Page 33 of The Scandal You Started
“I’m trying. I am.” His chest rose and deflated on a shaky breath. “But I am merely a red-blooded man, Rayna. What do I do? You are temptation I did not know I longed for.”
This time, her heart flipped in sync with her stomach. But her mind immediately raised a battalion of rationale, and she stiffened her shoulders. “Leave. Now.”
For once, he didn’t argue.
Dominic lowered his gaze and all but threw himself off the edge of the bed, shoving his feet into a pair of black slippers. Rayna whipped her head away, but by then it was already too late.
With the lamplight illuminating him more than the morning sun behind the curtains, she got a full side view of averydistinct tent in his trousers.
He was hard.
And she hadn’t even touched him.
Not that she was going to touch him. No. Gosh, no.She wouldn’t.
Writing that across her brain in big, red, binding letters, she forced herself to face him just before he left. “I’m going to get ready, then I’ll come to your room.”
He hummed roughly, and then he was gone, shutting the door behind him.
As the echoing clack rang through her room, Rayna dropped her arm and sighed up at the ceiling.
What a great start to the day that had been.
Chapter 10
Dominic
Dominic couldn’t get the image of Rayna’s luscious body, barely clad in any fabric, out of his head. She was printed across the backs of his eyes.
Not in ink that would wash away, but as an embossed stamp. Permanent. Tangible.
Gosh, he’d had no clue she was lying in such a state of undress under the bedding when he’d first fumbled through the darknessof her room. Upon discovering the switch of the bedside lamp as Rayna had shown him with his own, he’d turned it on, and the glowing sight of her had nearly brought him to his knees.
Awake, she might have been a strongheaded flame of sultry hips and sharp, infuriating words, but asleep, she’d been a breathtaking wisp of a woman nuzzled on her side, all flowy hair, lustrous cheeks, enticing lips, long lashes, and erotic curves.
She’d looked soft and vulnerable. Delicate. And the sight of her had clawed at his chest. It’d made him ache with acute tenderness that begged him to curl himself around her.
He hadn’t, worried he’d wake her, but he hadn’t been able to resist stroking her cheek a few times. Though he’d wanted to, he hadn’t climbed under the bedding in case it angered her.
Had he known she slept naked, for the sake of his sanity, he wouldneverhave entered her room.
No. Actually, he was lying through his teeth.
Dominic would have still slept beside her, but maybe he would have been the slightest bit prepared to witness it with his own eyes.
No, that was also a lie.
No amount of training or imagining could have prepared him for the sight of Rayna’s naked legs, shapely and supple, her skin radiant and golden. The grey…bloody woods, he didn’t even know what to call them. Smalls? What people in the present called boxers? But why on Neves did she sleep in a man’s undergarments? Whatever the bit of clothing was, it had stretched across her derriere so deliciously, showing off the rounded shape of her rather than disguising it.
And then she’d turned.
And Dominic’s dick had risen to attention with the kind of shocking blast of arousal that turned his skin hotter and mouth drier than the Northern Jahandari Desert.
The wicked view of her nipples, poking against her tiny, too-tight shirt—“T-shirt,”she’d called it—had had lust branding her name on his soul. He hadn’t been able to look away as if he’d never seen a woman’s breasts before until she’d covered herself.
He wasn’t an innocent man. He’d slept with his fair share of beautiful women. But only Rayna had been able to make his bones quake with a desperate need to hold her, without even a single word of temptation spoken between them.
Bloody woods, how he’d resisted the urge to haul her to him, bend her over his arm, and plaster his mouth over her breasts until he’d dampened her shirt, he’d never know.
