Page 46 of Courting Trouble
Better than any man she’d ever known.
Most certainly better than her.
“I had hoped you’d moved on,” she confessed woodenly. “I didn’t come to find you because I’d anticipated that you’d found a way to be happy. How could you not when you’re so easy to adore? I could not add interrupting that happiness to my list of many sins. I couldn’t do that to whomever loved you, any more than I could watch you love someone else. Or see the babies you might have put inside of her—”
He seized her then, tenderly, passionately, his hands bracketing her face, cradling it as if it were a precious, breakable thing, even as he delivered crushing blows with his words. “There’s no one. There has neverbeenanyone else. I always realized it made me pathetic. That I couldn’t give the shards of my heart to someone else, knowing she’d never put it back together. Why inflict a broken man on someone undeserving? It’s not her fault I’m damaged… it’syours.”
With a low moan, his mouth descended and claimed hers, cutting off any hope of a reply.
Answering Thunder
As Titus devoured her mouth, lightning struck, igniting an inferno that both humbled and terrified him.
The resulting firestorm herded every emotion toward him with all the galloping, thunderous peril of a runaway stagecoach. Desire in the lead, followed by possession, betrayal, hope, hunger, with the relentless lash of fury whipping the frenzy higher. Faster. Out of control.
The last time Titus had kissed this woman, she’d been Honoria Goode, a cossetted debutante who’d understood next to nothing about the wickedness of lust.
As shy and hesitant virgins, they’d swung like a wild pendulum between frenzied gropes and hot stolen kisses, to tender explorations requiring much encouragement and restraint. She’d been a tangle of insecurities and need, and he a machine of senseless desire tempered by blind, consuming love. Even still, she’d allowed him to lead her down the meandering paths of their mutual discoveries.
But now, it was Nora who held the reins in her elegant hands.
He’d been a fool to think he’d drive this interaction. That he’d control any part of it.
Nora had owned him from the moment he’d laid eyes on her twenty years prior, and even though he’d captured her lips, it washertongue that first staked the claim.
The depths of hell he’d endured at the loss of her, of this, were matched by an indescribable height as she licked into the seam of his lips. Withdrawing, she left the taste of sweetened tea and buttery biscuits behind.
He chased the flavor into her mouth, where their tongues met and sparred for a heated moment before he coaxed her back with a gentle sucking motion. He drank in her husky moan with the thirst born of a decade in the desert.
An answering growl vibrated from somewhere so low in his chest, he wondered if it’d originated from the abyss where his heart had resided for so long.
Lured out of the dark by the woman who’d stolen it.
If I was so easy to adore, why was I so easy to discard?
He shoved the question away as their kiss became a living thing born of need and pain and pure reclamation. He learned his temper and his lust could immolate in the same blaze, and would only be doused byher. He suddenly didn’t care if the conflagration caught and cornered them. He would gladly burn to ash, if only to be sifted through her fingers.
Those fingers shoved into his jacket, tugging it over one shoulder in a one-handed attempt to sweep it away from him.
Her left arm remained folded in front of her as if she wore her sling, and that fact drew his head up to break the kiss.
“Help me, dammit,” she panted, tugging restlessly as she lifted on her toes to reclaim his mouth.
“No,” he groaned.
“I can’t bloody do it myself.” Her expression was a lament of lust and frustration.
As he already held her jaw in his palms, he tilted her face up, urging her to look at him. “Your wound, Nora. We can’t.”
This close, her disappearing irises were the color of ripe black cherries, gleaming with striations of amber and ringed with honey. Her pupils dilated so large and round they almost swallowed everything else with a well of black, fathomless need.
“Undress,” she ordered breathlessly. “Now.”
Even as he complied, shucking his jacket and discarding it on the table, he contended, “I’ll hurt you—”
“I don’t care.” She yanked her claws down the front of his shirt, sending more than a few of his buttons clattering against the floor and rolling in chaotic directions.
“That is because you do not understand.” He caught her wrist, his thumb pressing into the pulse leaping against the thin and tender skin. He could feel the blood rushing through her veins, the electric currents leaping and arcing between them. “I’m still… furious. Withhim. With you. What is between us is not…it isn’t gentle.Thisisn’t—”
