The Wrong Wife. Eileen Wilks
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her. “I told you I’d give you everything you wanted if you would marry me. I’m not a man to go back on my word.”
Gideon studied the stubborn set of her jaw and decided he didn’t mind her obstinacy. He’d never objected to a challenge. “I’ve no intention of letting you go back on your word, either.” He moved closer.
She didn’t back away, but she wanted to. He could tell by the nervous way her tongue flicked over her lips. “Stop smiling like that,” she ordered.
“Like what?”
“Like a cat waiting. outside a mouse hole.”
His smile broadened. “As I recall, you always liked cats.”
“What does that have to do with—” Her breath caught audibly when he moved even closer.
Too close. Gideon stopped with a bare inch between their bodies. If he’d thought to dominate her, to intimidate her with the sheer force of his size, into his way of thinking, that thought fled at the feeling he saw flash across her face.
Desire. Innocent, but not simple, tangled up as it was in the shifting colors of those changeable eyes as she looked up at him, defiant, wary—and obviously unaware of what she’d just given away. And if Cassie’s breath had caught with sudden, unwelcome arousal at his nearness, Gideon lost his breath altogether.
She wants me. Cassie wants me.
His world shifted with that realization. Desire turned to need, to an aching imperative. He understood for the first time how a woman could drive a man to his knees...because Cassie, fey little Cassie with the fiery hair, was a woman. Not a girl. She was twenty-eight, not sixteen as she had been the first time he’d felt this way, not off limits, not forever inaccessible... oh, no, not inaccessible at all, judging by the look in her eyes.
The predator in Gideon roared to the surface of his brain while heat exploded in his body from the groin outward. Mine, he thought, already hard, impossibly ready. He reached out.
Reason didn’t rise and reassert itself. The flicker of uncertainty in her eyes didn’t keep him from grabbing roughly at what he wanted. Fear did.
His, not hers.
The fear didn’t even have to wholly surface to send shock waves through him. Like a leviathan at the bottom of a lake it stirred, and Gideon’s hand faltered just as he touched the place where the silk of her sleeve ended and the silky flesh of her arm began. I almost lost control, he thought. With the conscious thought came a dim amazement as the fear settled back into the murk.
Arousal still pulsed through him, making the tips of his fingers extraordinarily sensitive. That must have been why her skin felt so good to him, why he couldn’t resist stroking it lightly. He watched her eyes darken in response, and felt a flare of triumph.
She wanted him. He wanted her, too—but he could control his desires. He had to. “Give our agreement a chance, Cassie.” He slid his fingers down to her wrist and toyed with the delicate skin over her pulse point. “Be my bride. Live with me. Let me... take care of you.”
Cassie’s pulse was pounding. She knew Gideon could feel it. She wanted him to feel it, wanted, with a power that held her immobile, for him to go on touching her. Easily, naturally, she gave herself up to the feeling. “You just don’t want to admit you made a mistake,” she said, her voice husky. Cassie saw no contradiction between arguing with him and being aroused by him. “You’re not very flexible, Gideon. You think that because you’re married, however—” Her breath hitched as his fingers slid back up her arm, dragging tingles behind them like the frothy wake of a boat. “However accidental that marriage was, you think you should stay married. Stubborn.”
“Consistent,” he corrected. His fingertips slid up under the sleeve of her shirt. The small invasion felt unbearably intimate, as if he’d found some secret place On her body. “I’m a very consistent man.”
“It’s not logical,” she insisted as his fingers trailed around to the inside of her arm...lightly. Ever so lightly. Her skin broke out in goose bumps. “You don’t want to be married to me.”
His mouth, that beautiful, sensual mouth, tilted up at one corner. “Don’t I?” When his fingertips made a little circle on her arm, his knuckles grazed the side of her breast.
Oh, my. She swallowed so she wouldn’t gasp. Or moan. “You were going to marry the Icicle. I mean Melissa. You got drunk because you couldn’t marry her.”
His fingers stopped moving. His eyes went still with the dark, chill quiet of a frozen pond at night. Deliberately, his eyes fixed on hers, he repeated the motion of a moment before, circling the skin on her arm with his fingertips...circling the side of her breast with his knuckles. “You’re not sure if you can trust me, are you, Cassie?”
“It’s not very... consistent...of you,” she managed to say, “marrying me when you wanted her.”
He abandoned the pretense of rubbing her arm. His knuckles skimmed up the side of her breast. “I don’t want her now.” Slowly his hand went down. again. Up.
Helplessly her eyes closed as the undertow caught her, dragging her along like a shellfish tumbled by the tide across a gravelly ocean bed—a rough place in spite of the lightness of his caress, a place of confusion and sharp, conflicting currents.
Those hard, seemingly casual knuckles traced the curve of her breast, dipping under it, coming close to the nipple on the way up. Half of her breast seemed to catch the heat from his hand and reflect it back at him. The other half was cold, aching, bereft. His touch skimmed under her breast, around, closer to the tip, nearly touching it...nearly...circling...
“Gideon—?”
Her own longing forced her eyes open. He wasn’t looking at her face anymore. He stared openly at her breasts, at the bumps. her nipples made beneath the silk—the nipples he’d made harden, but refused to touch.
She grabbed his wrist. Her breath came hard, as if she’d been running. She didn’t know if she was going to shove his arm away or move his hand where she needed it. “What do you want?” she demanded hoarsely. “I have to know what you want from this marriage.” Sex? she thought wildly. He’d never wanted her before. Maybe his body remembered last night, though, even if his mind didn’t, because he wanted her now. Was sex enough to begin a marriage with? Could she accept it, if that was all he wanted from her?
Could she refuse?
Slowly his gaze left her breasts, sliding up again to her face. But she couldn’t read anything in his eyes, nothing but the settled darkness that spoke of both passion and control, a mixture Cassie couldn’t understand. “One year,” he said. “Give me one year to keep my word to you. Then we’ll end it.”
The pain was sharp enough to send her shooting to the surface. She sucked in air as if she’d actually been underwater, and stepped back. “An annulment would—”
He was shaking his head before she finished getting the word out of her mouth. “No. Not now. Not ever.”
Why? Why would he prefer divorce to—unless, she thought with an awakening flick of temper, he wanted to have her in his bed for that year.
That was it, she realized. The man had decided he wanted her, therefore he would have her. For a year.
She tried to step back. His hands slid to her waist and stopped her.
His eyes were unfathomable as they met hers. His harsh face gave nothing away, but his hands spread out, claiming more of her. His thumb almost brushed the underside of her breast. Heat arrowed through her, reminding her of passion... and frustration. “I’m not going to agree to an annulment,” he said. “Nor to a divorce. Not yet. Will you fight to be free of me, Mermaid?”
His eyes are so dark, she thought. So dark and filled with answers and questions she couldn’t guess, reasons and motives he didn’t want her to see. But for a moment as his fingers stirred her subtly, powerfully, she thought she saw past