“I don’t feel superior, Tehya.” Frankly, he felt lacking. During the past years, as he watched the happiness that filled men who had once been cold, hardened warriors, he’d finally realized what he’d lost in his life.
It was a loss he had accepted long ago, he reminded himself. He couldn’t make the same mistakes he had made in the past. The blood and rage that stained the darkest days of his life were never forgotten.
“The hell you don’t.” Anger filled her voice, but naked need filled her eyes. “You stood above your men daily, staring down that sharp, arrogant nose of yours as though they were recalcitrant children in need of discipline for actually daring to love. You were mockingly amused at the lot of them.”
Surprise burst inside him. Was this what his men thought? What his nephew thought? That he considered himself better than they because they loved?
He’d be damned if that were the truth. He was aware of the choices he had made, just as he knew that his men were in a far better position than he. They had someone to hold on to at night, someone to ease the aching loneliness. He had only the loneliness to keep him company.
“Is that what you really believe, Tehya?” He took a step forward, feeling blistering need and offended anger crowding inside him.
He promised himself before coming here that he wouldn’t touch her, that he would simply tell her good-bye.
Good-bye wasn’t going to be enough.
“Why don’t you just go ahead and leave, Commander Jordan,” she sneered, those tempting witch’s eyes flaring back at him as the fiery red of her lashes seemed to blaze around the iridescent color. “There’s the door, don’t let it hit you in the ass. Isn’t that what you Americans say?”
A whisper of French, that alluring little accent that only emerged in the most extreme situations, vibrated across his senses.
It may have vibrated across his senses but it seemed to wrap around his cock and squeeze. His balls tightened, the tormenting ache increasing. His self control was disintegrating and he knew it, felt it unraveling.
She did this to him. She made him crazy like this and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do to stop it. It traveled through his bloodstream like poison, like a potent drug, stripping away the control he prided himself on and leaving him grasping at the threads of decency as he tried to force himself away from her.
“You don’t want to keep pushing this,” he warned her.
“Well, hell, you must be enjoying it, Commander, you’re still standing here.” Her breasts were heaving, the nipples so hard beneath the silken material he swore they were going to pop right through the threads.
The urge to lick his lips was almost overpowering. The need for her was almost as strong.
“I could fuck you,” he growled then. “It’s what you want, it’s what we both want, but have you considered what would happen the morning after?”
“Will there be a morning after?” she questioned him roughly. “Aren’t you the one who said you could fuck me, but then you would have to kill me? Double O Seven has nothing on you, does he, stud?”
Stud? She had not just called him “stud”?
Damn her, the woman didn’t have the good sense to know when to keep her smart mouth shut or her tender heart safe.
Before he could stop himself, his hands were on her. His fingers curled around her upper arms as he jerked her to him, watching as her eyes widened, her hair seeming to flow around her as the pure silk of her flesh met the callused roughness of his hands.
And then he froze. Because her skin was so fucking soft. Beneath his palms it felt as heated, warm, and soft as a cloud itself. Sensation sizzled at the touch, heated and mesmerized his senses.
Spreading his fingers apart, he touched her with his palms only and watched as he let the inner part of his hand cup the curve of her shoulder.
Hell, he wanted her. He wanted to fuck her until he was mindless with it, until nothing or no one mattered but Tehya. Until the past and the nightmares were obliterated.
She would be the death of him.
That was but a distant thought as he let himself relish the feel of her flesh against his palms. He swore he could feel the sizzle of heat just below the flesh, drawing him, surging through his pores and washing through his system.
“Bad idea.” Swallowing tightly, he stared back at her, so focused on the strength of the need surging through him that all thoughts of pulling back evaporated.
The emerald green of her eyes darkened, glittering with need, as he watched her lips tremble.
“Six years,” she whispered. “I waited…”
He didn’t want to hear it. He couldn’t hear it. The words she was a
bout to whisper would be words she would regret the moment she realized that it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been twenty years.