Powerful and Proud: Beneath the Veil of Paradise / In the Heat of the Spotlight / His Brand of Passion. Кейт Хьюит
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He was hurt. He hadn’t expected to care so much, so quickly.
Millie gave just as level a look back, even as her eyes flashed fire. He might not be angry, but she was. Well, fine. Bring it on.
‘All right.’ She lifted her chin a notch, her eyes still flashing, and stalked past him to the ladder. Chase watched her descend below deck, her body taut and quivering with tension. Or maybe anger, or even fear.
Did it matter? Wasn’t this what she wanted, a quick bout of meaningless sex? She could get him out of her system, or so she undoubtedly hoped.
And maybe he’d get her out of his. He’d spent the afternoon coaxing smiles from her even as he enjoyed himself more than he’d ever thought possible. Every smile, every laugh, had felt like a discovery. A victory.
He thought they were building something—admittedly something fragile and temporary, but still. Something. And the whole time she’d been thinking of some stupid ex.
‘Are you coming?’ she called from below, her voice as taut as her body had been.
Chase’s mouth curved grimly at the unwitting double entendre. ‘You’d better believe it.’
He hauled himself down the ladder and saw that Millie stood in front of the double bed. She turned to him, her chest heaving, her nipples visible beneath the thin, silky material of her bra. She arched her eyebrows and curved her mouth in a horrible rictus smile.
‘All right, Chase. Let’s see what you’ve got.’
He swallowed, acid churning in his gut. How had they got here? The afternoon had been full of tenderness and teasing, and now they were acting like they hated each other.
Millie’s eyes glittered and he knew she wouldn’t back down. She never backed down from a challenge; he’d learned that already.
And hell if he’d back down either. She was the one who had said she didn’t want to get to know him. Wasn’t interested in emotional anything. Right now, right here, he could give her what she wanted. The only thing she wanted.
And, damn it, he’d want it too.
‘Take off your bra.’ A pulse beat hard in the hollow of her throat but she undid it and tossed it to the floor. Her breasts were small and round, high and firm. Perfect. Chase swallowed. ‘And the rest.’ She glared at him as she kicked off her underwear, her chin still tilted high.
‘Is this what you call foreplay?’
He almost laughed. She was magnificent. Naked, proud, defiant, strong. He shook his head. ‘I just like to see what I get in this deal of ours.’
‘Only fair I get the same opportunity, then.’
He arched an eyebrow, aroused in spite of the anger. Or maybe because of it. Hell, he didn’t know anything any more. ‘What are you saying, Scary?’
‘Take off your pants.’
He did.
They stared at each other almost in grim silence, both of them totally naked, nothing between them. The air seemed to crackle with the tension, with the expectation.
Hell.
What now?
Millie folded her arms. Waited. Chase felt like a circus seal, or a damn monkey. She clearly expected him to perform.
He hadn’t wanted it to be this way. He’d wanted to gain her trust, even her affection, and help her to lose control in the most amazing way possible. Right now she was clinging to that precious control with her french-manicured fingernails and it was slipping crazily away from him.
He didn’t want this.
He wasn’t going to back down.
‘Get on the bed.’
She gave him a little smirk, almost as if he were being so predictable, and lay on the bed. She even put her hands behind her head as if she were incredibly relaxed, but she was trembling.
Damn.
Again Chase hesitated. Don’t do this. He didn’t want to ruin what they had by losing her trust, affection, everything, in a bout of absurdly unsexy sex. Except who was he kidding? They didn’t have anything.
This was all they had—this, right here on the bed.
‘Let me tell you,’ Millie drawled, her hands still laced behind her head, ‘this is turning out to be the worst sexual encounter of my life, and forget about mind-blowing.’
Chase saw that she still trembled.
He sat on the edge of the bed and slowly ran his hand from the arch of her foot along her calf to behind her knee, his fingers instinctively seeking further, finding the soft, smooth skin of her inner thigh. More softness. He felt her muscles tense and quiver beneath his touch. Her breath hitched.
‘I’m not going to play this game,’ he said quietly and she stared at him, her whole body going rigid.
‘This was your idea.’
‘Yeah, I’ll grant you that. But you went for it because this is what you want.’
‘You think this is what I want?’
‘There’s no emotional intimacy or getting to know you in this scenario, is there?’ He slid his hand higher, savouring the sweet softness of her thigh. Another couple of inches would be even sweeter.
She stared at him, mesmerised, trapped. He stilled his hand. ‘You know I’m right, Millie.’
In answer she reached up, lacing her fingers behind his head, and pulled him down for a hungry, open-mouthed kiss. Her tongue delved inside and she arched upwards, pressing her body against him.
Shock short-circuited Chase’s brain for a second. Then his libido ramped up and he kissed her back just as hungrily with an instinct he was helpless to repress—even as he acknowledged this wasn’t what he wanted. He didn’t even think it was what Millie wanted, not deep down. She was trying to stay in control, seizing it desperately, and he couldn’t let her.
But then her hand wrapped around him and he stopped thinking about what he couldn’t do. His body was telling him what he could.
‘Millie.’ Her name was a groan against her mouth and he reached up to try to remove her death grip on the back of his head. ‘Wait...’
But she didn’t want to wait. She was all over him, eager, urgent, desperate, making him feel the same way. His self-control was slipping away. How did a man argue for a more emotional experience when the woman beneath him was determined to drive him wild? For the feel of Millie’s hands on him, her legs hooked around his hips as she angled upwards, was making him crazy. Through the fog of his own lust he tried to remember where he’d put the condoms.
‘Quickly...’ Millie whispered, her voice a ragged whimper, and Chase stilled. He heard too much desperation and even sadness in her voice, and he didn’t want that. No matter how much his body screamed otherwise.
‘Millie.’ He pushed away from her a little bit, enough to see her pale, dazed face. ‘Let’s hold on a moment, shall we?’ he said unevenly, even though his greatest desire at that point was to forget emotion and sensitivity, and even a condom, and just drive right into her.
‘No, I don’t want...’ Her face went a shade paler, and then she lurched upwards. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’ In one abrupt movement she rolled off the bed and raced to the head. Chase listened to her retching into the toilet in a kind of stunned disbelief.
This was starting to feel like the worst sexual encounter of his life too. He reached for his shorts and pulled them on, grabbed a spare tee-shirt from the drawer and waited on the edge of the bed.
A few minutes later a pale and shaky-looking Millie emerged. From somewhere Chase found a smile. ‘I don’t think that was because of the conch.’
She