Illegal Possession (4 page)

She could feel his chin move against her temple, feel his chest rise and fall in a quickening rhythm. Without conscious volition her hands curled at the nape of his neck, her fingers losing themselves in his thick black hair. Breathless, suspended, she was dimly aware of their steps slowing even more until they were barely moving—outwardly.

Inwardly Troy felt violent surges, a red-hot movement of feelings and impulses she’d never experienced before. They tore through her body with the speed and devastation of a tornado, leaving weakness and bubbling desire in their aftermath. She wanted to break free of his embrace, but didn’t have the strength; wanted to speak, but didn’t have the breath.

God, oh, God, what was he doing to her?

She felt his hands slide up her back, scorching the flesh left bare by the low-cut gown, then drop suddenly to mold her hips and pull her hard against his lower body with abrupt impatience. What little breath she could command left her lips in a rush as the hard throbbing of his desire ignited her senses. Troy hid her face in his shoulder in an instinctive attempt to prevent him from seeing the helpless reaction.

“Troy…” His voice was deep, choked off somewhere in his throat, and his movements against her had become a primitive and sensuous dance needing no music.

She closed her eyes, breathing rapidly through parted lips, her fingers tangling fiercely in his hair. The kiss on the steps yesterday, she realized vaguely, had barely hinted that he could make her feel like this. He had stolen her breath then, but she sensed that he was stealing far, far more now. Her willpower. Her strength. Her soul. Herself….

The familiar and comforting library vanished; time ground to a halt. The bubble of need within her grew, expanded, until it filled her entire body. It throbbed in rhythm with his desire, demanding an end to a sweet and mindless torture. She felt his hands searching, exploring, creating a sensual friction with the silky material of her gown, and the bubble of desire filled with a hot rush of hunger.

“God,” he whispered harshly, unevenly, “you’re not wearing a damn thing under this dress, are you?”

Troy heard the words, but the sensations in her body gripped and burned and refused to allow speech. She felt his lips moving down her cheek, along her jaw; felt the demanding heat of them stringing burning kisses down her throat. She lifted her head from his shoulder only to throw it back, the unconscious, provocative gesture allowing more scope for his explorations.

Mindless, eyes tightly closed, she stroked his silky hair helplessly and aided him in locking her body to his. Never in her life had she experienced such a burning hunger. She throbbed from head to toe, and she couldn’t be close enough to him to satisfy the need to touch him.

There was no rational voice in her mind, no whisper of logical warnings. There was only this building, smothering feeling of reaching for something unknown to her. Reaching, and her body yearned to find it. Reaching, and the tension was unbearable. She heard a groan rumble from deep within Dallas’s chest, and her senses spun dizzily.

And then, cutting suddenly through the layers of mindless desire and the silence of the library, the music, unheard by them for so long, now switched to a raucous, foot-tapping, jazz number.

Troy’s eyes snapped open in shock, and her hands fell away from him. She felt his hands release her, saw his head lift and eyes as dazed as her own look down at her. And the shock of interruption merged with the sudden shock of awareness as she realized just how far she’d been willing to go with this virtual stranger.

Dancing, she thought dimly. We were just dancing….

She stepped back, feeling the rush of air cooling heated flesh and the rush of sanity replacing blind desire. One step, two, three; she backed away from him as if from a suddenly recognized devil. The big leather chair halted her retreat, and her hand fumbled for the touch of rich leather and reality.

“Troy…” He hadn’t moved; he stood where she’d left him with every muscle tensed, and his face was white. A nerve pulsed erratically at one corner of his tightly held mouth. “You see why I have to know you?” His voice was uneven, harsh.

She swallowed hard, her nails leaving marks in the leather she was gripping. “Chemistry,” she choked, the lump in her throat refusing to dissolve.

He took a sudden step toward her, the movement filled with the tension and unfulfilled hunger that was still throbbing in the air between them. “I’ve felt chemistry before,” he bit out tautly. “But I’ve never felt anything like what just happened between us. And if you’re honest, you’ll admit the same thing.”

Troy fought for some hold over her churning emotions, some stable surface to stand on. “What makes you so sure I haven’t?” she challenged shakily. “I’m twenty-eight, Dallas, and I’ve seen a lot of the world. I could have had scores of lovers for all you know.”

