tight as he would have liked.
And he thought that was going to come easy?
She almost smiled at the thought.
She wasn’t easy, even for him. Especially for him, the emotional ties he was determined to build were not going to be given without an assurance of ties in return. And there was no assurance. Not yet. And neither was there a confidence that she could handle the man he had become.
It wasn’t, she had realized over the past days, a fear, shame, or embarrassment of the town. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to face fighting everyone around her for what she wanted. It was the fear that fighting everyone else would prove fruitless when he walked away.
“Cami, you’re not making much effort to help me out here,” he drawled, his tone velvet rough as it rumbled from his chest.
As he spoke, the blanket that covered her to beneath her arms was slowly pulled away from her, leaving her beneath his gaze clad only in the short, silky plum-colored nightgown she had donned after her shower.
“Am I supposed to be helping you out?” she asked him. “It seems you’re only asking rhetorical questions, Rafe. You already know the answers.”
“Let’s say I know of the subject at hand, but the details have eluded me. And you will give me those details.”
Would she?
She had no intentions of allowing him to order her to do anything. Just as she had absolutely no intention of bowing down to the dominance that gleamed in his eyes.
Submissive she truly wasn’t. She would call no man master, nor would she ever give in to that dominance without a very sensual struggle.
“There were no details to give, Rafe,” she assured him quietly as he pushed the comforter to her knees as she felt her womb flex and her pussy pulse erotically. The soft slide of her juices from the intimate recess of her body had her fighting not to arch her hips and bring attention to the needy flesh between her thighs.
She ached for him. There was no denying the fact that she wanted him more than she had ever wanted anything or anyone in her life. Just as there was no denying the sensual and emotional abyss that opened within her each time she had to deal with the conflicting pleasure and hungers that attacked her with each touch he gave her.
What the hell was she supposed to do with all this need? With the hunger for his touch, for his kiss, mixing with the overwhelming, overriding desire to challenge
It was like playing tug-of-war with herself.
His fingertips stroked against her knee before caressing above it, then back. Delicate velvet-soft touches before they went higher, petting and stroking as he stared down at her until the caresses were at her thighs and she was fighting to keep from parting her thighs.
“Did you recognize anything about the voice?” he asked her.
She cleared her throat. “It sounded very mechanical.”
It was all she could do to concentrate on the fact that when he spoke it wasn’t anything sexy. Still, though, the dark rumble of his voice had her entire body sensitizing when combined with the dark dominance that filled Rafe.
“No. Nothing. It just sounded like a robot.” Her hips did arch this time as his fingers delved beneath her gown.
Her thighs parted, her senses becoming entangled in the insidious pleasure stroking closer to the swollen bud of her clitoris and the weeping center of her body.
Her nipples, though excruciatingly tender, ached with more than the pain of the callous treatment that had been inflicted on them by her attacker. They were hardened, throbbing with both arousal as well as the tenderness. It was an interesting, confusing pleasure-pain that she fought to make sense of.
Rafe’s gaze moved from his fingers playing at her thighs, moving ever closer to the aching flesh there as his gaze centered on the hard buds of her nipples beneath the silk of the gown.
“Let me take your gown off.”
Her breathing seemed to constrict in her chest.
She’d seen the bruises after her shower, and they were horrendous. Long, thick finger marks marred the flesh in shades of black, blue, and abraded red. Her nipples were swollen and a cherry red, rather than the pink they had once been.
“I don’t want—”
He laid his fingers to her lips, stopping the flow of words.
“Do I make you feel good when I touch you, Cami?”
She could feel her breathing accelerate at the very thought of the pleasure he could give her. Instantly heat flooded her body, like flames burning out of control.
“That’s not the point,” she whispered, her fingers digging into the sheet beneath her as she fought to control her breathing.
She didn’t dare touch him. Touching him would be the height of insanity. There was no way she could hold back then. No way she could pull back from that pit of dark, hidden emotions that swirled within her.
“You won’t answer my questions, and you won’t let me love your sweet body?” He reached over, picked up her hand from her side, and forced her fingers from their grip on the sheet. “Cami, love, is it so hard to be my lover?”
“We’re not lovers.” She had to deny it; she couldn’t let herself accept that they were. Accepting it meant giving in, and giving in was something she couldn’t allow herself to do. Not yet.
He only chuckled at the denial, though, his lips curving, his blue eyes filling with knowing amusement as she stared up at him.
“Ahh, so, Cami, what does ‘a lover’ mean beyond the fact that when we’re together we’re fucking like minks in mating season?”
She had to force her lips from a smile at the phrasing, as well as the fact that he was right.
He lifted her hand, forcing her fingers to curl around his as he brought them to the warmth of his chest.
“Lovers do more than fuck,” she reminded him. “They spend more time together than that which is spent in the bed.”
“We didn’t spend the whole weekend in the bed when you were snowbound,” he reminded her. “We cooked.”
“I cooked while you shoveled out the sidewalk.” And she had watched him through the window over the sink, and she had fought the intimacy of something so simple, so homey, as the fact that she was cooking and he was shoveling the snow.
“But we did more than fuck.”
There was no denying that fact.
“Those were very unusual circumstances,” she reminded him.
“Only because you made them unusual.” He unfolded her fingers until her hand lay, palm flat, against the crisp, light mat of curls that spread across his chest.
Cami felt herself trembling, her fingers shaking against his chest, the urge to whimper with the need rising in her chest.
“I will have the answers to my questions.” The hem of her gown began to rise. “And I’ll see this very sweet body every night I lie in bed with it.” There was a demand in his voice that brooked no refusal. “Tell me you’re not mine, Cami. Tell me I don’t own every response, every heated second of arousal.” The hem cleared her thighs, revealing the tiny scrap of silk she wore as panties.
“Arrogant, aren’t you?” But he was right, so very right, about the fact that she responded to no one else. That she wanted, ached for, and needed no other man except Rafe.
“Right.”
His head lowered as his lips touched hers. Just touched. It wasn’t a hard, hungry kiss. It was a tease, a temptation, the threat of that raw, erotic hunger flaring between them as he stared down at her.
The silk moved higher, over her hips, and she lifted for it.
She was insane, because she couldn’t refuse him. She couldn’t say no. She couldn’t pull away from him. She
