He put the hurt into the bite into his inner lip, unable to transfer it to any other muscle, not curled fists, not curled toes. She would feel the tension in his body if he did.
Her fingers snuck over his ribs, which tickled so badly his breath hissed a tiny bit between his teeth, and she lifted her head.
His lashes were on his cheeks by the time her head lifted all the way, and he drew a heavy breath and sighed it out, shifting, like a man almost woken sinking back into deeper sleep.
For a moment, he thought she hadn’t fallen for it. That was the trouble with letting a very smart woman get to know you a little bit. Especially if she was quiet. You could fool yourself into thinking she believed you, and then, out of the blue, she made one of her rare comments and you realized she had been seeing straight through you all this time.
Her hand flattened out on his ribs, the first full touch, one his body could relax into, not nearly so ticklish. A little sigh of pleasure ran through him, but he made it sleepy, no scaring her off.
He liked his abs, when she stroked them, liked them with a sudden, vivid pleasure in how ripped they were, all that definition of a core that was always, always in intense use. He liked his forearms, the corded strength of so much heavy lifting. And when her fingers slowed at his wrists and traced over his hands as carefully as if she was tracing the most wonderful secret, his heart stopped, and he didn’t know what to like.
No one was as amazing as she made him feel. No one.
Well, except her.
Her fingertips slipped at long, reluctant last off his hands and snuck, with great care, to his hip. And then tiptoed down it, caressing the curve. He fought to control the urge to flinch at the ticklishness and got his reward: one gentle, kitchen-toughened palm slipped to curl over one butt cheek.
His buttocks tightened in one long, hard urge to thrust, and he rode it out, trying to breathe deep.
Just reacting in my dreams, that’s all.
Would she be able to tell? Had she ever touched a man in his sleep before? Had
he
ever been touched in his sleep before? A hot, tangled excitement swept through him, this heady mash of firsts and fear.
Her hand caressed his left buttock gently, as if she just had to figure out how he was made.
He began to feel he was spying on her. She was exploring his body in his supposed sleep, and yet he felt as if he
was the one cheating. Peering through her window with night goggles to catch her naked.
He wished he hadn’t thought it would be a nice gesture on his part to wear pajama bottoms. Admittedly, he usually did in the winter – made it a lot easier to get out of bed on a cold dawn – but he sure as hell wouldn’t have with her
in the bed with him if he hadn’t thought it would make her feel better.
Sarah, please, can I tell you how much I like this? Can I sigh into it? Can I let you have that much control?
***
He was so funny, Sarah thought, watching his heavy lashes against his cheeks. He must be awake. He had to be. And yet he kept up the pretense. Why?
Did it matter to him
that much
that she touch him, that he had to pretend to sleep through it?
She wondered suddenly if this was emotional bravery on his part – to let her touch him, to not take her over.
And if he could be brave by lying quiet, by hiding, then she could be brave by continuing to put herself out there, even knowing he was awake to notice how much she got wrong.
She ran her hand over those hard, ripped abs, the core of a man who never, ever stopped bending, lifting, twisting, working. Always with that easy amusement, as if his intense physical day was a nap in a hammock.
You’re so beautiful.
The warmth of his skin against her hand ran up through her body, sinking into her soul.
I just don’t understand. It’s so hard for me to get things right. How could someone so naturally, so easily perfect want me? Make me feel so easily perfect, too?
It’s not easy for him to be perfect,
she had to remind herself, yet again.
He works brutally hard.
His breathing shifted all the muscles of his torso in slow, deep motions under her hand. Maybe he was falling back asleep after all. She smiled a little, relaxing into the thought, and pressed her palm against his stomach, so flat and hard. His chest hairs tickled her nose, and she realized she had drawn in close to him again, lured by his scent back into that heat that would eventually drive her back to her cool space. And then lure her in from it again.
Was he really asleep? She pressed her face into his chest, taking a deep breath of him, this man who had knelt at her feet in elegant black with all Paris spread out below them. Who had offered the very sparkles of that night to her in a little box.