“Have you?” he asked very quietly.

She stared at him, wanting to lie but sensing dimly that it wouldn’t matter to him. Driven by a curiosity she couldn’t fight, she murmured,

“What if I said yes?”

“It wouldn’t matter,” he answered flatly. “It wouldn’t change anything, Troy.”

“You’d just add promiscuity to my catalog of vices, I suppose?”

His head jerked slightly, denying the accusation. “No. If you told me you’d had scores of lovers, then I’d have to believe that you’d…cared…scores of times.”

“Generous of you,” she snapped softly, reaching for anger, for anything to combat the bewildered emotions she was feeling.

Dallas swore with a violence no less fierce in its quiet intensity. “Troy, I don’t want to know how many lovers you’ve had. Don’t tell me. All I want to know is that I’ll be the only lover in your life…
now
.”

Her body aching, Troy looked at him in silence. Then she shook her head. She didn’t want an affair with Dallas, and she knew very well that nothing else would develop—could develop—out of their attraction. Opposites could attract, certainly, but rarely did they cling permanently. “I don’t want a lover…
now
,” she whispered.

“Troy—”

“Don’t you understand?” Her voice was soft, driven. “When I see rain, I look for a rainbow. When I see thorns, I look for roses. But when I look at this—whatever it is—between us, I see only thorns and rain. All I see are the problems.”

“If you’ll just give it a chance—”

“And be left bleeding when it’s over?” she interrupted, vulnerable, and not caring that he should see her vulnerability.

He took another step toward her. “You’re looking at endings before beginnings,” he told her huskily. “No one can say if it has to end—unless and until it does.”

Troy attempted desperately to make him understand, afraid of what he could take from her if he tried. “A relationship with at least a possibility of…continuity is worth taking a chance on. But something that’s impossible from the beginning—”

“It isn’t impossible,” he insisted softly.

Her smile was twisted. “Remember how we met? Remember your question not too long ago about how I ‘acquired’ the art treasures in this house? Your mistrust is a wall neither of us can break through.”

“You don’t have to be a thief,” he snapped, and realized immediately and with a sinking sensation that he had unintentionally built the wall higher.

Her eyes were vividly green; she’d found the stable surface of anger to stand on. “Thief.” She repeated his word with a soft and deadly emphasis. “You see? It’s between us like an ocean, and I won’t cross to your side, Dallas Cameron. I won’t be taunted, and I won’t be
reformed
. I am what I am, and you can’t accept it. And I won’t climb into bed with a man who calls me a thief.” She drew a deep breath, finishing quietly, “So there’s nothing to talk about, is there?”

Dallas gazed at her for a moment in silence. He fought the instincts urging him just to grab her and to hell with talk, leashing the violent emotions she had roused in him.

“Now, if you wouldn’t mind leaving?” she suggested, wishing him gone because her anger had drained away and left behind it an urge to find a quiet corner and cry her eyes out….

“But I would mind,” he said abruptly. Before she could speak, he was going on unemotionally.

“Thief. Yes, that’s partly how I think of you. But if I’ve learned anything tonight, it’s that you’re a woman who…wears many hats. If I believed that you were
just
a thief, I wouldn’t be standing here arguing with you; I’d be gone.”

“Get to the point,” she requested shortly, hanging on grimly to her composure.

Slowly he did. “I told you that I had to know you, that you were becoming an obsession with me. You’re like a—a picture not quite in focus, something my eyes are straining to see clearly.” He took a deep breath. “Maybe you’re right, and there’s no future in it; but I have to believe that myself, and I don’t. If you’re so sure about us, Troy, then let me be sure too. Give me a chance to see you clearly.”

“As a lover?” she inquired, her voice constricted.

Dallas hesitated, the curiously beaten expression appearing in his eyes again. “I hope…eventually. But as a woman first, as a person. I wouldn’t ask you to climb into bed with a man who called you a thief, Troy.”

Troy felt the breath catch in her throat, wondering dimly at the rough unsteadiness of his final sentence. What was he asking of her? And why couldn’t she look away from his intensely blue eyes? She shook her head, not certain what she was denying.

