She stared at him, her mouth hanging open for several seconds. They were mere words but she could already feel herself softening, traitorous desire whispering sweet temptations in her ears.
It seemed nothing had changed in how she reacted to his magnetic presence. After everything she had gone through in the past few weeks, she was ashamed to feel the thrum of excitement his words incited.
“No,” she forced the word out.
He trapped her again. Rock-hard thighs pressed into hers. Molten gaze hovered over her mouth and a low hum began to vibrate over her skin. “Why not?”
She licked her lips and straightened, fisting her hands. It was either that or touch him. God, how she wanted to run her fingers over his sensual mouth, lean into him and relish the heat of his body.
His hands crept into her hair and tugged her closer, his long fingers encircling her nape. Awareness shot through her like a surge of current. “You’re a workaholic and haven’t taken a vacation in forever. Besides, I’ve missed our Friday, what did you call them, movie and...make out sessions.”
“You’re serious?” she said.
He didn’t answer her question, only pulled her closer. It went straight to her head, making her light-headed with longing, shooting need to the apex of her thighs, drenching her in liquid heat.
How she wanted to close her eyes and let him take her to ecstasy once again. How she wanted to delude herself that physical pleasure was intimacy...that lust was caring...that she mattered and not just as a willing woman.
Fears and insecurities she had repressed for so long festered in that void. And she detested herself for feeling so much. “I can’t. In fact, if I never lay eyes on you again after tonight, it’ll be too soon for me.”
A vein fluttered at his temple, his grip tight in her hair. Her pulse hammered, her insides feeling as though she had taken a vertical leap.
“You’re a liar.” His mouth hovered mere inches from her, his breath brushed her skin in a featherlight touch, teasing. “Do you have any idea how I long to possess you again? How much I need you, Lauren?” His gaze came alive, his words low and husky. “And if I kiss your luscious mouth, can you honestly say you’ll stop me? Can you deny us both the pleasure we want so much?”
Lauren shook her head, knowing everything she felt was reflected in her eyes. A grim satisfaction shadowed over his face, its razor edge mocking her feeble defenses.
“No. I’ll admit that I’ll enjoy the sex as much as you do. I’ll go as far as to say you’re the best lay I’ve ever had,” she said, hungry to see his smooth charade fracture.
Thunder danced in his gaze, his razor-sharp cheekbones streaked with color. Even as he knew that she had had one lover before him, a boyfriend in college who had been more into his military career than into her.
“The best lay you’ve ever had?” he inquired silkily, the force of his anger all the more fierce for the leash with which he reined it.
“Yes,” she said, tilting her chin up with a recklessness she was far from feeling. “You’re extremely skilled and generous when it comes to sex.”
Reducing their affair to the crudest terms was the only thing that would save her. From him and herself.
“But I have to resist the attraction, the lure of self-delusion this time. Your power and the ruthlessness with which you wield it, the reckless indifference it affords you of other’s feelings, especially someone like me who’s all too willing to fall into your bed...
“How long before you decide that you’ve had enough of me, before you decide I don’t belong in your world? How long before, once again, you walk out of my bed in the middle of the night and have one of your guards throw me out without so much as a goodbye?”
An immense stillness came over him. Her breath hitching in her throat, Lauren waited. For something—for refusal, for anger, anything that refuted her accusation.
But nothing came.
His silence plunged her deep into a vortex of painful memories.
Discarded in the name of ambition and lofty goals, picked back up with no thought to her feelings, and discarded again. She couldn’t count the number of times her parents had hurt her.
The insecurity, the fear that she didn’t somehow measure up, her resolution to make no demands—a vicious circle of pain that stole every ounce of joy from her. That’s what she would bring upon herself if she succumbed.
Stepping back from him when every inch of her thrummed to be with him, it was the hardest thing she had ever done.
Her heart stuttered anew at the dark beauty of the man.
God, he was the father of her child, the first man who had made her feel so much...the first man for whom she had forgotten herself. And she...she had to walk away.