Darkness(64)

His hand stilled on her breast. With an audible indrawing of breath he lifted his head to look down at her.

His eyes were black with passion. His face was hard and flushed with it. His mouth—she couldn’t look at his mouth. She wanted it on her body too badly.

“I can’t,” she said again, meeting his gaze, knowing that her eyes had to look drugged with desire and that her lips were ripe and swollen from his kisses: a face that said yes even as she told him no.

His eyes blazed down at her. His breath hissed out through his teeth.

The steeliness of his arm around her held her fast against him. There would be no easy escape if he didn’t choose to release her. His body was as unyielding as the stone wall at her back. She could feel the urgency in him, the depth of his need. The air around them was electric with arousal. It crackled with the promise of sex.

His eyes flickered down, and she realized that he was looking at her breasts. Pale in the dim light, they were round as tennis balls and taut with anticipation. Her nipples were dark, puckered, and obviously eager. Curled around her breast, his hand looked deeply tan and very masculine. His big thumb rested right beside her nipple.

The sight was so erotic that she caught her breath. With every cell in her body, she wanted to change her mind, to pull his head down and—

She watched as his hand dropped, and felt a sharp stab of regret.

Their eyes met. She had no idea what he saw in hers, but his were heavy-lidded and burning hot. That steely arm tightened around her for the briefest of moments. Then he let her go and walked away, just a few long strides but far enough, before stopping with his back to her.

Gina was left leaning against the wall, breathing hard, her body still smoldering inside as she looked at his tall, broad-shouldered form with fierce longing. Pulling her clothes down, adjusting them, she fought to banish the physical yearning that pulsed through her in an urgent, relentless rhythm. She wanted him. Badly. Nothing about that had changed.

With every rational brain cell she possessed she knew, as well as she’d ever known anything, that she was doing the right thing in calling a halt. Her incendiary response to his lovemaking had made it abundantly clear to her that she was hungry for sex. Nothing so surprising about that: it was, in fact, a good thing, a sign that she was fully emerging into life again. But however hot Cal might make her, he was absolutely not the right man for her to jump back in the sexual waters with. She wanted sex in the context of a relationship, and what she wanted in a relationship was a man who was kind and gentle and affectionate and, above all, there. A man who did ordinary things, who went to work at an ordinary job, with whom she could build an ordinary life.

Not a hard-eyed, hard-muscled mercenary who’d just killed a man and who’d gotten her friends killed and was probably going to get her killed before he died himself. At best, he could be counted on to provide her with a bout or two or three of steamy sex before disappearing from her life.

She knew herself: if she had sex with Cal she’d get attached to him, and if she got attached to him she’d wind up trying to put the pieces of her broken heart back together all over again.

How totally stupid would she have to be, to open herself up to something like that?

Probably, if she survived this and made it back home, she ought to try dating again, she decided.

In the meantime, she needed to get her act together and deal with the man in front of her.

Cal hadn’t moved. The rigidity of his back made her stomach muscles tighten. His hands were curled into fists at his sides. It occurred to her that she actually knew very little about him—such as how he took rejection. Was he angry or—

Her hands were unsteady as—in instinctive, unthinking reaction to what had just happened between them rather than because of the temperature, which this far into the cave was relatively mild—she zipped her coat back up. The metallic sound it made was jarring to her senses. He heard it, too: she saw his head lift.

“Cal.” Her voice was husky. It didn’t help that her bra now felt about two sizes too small, or that her mouth still tingled from his kisses, or that the hungry throbbing deep inside her hadn’t abated.

He turned to look at her. Since the flashlight was tucked in his pocket still, the small circle of illumination surrounded him. She was able to see his face, while hopefully she was deeper in shadow and he couldn’t see hers well enough to read anything in it. His eyes were still black and hot. His mouth was iron with control. His body radiated tension.

His eyes slid over her, registering, she could tell, her zipped-up coat. He said, “Hmm?” without any intonation at all.

She took a breath. “Can we talk?”

“About what?” There was a harshness to his voice that confirmed, as if any confirmation was necessary, that he was still at least as turned on as she was.

Her lips compressed. “About what just happened. About the fact that we—kissed. About why I can’t let it go any farther.”

He took a breath. It was deep and ragged enough that she both saw and heard it. When he spoke, his voice was slightly less harsh than before. “You have a perfect right to call a halt anytime you want. I’m fine with it, okay? So is there anything else you want to talk about?”

She searched his face. Those ruggedly handsome features could have been carved from stone for all the emotion they revealed. Yet she could see the enormous amount of self-control he was exercising in everything from the curl of his fingers to the tension in his stance.