“Please, Troy.” His eyes held hers steadily. “Let me get to know you. No strings; no pressure, I promise you. And no taunting. I won’t try to reform you. I won’t rush you into a relationship you think we aren’t ready for. I just want to see you…wearing all your hats.”

Troy became suddenly aware that the band was playing another tune now, a love song, and the seductive, throbbing sound of it was undermining her resolution. She tore her gaze from his with a force that broke something inside of her, and confusion welled up again. “Damn you,” she said very quietly.

“Troy.” He took another step toward her, her name a plea, a caress, a demand on his lips.

She kept her face averted. “I don’t want you in my life. You’re a potential heartache walking around on two legs, and you’re asking me to show you everything that I am.”

“I won’t hurt you.” He was standing directly in front of her now.

Troy chuckled, only a breath of sound, and there was no amusement in it. “I don’t believe you, you know. I’ve heard empty promises before, and that promise has all the earmarks of being empty.” She looked up at him with eyes that seemed to be pure gold, and what he saw there nearly stopped his heart. “Keep your empty promises to yourself,” she spit softly.

Dallas saw pain in her eyes, an old, half-healed scar. It shocked him oddly; until that moment he would have sworn that Troy had traveled lightly through her life, avoiding hurts. But the sight of her pain and vulnerability roused in him an anger at whomever had hurt her, and a fiercely protective emotion that he didn’t try to define. He reached out to capture her resisting hands, holding them securely in his own.

“I don’t make empty promises,” he told her flatly. “Troy, all I’m asking is the chance to get to know you.”

“And then what?” Molten gold burned up at him. “A roll in the hay because spring is in the air and you’ve never slept with a thief before?”

“Stop it.” His hands tightened on hers. “Stop making what I feel for you sound cheap, because it isn’t. I want you. Troy, because you’re a beautiful, desirable woman. I want to be your lover, and at this moment I don’t care if you’ve stolen the crown jewels of England.”

Troy wanted to call him a liar, but the words wouldn’t come. She looked down at the large, strong hands holding her own, and knew suddenly why she couldn’t accuse him of lying. And she knew then that Dallas Cameron
was
going to hurt her, and hurt her badly.

Opposites could and did attract. The passion that was still a stubborn weakness in her body told her that. Opposites did attract…for a time. And she was drawn like a moth to the flame that would destroy it. Dallas had taken something from her, something she would never be able to recover. And when he left her one day…

“All right,” she heard herself say quietly.

“Troy?” he breathed softly.

She met his gaze steadily. “You’ve got your chance. We’ll get to know each other. But I won’t let you interfere in my work.”
Because it’s all I’ll have left when you’ve gone
, she added silently.

His chest moved with a sudden deep breath. “That’s all I want—a chance,” he said huskily.

Troy very gently pulled her hands from his grasp. “Now, since my guests will soon be drifting out, I should be there to say good night.”

Dallas nodded. “I’ll say good night now,” he told her with an odd gentleness. “May I see you tomorrow?”

“I’ve got a busy week planned,” she hedged.

He smiled a little. “Mind if I tag along?”

“What about your company? Shouldn’t you be minding the store?”

“I haven’t had a vacation in years; what’s the use of being the boss if I can’t take some time off?” he asked lightly.

Troy summoned a smile from somewhere. “All right then. But you’ll probably be bored silly.”

“I doubt that. What time?”

“Eight tomorrow morning.”

His brows rose in faint surprise. “After a late night?”

“After a late night.”

“I can take it if you can,” he said wryly.

Troy watched him hesitate, observing that he had nearly bent his head to kiss her and wondering why he had apparently decided against it. But she didn’t ask. Her eyes followed as he moved slowly to the door, absorbing the cat-footed grace that would rivet her gaze even in a crowd.

He half turned to look back at her. “Good night, Troy.”

“Good night, Dallas.”

She stood alone in the silent room for a long moment, her mind a blank. And when her own voice shattered the stillness, it roused her as if from a trance.

“Who’s the thief, Dallas? Me or you?”

Squaring her shoulders, Troy went to see if Tom Elliot’s punch had as much of a kick as he’d promised.