret. You must know this.”
What I know is the feel of him against me, our bodies flush in the dark. What I feel is that urge that never made sense to me before. To strip off all my clothes, and his. To press our naked bodies against each other and see what happens. To be closer still.
I want these things as if my next breath depends upon them.
“I know it,” I tell him.
I would have told him anything.
And at first, everything seems like a rush.
He shoves off his coat and something flutters out from his pocket. I mean to point it out to him, but I have other things to think about.
So many astonishing other things.
Like that almost sharp, starkly sensual look on his face.
“You are so beautiful,” he tells me. “It should not be permitted.”
“I will take it up with the creator the next time we meet,” I say with a laugh.
But if I imagine that might inject some levity into the situation, I am mistaken.
He does not laugh. He shrugs out of the rest of those impossibly beautiful clothes and tosses them aside with a carelessness that, once again, offers me a clue.
Except that, for the first time in a long, long while, I don’t want clues. Not now. I just want him.
He has fire in his eyes, but he is gentle with me.
He turns me over on the bed so I am face down, and then he moves behind me.
I sigh as he presses those shimmering, terrible, marvelous kisses down the back of my neck, between my shoulder blades, and then I feel a kind of tugging, and then the dress is peeled away.
“I knew how you would look in this dress,” he tells me in that same voice that sounds like some kind of agony, but makes a deep, hard thrill rush through me. “I knew. I did this to myself.”
He moves as he speaks, rolling me one way and then the other to pull the dress off, so that when he tosses it aside I am lying there in nothing at all but a pair of lace panties.
He breathes out, hard, as he turns me back toward him.
And then, taking on the look of a man at his devotions, he pulls me toward him again and settles me beside him on the bed. For a long moment he only gazes at me, something that feels almost too intense in his gaze.
I gaze back, though I feel the hint of moisture threatens.
He reaches over and brushes the back of his hand over one cheek. I feel him breathe. I catch my own breath.
“Annagret,” he says. “I wish…”
But he doesn’t finish. And I put out my own hand and trace the shape of his mouth, then find my way to those impossible cheekbones.
I try not to think about the fact that none of this feels like the mad rush of lust. Not that I don’t feel that rush. But this feels like something else.
This feels golden and quiet. This hovers in a space I can’t seem to look at directly.
As if this is sacred.
As if what happens here, between us, is its own kind of holy.
My hand moves over his jaw and we stay there, possibly forever, lost and found. He takes my hand from his face and presses a kiss into my palm, then smiles as I curl my fingers around it.
And when he kisses me this time, the whole world changes. Again.
He kisses me until we’re both groaning, and then he shifts, moving me to my back. Then he wastes not a single inch of my skin. He trails his way down my neck and all the way to my breasts, until I’m arching up to give him my nipples as he teases them both, making twin points of aching.