by JoAnn Ross
“I have a confession.”
She waited, her eyes unrelentingly calm.
He drew in a deep breath. “I’ve read your books. Private Passions and Fears and Fantasies.”
“I know.”
Once again she’d managed to surprise him. “For how long?”
“Since that first day. I saw them on your bookshelves and wondered if you knew I’d written them.”
“I first saw them on Larry’s desk.”
“Ah.” She nodded. “I should have thought of that possibility. Although I didn’t know Larry Kassebaum was your agent.”
“One of the things I like about the guy is that he keeps his client list to himself. He didn’t tell me about you,” Roman assured her. “I was just wandering around the office—”
“Snooping, like I was doing in your library,” Desiree said with a quick, teasing grin.
“Snooping,” Roman admitted with an answering laugh. “I ran across one book and a letter to you in his Out basket. I bought both volumes as soon as I got back to town.”
Heaven help her, she had to ask. “And? What did you think?”
“I thought that not only were they well written, the stories spoke to the heart of a fantasy not many people are brave enough to admit to.”
“I was amazed at the size of the audience,” she responded. “So was Larry.”
“I wasn’t.” Roman ran his hand down her side from her shoulder to her thigh, pleased when he felt the flesh warming beneath his touch. “Did I mention that they were incredibly arousing?”
“No.” His touch was proving pretty arousing itself.
“They were. In fact, there was this one particular story, ‘Scarlet Ribbons’”
He felt her go momentarily rigid. “Desiree?”
She looked up at him and knew without a shadow of a doubt that she was absolutely safe with this man. “That happens to be one of my personal favorites,” she said, putting away any thought of the other man who’d found himself drawn to the erotic story.
Her body, beneath his stroking palm, turned warm and fluid again. She caught his hand and lifted it to her lips. “There is nothing you could ever do that I would say no to, Roman. Nothing.”
That declaration, spoken with such sensual conviction, fired Roman’s imagination as it burned away the last of his concerns. He bent his head and gave her a dreamy kiss that went on and on, moving his head to change angles, tasting her completely, nibbling, nuzzling, drawing it out with a tormenting tenderness that made her ache.
“Roman...” When he broke off the kiss and stood up, she reached for him, her movements slowed as if in a dream. “Please.” She heard her trembling tone, knew she was begging and didn’t care. “I want you to make love with me.”
“Not yet.” He ran the back of his hand down her cheek, her throat. When his thumb lingered at her pulse, she knew he could feel the wild, out-of-control beat of her heart. “There’s no hurry.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” she managed to gasp as his hand brushed against her breast and created a flare of heat.
“Easier to say than do,” he agreed huskily.
Desiree watched as he crossed her room and plucked a pair of silk scarves—one crimson silk, the other a diaphanous gold-studded chiffon—from the brass hooks. Anticipation flicked through her veins as she realized what he had in mind.
“There’s something you have to understand.” He was standing beside the bed again, his gaze managing somehow to be both predatory and gentle at the same time. “I’d never—ever—hurt you.”
“I know.” As she looked up at him, standing over her, strong and hard and unabashedly aroused, she knew that she loved this man irrevocably. And trusted him implicitly.
Roman read the truth in those lovely gold eyes and felt dual waves of relief and desire. “Lord, you are incredible.” He took hold of her hand, turned her wrist and pressed his lips against the pale blue vein. “Incredibly beautiful.”
Twining the scarlet silk scarf around her wrist, he looped it to the white iron headboard. “Incredibly intelligent.” He repeated his actions with the other wrist. “Incredibly sensual.”
His gaze swept over her slowly, intimately, the uncensored hunger gleaming in his midnight eyes heating her naked flesh, making her blood pulse. At the same time, she couldn’t take her eyes off him. His body was lean. Hard. Blatantly aroused. In spite of all the passion they’d shared during the past two weeks—or perhaps because of it—just looking at him quite literally took her breath away.
He sat down beside her, took her chin in his long fingers, holding her gaze. “I want this to be a night like no other.” The husky timbre of his deep voice made her tremble. When he traced a fiery circle around her lips with a finger, they parted softly, invitingly in response.
