CAITLIN CREWS - The Guardian's Virgin Ward

She threw up her hands in emphasis or maybe to illustrate how strongly she felt these things. God help him, but Izar did not want to feel. He did not want to be near anyone who did. Feelings were no good. They led nowhere he wanted to go. He indulged the passions of the flesh because they were easily sated by his ever-revolving selection of mistresses and because he was, after all, a man. But he didn’t feel. He had sex, then moved on. Passion like this was lethal. He’d excised it a long time ago.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so close to someone who fairly oozed it.

And she was still speaking. “I want to be a regular person. I want to complain about my job all week, then stand in loud, tacky bars or binge watch television all weekend with my friends. I want the whole experience. Where’s the harm in that?”

Some distant voice inside him told him to step back. To remove himself from the temptation of such a ferociously earnest expression on such a beautiful face. The way she tilted her head back so she could stand that close to him and still look him in the eye, as if it was necessary she confront him this way. Her faint scent, maddeningly vague, that was somehow a part of the heat of her skin and its softness at the same time, tangling inside of him and making him long for things that were impossible. More than impossible.

He didn’t understand how any of this had happened. But he couldn’t make this situation any worse than it already was tonight. He couldn’t.

“I sympathize.” He did not touch her. He did not bend his head to taste that full mouth and he did not test the smoothness of her bared arms with his palms. But he also did not back away. “But that is not a choice you have.”

“It should be my choice.”

“Perhaps. But, instead, it is mine.”

“I don’t—”

“Do you really think this is wise, Liliana?” he bit out, cutting her off before he stopped remembering why he should. “Do you really think pushing me is going to get you what you want?”

“What will?” she demanded.

And later he might very well rip this moment apart. He might dig through his every motivation and question what the hell he’d been thinking—but here, now, he wasn’t sure he thought at all. It was as if she was a cliff when he’d expected a long, flat, familiar meadow, and he’d plummeted straight over the side without any warning. And there was nothing to be done for it now. He should have shut this down and bundled her off into his waiting car the moment she’d walked into the room and confirmed every last thing that smirking cockroach had told him. He shouldn’t have engaged with her. He shouldn’t have listened to a word she said, because how could it matter? And who cared if the woman who was still his duty had gone and transformed herself into the physical manifestation of his deepest desires? That he noticed at all was appalling. He’d have to add that to his laundry list of reasons to loathe himself. Later.

But in that moment, Izar did more than notice. He let his eyes drift down to her lips and linger there. Almost as if he was powerless to help himself—or stop.

“Oh,” she said softly, and the word was ripe with too many meanings. Revelation and understanding. Something like wonder. A touch of daring besides, and it poured through him, molten hot and impossible to resist. “Honey, not vinegar. I should have realized. The great and terrible Izar Agustin only acts tough.”

She threw herself forward and into him, catching herself with her palms flat against his chest even as his hands came up to grip her upper arms. Automatically, he told himself. To push her away, he told himself—but he didn’t.

Her skin was every bit as smooth to the touch as he’d tried not to imagine. The contact was like fire, surging through him, making him insane enough to understand he was hot and hard and unwilling to do a damn thing to change it—

And then Liliana surged up on her toes and pressed her lips to his.

CHAPTER THREE

KISSING IZAR WAS a great deal like leaping from the top of a high building into an endlessly frozen arctic sea. A giddy rush and then the shock of the cold. The feel of his cruel mouth against hers, his taut chest beneath her hands as if she’d slapped them on a blazing radiator, his hard-packed, solid body too close and too big and too much—

Maybe she had been tipsy before. Because she wasn’t now. At all. And she couldn’t imagine what in the name of all that was holy she thought she was doing.

For a moment, they stood there as if turned to stone. Liliana’s heart kicked at her, hard enough to knock her down, though she didn’t let it.

Liliana’s whole life seemed to flash before her in an instant. Most of it revolving around the frustrating man whose large, hard hands gripped her upper arms, whose fresh, clean scent was mixed with something dark and spicy that she suspected was all him, and whose mouth was as hard and unyielding as it had looked in all those tabloid photographs.

Her heart walloped her a second time. Harder, maybe.

The wine she’d drunk seemed to spin around inside her, playing back every single word she’d said to her guardian since she’d walked into this room tonight. Liliana shivered. What in the name of God had she been thinking? Taunting Izar? Was she mad? He was going to throw her into a dark little cell somewhere and never, ever let her out again, and that would be if she was lucky—

But first she had to deal with the fact that on top of all the things she’d said and the fact she’d attacked him and possibly damaged his mobile phone in the bargain, she’d also thrust herself upon him. She hadn’t looked him in the face and now she was touching him. She was standing here in her bedroom with her lips attached to his. How would she ever live that down? How could she possibly begin to apologize for such a lapse in judgment?

Her heart kicked at her a third time.

Liliana tensed, ready to push herself away from him and, if there was a God, disappear through the floor or die on the spot as planned—

But Izar made a low, growling sort of noise. She’d never heard anything like it before, yet it seemed to move through her body, curling around her like smoke. Holding her as tight as he did.

Then he angled his head, hauled her even closer and took control.

And everything exploded.

The world disappeared in the searing flash of it, wild and hot and insane. There was nothing left. No scrap of her at all. There was only the masterful way Izar took her mouth, parting her lips to slip between them and setting her on fire.

He tasted her. He tempted her. He hauled her even closer until she was sprawled against his chest, her breasts flattened against the wall of his torso. And she hardly knew herself, because all she could do was meet him as he pillaged her mouth, winding her arms around his neck and trying to get even closer to him, if that was possible.

There was too much. He was too much. She found her fingers tangling in his crisp, dark hair and could feel even that like a bolt of lightning, searing into her and through her. And she didn’t care if she burned alive as long as she could keep doing this. Forever.

He deepened his kiss and she arched against him, understanding when she rubbed against him what that hardness was. She wanted more. She wanted him.

She wanted everything.

Because, finally, it all made sense. Her whole life. Her long evenings spent tracking pictures of Izar across the globe, from one glittering party tailor-made for the tabloids to the next. Her tense and painful long-distance relationship with this man and his infrequent letters that had cast such a long and dark shadow over the last decade. It seemed so obvious, suddenly, that everything had been leading here, to the exultation of his mouth on hers, urging her on, making her pant and shiver and think she might die if she couldn’t feel the scrape of his marvelous jaw on every part of her skin.