Page 37 of One Dangerous Desire
“Too late, I’m afraid.” His voice dropped lower as he drew near. “Here I am.”
His scent was winning. The odor of peonies faded.
“It’s a small room, Mr. Leighton. A few steps would take you back out again.”
He took a few steps, but they weren’t toward the door. They were toward her. He loomed directly behind her. “I prefer this room to the other. It’s smaller, quiet, and smells good.”
“That’s the peonies.”
He lowered himself onto the settee, his weight dipping her lower into the upholstery. She moved away from him, but he leaned close, his heat warming the side of her body. “It’s you, May. You’re always what draws me.”
When she turned to face him, he leaned forward and reached a hand up to her face.
“W-what are you doing?”
After drawing a feather-light touch across her cheek, he drew back to show her his wet fingertip. “You’re crying.”
“I’m not crying.” May lifted a hand and swiped at her cheeks, stunned to find dampness on both.
“Then it’s worse than I feared.” One of his lopsided grins made her stomach tumble. “It seems you’re leaking from the corner of each eye.”
“Don’t tease me.” Pushing lightly against his shirtfront to create a bit of space between them, May found her palm crushed against the solid plane of his chest.
He clasped her hand in place with his own. “Feel that?”
“I . . . ” Her mind failed her. Her tongue tangled in her mouth. Sensation was all she could manage, absorbing the jump of his heartbeat against her skin.
“No feigning. No tease. That is what you do to me.”
She’d felt like this before. Tipping, her heart in her throat, her head in the clouds. Toppling, faster and further, into a love that would swallow her up if she let herself go.
“I’m not the girl I was six years ago.”
He wrapped his arm around her, nudging her closer, lowering his head as if he’d take her lips. “I know who you are, May. I’ve never forgotten.”
“I’m not the same.” The years had changed her. Made her long for something more than the match her parents had raised her to seek. She’d discovered her passion for art and design, begun to nurture a desire for a business of her own. When she’d met Reginald Cross, she’d been naive and less certain of herself. He was her first certainty—that she desired him, needed him, loved him.
He caressed her cheek, his large hand impossibly gentle as he stroked ribbons of sensation across her skin. When he placed a kiss at the corner of her mouth, his lips were as tender as his touch. “You taste just as tempting.”
“And you still know just what to say.” She hadn’t intended the derision in her tone.
Rex sat back stiffly against the settee as if she’d cursed him. “I am not lying to you.” He looked frightfully grim. “My feelings for you were never a lie.”
“So you told the truth.” May smoothed her fingertip along the frown marring his brow. “When you said you wanted me?”
“Yes.” He gripped her round the waist and pulled her so close she was almost in his lap.
May went into his arms, settled her chest against his, twined her hands around his neck. “And when you said you loved me?” She pressed her mouth against his before he could speak, fearing his answer as much as she needed to hear it.
His kisses melted her while his roving hands drew circles over her back, gripped her hips, and pulled her closer. “Yes,” he rasped against her mouth.
“Yes,” she breathed. The sentiment slipped from her lips as it hummed through her body.
She may have changed, but her feelings for Rex hadn’t. Along with that certainty came another. Whatever the consequences, however disappointed others might be, she couldn’t marry Devenham. She couldn’t imagine loving or giving herself to any man, except the one in her arms.
Chapter Thirteen
THE NEXT DAY, she could still hear Rex’s voice in her head.