She should put them back on, those earrings, she thought, on a shaft of guilt for where they had been flung, in the corner of her locker.
They’re earrings. I can wear mine sometimes and his sometimes. I could even get two piercings and wear them together, if I’m that damn insecure. I can have both.
Except she only wanted to wear his.
Let me drown myself in all your beautiful gold.
And at the same time, some core of her responded, that steel core maybe that he talked about, that had grown from a tiny iron seed inside a very small child who needed to become herself – not the compensation for her poor brother, not the confirmation that her mother had made the best choice for her family, not the consolation for a loss too great to be consoled, not the desperate nail of American citizenship on which her entire family hung, not the relentlessly excelling proof that America was lucky to have them, that they belonged, not the perfect child, not even the girl so thrilled to please the stepfather who had relaxed the whole house with that gentle calm of his.
That steel core refused to dissolve in his gold. Said:
No. I am me.
I am me.
That’s what I want to be.
My dream is a good dream. Not because I’ll do well at it, or because it’s serious, or will impress people. My dream is a good dream because it’s mine.
But, oh, if I could have both it and you…
You beautiful, naked prince…
She brushed her lips against his chest, shy and sincere.
I think I might matter to you, too. I think for all you seem so perfect, like you could have any woman you wanted, for all that charming ease you prefer, if I ran away from the ball in rags, you might come hunting with that shoe until you found me.
The problem was, would she come out of hiding to let him put it on if it meant he would see her in rags? And take over her life and sweep her into his kingdom…
His impossible kingdom. She wanted her own, one she could believe in. One over which she could actually reign.
Except that he smelled so good. Except that his body was quite possibly the most beautiful thing she had ever touched. And she had touched a lot of beautiful things since following her dream to Paris: fragile things, breakable things, things she had to manipulate just perfectly to make them turn out right. His body was not remotely fragile, but she touched it as if it was. As if he was the most beautiful, impossible, glorious sculpture of sugar, and she could break him.
Careful, careful, careful…what beautiful skin he had. How it slid under her fingers, smoothness finely textured with hair that veed down under his pajama bottoms. It was a good thing she had built up all those calluses on her fingertips to help her handle hot things.
She paused at the waistband of his pajamas, brushing the knit. His stomach tightened subtly and held still, no breath going through his body at all. She snuck a glance up at him. His lashes still lay on his cheeks.
This was so embarrassing, and yet – he might like it very much. She let her hand slip under the pajama waistband and slide down to – startle.
He hadn’t worn anything under his pajamas? That was so –
deceptive.
It was so like him. And now his erection pressed hot and hard and bare into her hand, and she bit her lip and glanced up at him again. Remembering the first time they had made love, before he had become quite so expert at taking control of her, when he had whispered so hungrily,
Touch me, just once?
She wrapped her hand carefully around him.
I’m touching you. Do you like it?
His eyes stayed closed, his breaths coming long and slow again, like a man asleep. Or a man pretending very hard to be asleep.
Why did he do
that? Why couldn’t he yield to her a little bit of himself?
Like what? Like when he knelt in front of you with all Paris laid at your feet and tried to give its stars to you in a box? Sarah, he
fakes
the indifference. And he fakes it really damn badly, too. You
know
this.
She firmed her grip and drew it the length of him and back down. She had a good, strong grip these days, and guys liked that, didn’t they? Or did they? She was so crappy at this.
She drew her hand up and down him again, testing differences in strength of grip, light, hard, peeking at his face under her lashes, but he didn’t react. His erection pulsed in her hand, and her fingertips brushed the tightness of his testicles, but he didn’t crack and go crazy for her or anything. He didn’t even yawn himself awake.
Damn it. She flushed, profoundly embarrassed, and started to extricate her hand.
Patrick’s eyes flew open, and he clamped her hand to him. Their eyes held in the city-lit darkness.
“You could tell me,” she whispered. “What to do. To get it right.”