“A night free of inhibitions.” He moistened the fingertip with his tongue and slowly, deliberately drew a line down her throat and around first one sensitive breast, then the other. “A night I can take you in every way I’ve imagined and bring you only pleasure. A night you can live out your innermost fantasies without guilt or self-recriminations.”
“Oh, yes.” When his teeth closed around an electrified nipple, Desiree arched her back off the bed. “Yes, to everything.”
His hand clenched in her hair, tilting her head back, giving her another one of those long, breath-stealing looks. “Incredible,” he murmured once again.
The sunbursts in her liquid eyes gleamed gilt with passion. Never had Roman been so aroused. Never had he been so aware of his power as a man. A surge of savage lust shot through him, his hunger like a wild animal that had been caged up too long finally breaking free of its restraints.
And then his dark head swooped down and he’d fused his mouth to hers. The kiss was hot and ravenous and laced with an edgy, dangerous, thrilling violence that sent tongues of fire licking up between her thighs. She tried to thrust her hands through the jet silk of his hair, belatedly remembering that they were tied.
Never in her life had she been so helpless. Helpless to resist Roman. Helpless to resist her own rising needs. Never had she been more willing to go wherever this man took her. A savage ecstasy was clawing at her, more acute, more erotically intense than anything she’d ever fantasized.
The kiss grew increasingly carnal as his tongue probed deeply, tangling sensuously with hers, tasting the unraveling of her breath, making her moan. His teeth nipped at the sensitive flesh inside her lower lip and made her tremble—not from fear, Roman knew, but from excitement. Expectation.
Need for Desiree burned in him like wildfire. He’d wanted her like this from the beginning, hot and hungry and pleading for more. He wanted her as he wanted no other woman in his life—obsessively, possessively. Dangerously.
All too aware of the incredible gift of trust she’d given him, Roman forced himself to ignore the painful need knotting and twisting inside him. Drawing out the passion that was burning within him, gritting his teeth to keep from exploding, he taunted her mercilessly with his fought-for control as a crescent moon rose in the black winter sky. Her skin, in that cool white light, gleamed like pearls.
He made love to her endlessly, discovering erogenous places Desiree had never known she possessed. She writhed on the hot and tangled sheets, awash in voluptuous anticipation, burning from the inside out, desperate for him to end this torment. She could scarcely breathe from wanting him so badly. And still he continued to drive her closer and closer to the perilous razor’s edge of oblivion, goading her into a near frenzy of need.
Roman growled deep in his throat as his open mouth moved over every graceful curve, every sensual hollow. Her flesh was furnace hot, her limbs fluid. Roman had imagined her like this since that first morning she’d shown up at his door. Totally uninhibited. Totally aroused. Totally his.
“Do you have any idea how wonderful you are?” His tongue cut a wet hot swath across her quivering belly. When it dipped into her navel, she moaned and arched her hips off the mattress
in a mute plea for fulfillment. “How responsive?”
“Only with you.” Her liquid eyes pleaded; her thighs trembled. She was desperate to feel his heaviness against her. She wanted to touch him as he was touching her, make him as crazy as he was making her.
“You are so warm,” he murmured, ignoring her ragged request as if she hadn’t spoken. His swirling fingers gathered up the hot honey that was flowing between her legs. “So wet.” With his eyes locked on hers, he touched his fingertips to his lips. “So wonderful.”
With all the power of a conqueror exploring foreign territory, he touched her everywhere, watching her face as she melted like wax in a hot New Orleans summer. Her eyes turned dark and slumberous; her breath rushed between her lips as he continued to caress her with unapologetic carnality.
“Please,” she begged raggedly as his questing mouth sent a flick of passion’s whip across her moist, heated flesh. Although his caresses remained achingly slow, his wicked hands seemed to be everywhere at once. “I want you.”
“I know.” He touched his open mouth to her breast. Her heart was a hammer against his lips, sending savage streamers of flame through him, creating an answering surge in his own blood. “I can taste it.” His tongue glided down her torso, over her stomach and beyond.
He wanted to bury himself in her heat; he wanted to claim her, possess her, body, mind and soul. He wanted to burn away any memories of any man who had come before. He wanted to ravish her so thoroughly that she could never conceive of any man coming after.
