Nalini Singh - Craving Beauty

"Now, you'll tell me every lie that bitch spouted." He crowded her until she was pressed against the wall. Her purse dropped to the floor as he wrapped one hand gent­ly around her nape.

"How do you know they were lies?" Her pulse pounded against his hand, but her tone was defiant, her eyes beginning to burn with inner fire.

"Because Lydia wouldn't know honesty if it bit her."

He crowded her some more until her soft breasts pressed against the jacket of his tux.

"Stop giving me orders," she hissed. "And back off."

"No." His woman had been hurt and he wanted an explanation as to why she'd let that happen.

She blinked at the uncompromising denial. "You are not behaving as American men are supposed to."

"How am I behaving?"

"Like one of the desert chieftains. They're known to be primitive."

"Is that so, cher ? Then you'd better start talking. Us primitive types aren't known for our patience." His eyes drifted to the lushness of her lips. Before his civilized side could talk him out of it, he leaned down and kissed her the way he'd been wanting to all night. Pure heat and pure, possession.

Her soft lips parted for him, inviting him into her mouth. He took the invitation and claimed her sweetness. His free hand went to her breast but he didn't like the feel of her sparkly dress against his skin. Without releasing her lips, he pushed the strap down and slipped his hand under the dress to close around one heavy globe.

Hira jerked, but her arms came around his neck in per­mission that he hadn't asked for. Rubbing his thumb across her nipple, he broke the kiss only long enough to allow her a breath and then he ravished her again, massaging her breast with a hand that knew exactly what she liked.

"What did she say?" he asked, raising his head.

Her lips were wet, her eyes sleepy looking but her mind sharp. "You're trying to seduce me to get your way."

"Yes." He plucked at her nipple before cupping her breast again. "I'm a bastard of a negotiator."

"No, you're merely determined." Her lips curved in an indulgent smile. "Lydia said much, but it all came down to the fact that you were sorry to have married me and were madly in love with her, that you had begged her to come to your bed despite the fact that she was married."

Raw rage whipped through him. Leaving her breast, he pushed both hands through her lush fall of hair. "And you believed her?" He was furious with her for think­ing so little of him.

Her eyes narrowed. "I told her that you'd never lower yourself to trash such as she was."

He wasn't fully mollified. "Then why the hell did she look so happy?"

"I believe she thought to drive a wedge between us by planting seeds of doubt in my mind."

"Did she succeed?"

"You are a man with much pride. You'd never beg the favors of a woman who had rejected you."

"You know me." He pressed impossibly closer. Only her height in heels allowed her to meet his gaze. "But you believed some of it. You looked like hell."

"No. I was hurt at being reminded that though you say many things which make me think you value me as more than just a pretty face, I'm still a trophy wife to you, like Lydia is to her husband. Most of the couples there tonight were successful men with beautiful young women they treat as ornaments. I fitted right in."

His control snapped. "Trophy wife?" he asked very softly. He'd been torn up at the sight of her in pain and she considered herself a trophy wife? He was sick of try­ing to get through to her. Maybe it was time to use non-verbal communication of the kind they were best at. Putting his hands on her waist, he lifted her. "Legs around my waist."

She obeyed. "What are you doing, husband?"

Good. She sounded wary. But beneath the wariness was trust that soothed the raw edges of his temper.

"Teaching you that whatever else you might be, you're no trophy. Trophies get put up on a shelf and admired. I want you in my hands, to touch and please and own in a far different way." He reached under her dress and made short work of her fragile panties.

She gasped. "This is..." Her words were lost as his fingers probed her, testing her for readiness. Within a few strokes, he was rewarded with damp heat. The scent of her desire rose in the air.

"Yes, cher," he said. "That's it."

She hit his shoulder with a closed fist. "Do not talk to me as you would to a horse."

Some of his masculine possessivehess retreated under that sharp-voiced command. Only some. "But, baby, you respond so beautifully to a little coaxing." He slid a finger deep into her, gentle with her in spite of the desire running rampant through his body.

She cried out and clutched his shoulders. When her eyes opened, they were full of some feminine mystery he couldn't hope to understand. Clenching around his finger, she pulled his head to hers. He went, his free hand breaking a strap on her dress to give him easy ac­cess to her breasts. As one hand closed around her flesh, her teeth scraped his lips.

"Biting, Hira?" He grinned. "Tut, tut." Another fin­ger deep within her.

Her eyes flashed, even as tiny feminine muscles rip­pled around him. "I will make you pay for this, Marc."

He started kissing her neck, wondering if she knew just how rawly sexy she looked with her dress tumbling off to half expose one breast and completely free the other, her hair falling wild and free onto her shoulders and her long, silky legs wrapped around his waist. Sud­denly it was too much. She was hot and more than ready.

Removing his hand, he went to work on the fasten­ing of his pants. Holding her gaze, he guided himself to her and then thrust. She gasped and blinked, and it was all he could do to stop with that first deep thrust sunk in the velvet heat of her body.

"Move!" she ordered, breathless.

Since he had no objection to the idea, he moved. Again and again and again until he couldn't think and there was such erotic pleasure, it felt as if his whole body was going up in flames.

Hira wondered how she had never, in all her re­searches, come across the mention of how erotic it was to be made love to by a fully clothed man when one was almost naked. Though she couldn't remember how they had got there, she was now in bed, completely naked. Her forest-green gown was hanging over the back of a chair by the vanity. Beside her, Marc lay sprawled on his back, one arm thrown across his eyes. He remained dressed except for his shoes, which he'd apparently kicked off at some stage.

Very carefully, she sat up and looked down at her husband. Over six feet of long, lean man, he was pres­ently asleep. She was glad. Tonight something fundamental had changed in her thinking about their rela­tionship and she needed time to come to terms with it. Her husband had behaved as an enraged male whose wife had done something that displeased him, rather than as a man annoyed with a woman he'd acquired for her ornamentation value alone.

It was a very sharp distinction. One was a reaction fueled by emotion, the other by logic. Whatever else it had been, their joining had not been logical. It had been decidedly out of control and that was something her hus­band guarded fiercely against. Tonight, at the party, she'd overheard people discussing his reputation of icy control in the most stressful circumstances.

Except, with her, he'd always been fire and heat.

The bruised bloom in her heart unfurled into full flower at the revelation that her husband was truly not indifferent to her. The hope she'd felt the night she'd realized they'd somehow become a unit, reawakened. She had yet to understand the depth of what Marc felt for her, but it was surely something far more than mere de­sire.

Perhaps the love in her heart wasn't doomed.

It had taken her a long time to accept that this wild hunter of a man had found a foothold in her soul, but she was a woman who knew herself. Marc Bordeaux was the one. The only one. In her deepest heart, she must've known that when she'd acceded to her father's demands; she was far too smart a woman not to have found a way out if she'd been desperate. She'd been stalling Kerim for months before Marc came on the scene.