“I could,” he agreed slowly, his voice low and rough, like a lion dragged out of sleep. “I could give you that much control over me. Except you don’t need to know how to crack me faster, Sarah.”
“I might want to know I at least can,” she protested.
He just gazed at her a moment and then slowly shook his head. Her heart had just started to sink when he said, “Sarah. You cracked me here.” He touched his chest with one finger, right where she had first kissed him. “This” – he pressed her hand more strongly against his erection – “is just play, in comparison. It’s fun, and it’s hot, and we can do it. But Sarah” – he drew his finger over her lips slowly and then brought his hand back to the spot she had kissed, this time to cover it with his full palm, protectively – “you crack me here.”
She stared at that hand on his chest. It covered right where his heart lay.
He shifted it immediately under her gaze, bared his chest – or his heart? – again, pretended it wasn’t naked, as his hand came back to her lips, this time pinching the lower one gently and rolling it in a much more sexual way, taking possession. “Besides, Sarah.” He winked at her, as if this was all just fun and games. “I promised you twelve hours, and it’s only been” – he peered around for his clock – “nine.”
“I didn’t promise
you
.” She wrapped her fingers back around his penis, watching his face. His lashes veiled his eyes immediately.
As she shifted her grip up and down him again, his hand rode on her wrist, not stopping her but keeping his control of the situation just a tiny flick of his strength away. “I used to fantasize about this so much,” he murmured roughly after a second. “But now I think you would have to tie me up to make me take it. And that would be…torture. You couldn’t torture me, could you, Sarabelle?”
She considered that, his coaxing, caressing tone luring her toward an instinctive
No!
, but then – the thought of golden, gorgeous, perfect Patrick, stretched out and racked apart for her – “Yes.” She gave him a straight, serious look. “I think I could. I don’t know if it would be something I would want to do a lot, but I think, at least once, I really could.”
He stared at her a long moment. And then he slowly closed his hand around her wrist and pulled her hand from his pajama pants to curl her fingers around the drawstring of those pants. A cord. He had just provided her with a cord. “All right, Sarabelle,” he said reluctantly. “But – supposing I don’t survive it?”
“I’ll take good care of you,” she whispered, pulling the drawstring slowly free of his pants. His throat worked as he swallowed. She slid a soothing palm up his chest, trailing the cord, and his muscles flinched as it slithered over them. “I promise you that when I’m all done” – she drew his arms over his head to the wood slats of his headboard, setting off those long, hard triceps and all their tension, and he took a harsh breath and forced himself to let her, his face nearly hidden in her breasts – “you’ll still be glorious, and perfect, and…you. You’ll still be entirely you.”
“But I’m scared, Sarabelle,” he told her breasts, his voice lightly, mockingly cracked, as if he was just a big, bad man pretending to be afraid in order to indulge a toddler dressed up as a dragon.
“I know you are,” she said softly. “But maybe you need to see – there’s really nothing to be afraid of.”
Chapter 27
He was so funny. And yet she didn’t laugh. It made her tender and possessive and – ruthless. Willing to drive him past anything he could stand to prove to him that he could. She forgot to worry about whether she could get him right. She stopped worrying about her hands and all the things at which they failed and only watched him.
Felt him.
Corded with tension as her body bent over his so she could tie the knots. “I think you’ve already broken me,” he joked, testing the strength of the cord, clearly already regretting this and not willing to say so. “I give up. I surrender.”
“Not yet.” She ran her hands down his arms, now tied for her. “But who knows? Maybe you will surrender.”
He took another harsh breath, but then just grinned. “No, no, I promise, I’ll talk. You don’t have to hurt me, your majesty.”
She laid her hand over his mouth. “Let’s not play that game.” His torture references were as innocent as hers had been, but unexpectedly, a thought of her mother’s actual torture flashed through her mind, breaking her mood to jagged pieces. “Not that way.”
His gaze softened in quick comprehension. “I’m sorry,” he said into her palm, and when that slid away, he tilted his head up to ask for a kiss. “I’m sorry,” he said again.