Page 141 of The Burning Mountain
There was a bemused silence. A sly smile curved her mouth when she heard it.
“Will you be staying there all night?” he asked carefully. “The hour is growing late.”
“You may go to sleep,” she said, waving him away with an imperious hand. “I shall watch the scenery until I tire of it. This is probably the most exciting thing I’ll experience today.”
“Most exciting?” He sounded confused. “I thought perhaps?—”
“Yes, yes, I’m expecting nothing more exciting,” she interrupted. “I’ve seen it all before.”
There was another ringing silence.
“You’re doing this deliberately, aren’t you?” he asked lightly.
She flicked a glance at him. “Am I?”
“Yes. You want to punish me for ignoring you all these weeks.”
“Punish you?” She pretended to look perplexed. “How exactly am I punishing you?”
Chandra felt a perverse sense of satisfaction in making him work for it.
There was a pause and then his voice came out serious. “I’m willing to wait if you’re not ready, Chandra. Even if your injuries are all healed, I understand you may not be willing to forgive me yet. I know I have a lot to make up for.”
Oh. For heaven’s sake. She didn’t want him to feel guilty. She just wanted to tease him a bit. And perhaps it was a fair bit of payback for making her doubt herself.
But she didn’t want to spend their first night back together alone. She missed him on a visceral level, and she would be denying herself too.
“Or you could change my mind,” she said quickly, when she saw him moving toward the door.
He halted. “Change your mind?” he asked cautiously, but his eyes turned hopeful.
“Yes. Why do you keep parroting my words?” She averted her gaze once again, hiding her smile, confident he wouldn’t be going anywhere. “You could do something to catch my interest,” she said in an offhand manner, but the challenge in her words was unmistakable.
Veer was silent for a long while. She feigned an interest in the outside landscape but all her senses were attuned to the man behind her. She felt the probe of his heated gaze, along her exposed skin.
“I could do a striptease,” he said finally.
“A what?” She whipped her head around, forgetting to be uninterested. She didn’t understand the word but knew, just knew from the way his eyes scrunched, that he was planning something no doubt designed to make her blush.
“A striptease. Some of the desert tribes bring these foreign customs from other countries. It is a performance where women gradually remove their veils and then pieces of clothing in accompaniment to music.”
Her eyes widened at the description.
“Haven’t heard men perform it and there isn’t any music here,” he continued, rubbing his chin, his mouth tilted in a rueful smile, but his eyes were watchful. “But I can bend the rules a bit. After all, I want your stay here to be…unforgettable.”
She swallowed hard, his words bringing a heat to her face as she imagined it. Even the jealousy she felt at hearing him describe the dance, knowing he must have enjoyed seeing another woman perform it for him, didn’t dim the slow curl of excitement building in her blood.
“And since we don’t want you bored out of your mind,” he said as he stalked closer, gracefully avoiding the bed, his voice smooth as butter, at odds with the wicked glint in his eyes. “I can even do it with a twist.”
The hair at the nape of her neck rose at his proximity and she waited on tenterhooks to see what he would do or say next.
His hands settled on her shoulders. “You can just keep looking out of the window, my dear. Won’t want you missing your first snowfall after all,” he said, turning her to face the window once again, before stepping away.
The snowstorm had become thicker, the flurries almost turning the air opaque. But it could have been on fire for all the notice she took. Her senses were in overdrive and focused on the man who stood behind her, not touching her in any way, but still made her body sing just with words alone.
“I’m just going to stand here and remove my clothes. One article at a time, describing it in detail. When something has sufficiently caught your interest or you are ready to accept defeat, you may turn,” he said lazily, throwing down the gauntlet.
“Accept my defeat?” She glared at him over her shoulder and found him a few scant feet away, right by a table set with two chairs. “In your dreams.”
