LITMIR.BIZ

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      At a loss for the word, she gave a little grimace and shook her head.

      “Cooped up?” Cade softly suggested, watching the horizon as she did. She looked him a question, not being familiar with the expression. He glanced down at her. “Walled up…fenced in—”

      “Oh, yes!” She turned toward him, her breath escaping in a grateful rush. “That is it exactly—walled up and fenced in. But what is this…coop? I do not know—”

      He shrugged and turned his gaze back to the sea. “It’s an expression they use where I come from. A coop is a kind of pen. They keep chickens in it.”

      “In Texas?”

      “Yeah…” He said it on a sigh. “In Texas.” After a curiously vibrant pause, one that fairly sang with unspoken communion, he jerked himself upright and away from the silence with a loud and raggedy attempt to clear his throat. “Other places, too. Pretty much any place they have chickens.”

      He couldn’t believe he was having this conversation with a princess. One that, even in a designer gown, really did look like something out of The Arabian Nights. But talking about chicken coops, dopey as it was, seemed infinitely safer than that terrifying sense of…what in the world had it been? Affinity, concord…none of those words seemed adequate to describe what had just happened between them, between himself and this woman from an alien culture…a kind of oneness he’d never experienced before with another human being. As if, he thought with a shudder, she’d somehow found, and for that one brief moment touched, his innermost self. His soul.

      “Texas.” Her sigh was an echo of his. “It must be very wonderful.” Hearing a new lightness in her voice, he looked at her warily. Torchlight played mischievously with her dimples.

      She’s flirting with you, Cade. The thought made him almost giddy with relief. This was familiar territory, something he was pretty sure he knew how to handle.

      He turned toward her and leaned an elbow on the balustrade, relaxed now, and casually smoking. “Some parts of it are,” he drawled, “and some aren’t.” He was thinking about the West Texas oil country, and parts of the Panhandle that were so flat you had the feeling if you got to running too fast you’d run right off the edge of the world. Even such a thing as wide open spaces could be carried too far.

      Maybe because his thoughts were back home in Texas and he was feeling a little bit overconfident, it was a few seconds before he noticed the intensity of Leila’s silence. By the time he did, and snapped his attention back into focus on her, it was too late. He thought it must feel something like this, the first moment after stepping into quicksand—a disquieting, sinking sensation, but not yet sure whether he ought to panic or not.

      When had she come to be standing so close to him? The sea breeze carried her scent to him, sweet and faintly spicy. The word “exotic” came to his mind. But then, everything about her was exotic. Was that why she seemed so exciting to him? The fact that she was different from every other woman he’d ever met?

      Don’t even think about it. She’s absolutely off-limits.

      Or was it simply that she was forbidden fruit? Off-limits. Inaccessible. Except that, at this moment, at least, he knew she was entirely accessible…to him.

      To think like that was insane. And insanely dangerous. He was dealing with a tiger out of her cage, nothing less.

      Except that she didn’t look much like a tiger at the moment, or anything even remotely dangerous. She looked soft and warm and sweet, more like ripe summer than forbidden fruit. Torchlight touched off golden sparks in the ornaments in her hair and in her eyes. Gazing into them, he felt again the peculiar sensation of not-quite-dizziness, as if his world, his center of gravity, had tilted on its axis. Clutching for something commonplace and familiar, he took a quick, desperate puff of his all-but-forgotten cheroot.

      Her whisper came like an extension of the breeze…or his own sigh. For one brief moment he wasn’t certain whether it was her voice he was hearing, or merely the echoes of his own thoughts.

      “Do you want to kiss me, Mr. Gallagher?”

      Cade almost swallowed his cigar. Do you want to kiss me?

      What on God’s green earth could he say to that? Jolted cruelly back to reality, his mind whirred like a computer through countless impossibilities, distilled finally down to two: Lie and tell her he didn’t, which would be unconscionably cruel; or tell her the truth, which would most likely land him in more trouble than he cared to think about.

      It was probably gut instinct that made him do neither of those things, but instead try to laugh his way out of it. To make light of it. A joke.

      Tossing his cigar over the balustrade with an exaggerated, almost violent motion, he snaked one arm around her waist. The other he hooked across her back at shoulder-blade height, and laying her against it, arched his body over hers in broad parody of some old silent movie clip he’d seen recently, he couldn’t recall exactly where—The Academy Awards, maybe?—about an Arab sheik in flowing robes and headdress seducing a wild-eyed maiden in a tassel-draped tent.

      “Kees you?” he intoned in a ludicrous and excruciatingly awful mishmash of several different accents—he had no idea where he’d gotten that from. “Oh-ho-ho, mademoiselle…”

      Startled eyes gazed up at him. He felt a sensation of falling, as if the ground beneath his feet had dropped away.

      What mow? He had no idea what he was supposed to say next. That was the trouble with those silent movies, he thought. They were silent. Short on dialogue, long on action. And he was pretty sure he did know what action was supposed to come next.

      Don’t do that. You can’t. You’d be crazy to do that.

      Then came the smallest of sounds…the soft rush of an exhalation. Her breath was sweet and faintly wine-scented, so close he felt the stirring of it on his own skin. So near to his…her lips parted. Slowly, slowly her eyes closed.

      Lord help me, he thought, and lowered his mouth to hers.

      He had an impression of warmth and softness, of sweetness and innocence. Of purity. It occurred to him to wonder whether his might even be the first lips to ever have touched hers, and the thought both excited and shamed him. Is that what it’s all about? he wondered. Is that why I want her so much? Nothing to do with exotic beauty and forbidden fruit, only the thirst of the conqueror for undefiled lands to claim as his own.

      His thirst was in danger of blossoming into fullblown lust.

      He felt the flutterings of her instinctive resistance. If only he hadn’t! If only she’d responded openly, brazenly to his kiss, he might have been able to keep it as he’d intended it to be—blatantly mocking—and end it there. But that tiny faltering, that faint gasp of virginal hesitation… It stirred some primitive masculine response deep within him, so that her hesitation affected him not as a warning, but as a challenge. And an embrace meant only to lighten the mood and diffuse dangerous emotions became instead a seduction.

      Instead of releasing her, his fingers stroked sensuous circles over the tightened muscles in her back and waist. Instead of pulling away from her, he gently absorbed her lips’ quiverings and delicately soothed them with the warmth of his own mouth. And felt her relax…melt into his embrace …as he’d somehow known she would.

      He shifted her slightly, to a more comfortable, more natural position, and felt her body align with his as if it had been custom-made for that purpose, a soft and supple warmth. He lightly sipped her wine-flavored mouth, and only then discovered—too late—that he was famished for the unique taste of her, that he craved her with every fiber of his being.

      Tiny lightbursts of warning exploded inside his brain. Reserves of strength summoned from God knew where made it possible for him to tear his mouth from hers—for a moment, no more. He released a sound like the moaning of wind in old trees and buried his face in the graceful curve of her neck. Then…gently,

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