Page 34 of Edge of Darkness (Night Prowler 4)
They stared at one another in silence while the fire snapped in the hearth, sending orange sparks up the chimney, filling the room with a lovely pine-scented glow.
“I don’t know. Probably not. But just for shits and grins—was it?”
A muscle flexed in his jaw. He didn’t look away from her face when he said, “Yes.”
She tried to fathom his expression, but it was unreadable. There was something in his eyes though, a certain urgent pathos, which told her he was telling the truth.
What on earth could he be doing at seven o’clock on a Sunday evening at home that was life or death?
She sighed, defeated. “Well, it doesn’t really matter, anyway. I brought the copy of Casino Royale, I’ll just leave it with you and—”
“No.” His voice was forceful. He took a step nearer.
“No? What do you mean, no? You don’t want it?”
He stepped nearer. She was forced to step back until her back was against the glass case and couldn’t retreat any farther. He leaned in very close, put his mouth near her ear, and said, “You know what I want, September, and it isn’t the goddamn book.”
Her blood stopped circulating. Which was because her heart had frozen inside her chest. Then he put both hands on the case beside her head and inhaled against her neck, a slow, soft intake of breath as if he was smelling her. The tip of his nose skimmed her neck. She felt the fleet, electric brush of his lips against her skin, and her heart took off at a thundering gallop.
Ember had heard of this before, the weak knees, the dry mouth, the hair-raising electricity that could pass between two people, but she’d never experienced it. She’d had boyfriends, of course, short-lived relationships of varying degrees of intensity, but her body had never responded like this, every nerve screaming simply because a man had inhaled against her throat.
“Christian.” She breathed out in a careful, slow exhalation. “Please.”
She didn’t know what she was asking for—Stop? Go on?—but he responded by encircling one of her wrists in his hand and bringing it to his chest. He drew away so they were looking at one another and flattened her hand over his heart. He held it there, pressed against his chest, with his own hand pressed atop it, and said, “Close your eyes.”
Her lids fluttered closed on their own. She held frozen and breathless, her nerves honed to a million excruciating exclamation points.
He said, “Do you feel that?”
She did. Beneath her palm, his heart was pounding as hard as her own. She nodded.
“And what does that tell you?”
His voice had dropped. This close, the scents of his skin, his hair, and his breath, were heady. Soft and sweet, yet musky and dark, he smelled like the outdoors, like night time in the deepest heart of the woods, like something natural and primitive and indefinable, moonlight and magic and fresh fallen snow.
He smelled—wild.
“It tells me that…that it’s real. Because I can feel it,” she whispered, knowing exactly what he wanted.
“That’s right,” he said, and with his other hand touched her face.
Unable to look at him, she kept her eyes closed. He held her jaw cupped in the open palm of his hand as if it were something fragile. His thumb was just beneath her left ear. Then he slid his hand forward and his other fingers curled around the back of her neck. He began to stroke his thumb lightly over that sensitive spot behind her earlobe, and it raised a rash of goosebumps on her arms.
“I’m not your type,” she whispered, all her anger at him gone. She realized it had really only been acute disappointment, both in him and in herself for getting her hopes up, but that didn’t make it any easier to look at him. She finally gathered the courage to open her eyes and found him staring down at her, his eyes shadowed and intense.
In response to her words his brows lifted. Then those green eyes of his, always so penetrating, shifted from stormy and dark to amused. “No. You’re not.”
That stung. Until he amended, “You’re smarter than my usual type.”
Thumb stroke. The goosebumps spread to her legs.
“Edgier.”
Another thumb stroke. Her heartbeat accelerated.
“More…interesting.”
His smile deepened as he said that. Her heart began suddenly to pound wildly in her chest as if she’d been injected with adrenaline, a thrum and a throb so wild and violent she thought she might faint. “Trust me, I’m about as interesting as vanilla pudding,” she said unsteadily.