His teeth bit at the vulnerable soft skin at the inside of her trembling thighs, leaving a mark of passion that branded her as belonging to him. Only to him. Forever.
She gasped as the hot tip of his tongue brushed against that ultrasensitive nub of tingling flesh that had been screaming for his touch. Once. Twice. A third time, creating a single shining point of pleasurable, painful delight.
Just when she didn’t think she could take any more, his seeking tongue plunged into her center. She was burning alive, her flesh flame, her blood a volcanic torrent raging through her veins.
She sobbed out his name in a hoarse, ragged voice as the flames engulfed her. Before she could catch her breath, he’d jerked the silk restraints free, allowing her to wrap her arms around him as he surged into her.
The liquid fire of her response engulfed him. Entering Desiree was, Roman thought, as the blood swam in his head, like coming home.
Hidden secrets exploded as he filled her. Claimed her. Drove her up again and again.
And finally, when he took her over that last shuddering peak, he followed.
Lids heavy, her body sated, Desiree lay in the protective circle of Roman’s arms and waited for her breathing to return to something resembling normal before she even tried to speak.
“I thought I knew,” she murmured, her lips against his slick chest. “I believed I could imagine how it would be.”
“But?” He pulled her closer and pressed his lips against her tumbled auburn hair.
She smiled up at him, her eyes bright. “I didn’t even come close.”
“You’ve no idea what a relief that is.”
She laughed at that as she was supposed to. “There’s only one problem.” She ran her hand down his torso, enjoying the contrast of her pale skin against his dark chest.
Roman sucked in a harsh breath when her fingers skimmed his stomach. “What’s that?”
His penis, nestled amidst the ebony curls, was smooth as teak, warm as velvet as it swelled to her caressing touch.
“You spent a very long time driving me crazy.” Breathing in the rich, musky scent of their lovemaking, she touched her ravaged lips to his glistening shaft, invoking a low ragged groan that sent a rush of feminine power surging through her. “It seems only fair that I should get equal time.”
“You’re right.” Roman rolled over onto his back and stretched out his arms in a position of surrender. “Have your way with me, sweetheart. I’m all yours.”
The wonderful thing was that he was.
So she did.
All night long.
Epilogue
DESIREE WAS FLOATING on air the following morning. Last night had been the most erotic, incredible night of her life. And although it had begun with her sensual surrender, by the time the sun rose, both she and Roman had surrendered ultimate power to the other. And received incomparable rewards in return.
Although she woke to find the bed beside her empty, Desiree didn’t worry. Not when she was feeling so wonderfully, thoroughly loved.
She heard him in the kitchen, smelled the rich aroma of freshly brewed coffee and seriously considered, once again, the benefits of spending the rest of her life this way.
“You look like the cat that swallowed the canary,” he said as he entered the bedroom, a cup of steaming café au lait in each hand. His lazy, unabashedly sexual gaze skimmed over her. “A sleek, gorgeous feline.”
She laughed and accepted the cup he held out to her. “There have been times when you’ve made me feel like Maggie the Cat,” she confessed. “Dancing around on a hot tin roof. But this morning I’m feeling like a plump, lazy tabby.”
“Hardly plump.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and ran his free hand across her shoulders and over her breasts.
“Not yet.” As irrational as it might sound, she knew with an instinctive maternal knowledge that they’d made a baby during the long, love-filled night. She frowned slightly. “Will it bother you? When I’m a fat pregnant lady?”
“A sexy, ripe pregnant lady,” he corrected with a look that warmed her all the way to her most feminine core. “All the more to love.” The smile faded from his mouth. His eyes. “I do, you know.” He ran his palm down her tangled hair. “So very, very much.”
“I know.” Her own smile faltered as she read the ominous message swirling in his strangely tortured gaze. “And I love you.” She caught his hand and held it tightly in hers. “Which is why I think you should tell me what’s wrong.”
He sighed and looked at the flower-sprigged wall, as if unable or unwilling to meet her eyes. “It’s the same thing that’s been wrong from the beginning. The same person.”
She shook her head. “He doesn’t have anything to do with us.” Even as she said the words, Desiree knew she was whistling in a graveyard. As if saying it could make it true.
“We can’t run away from it any longer, Desiree.” He shook his head and closed his eyes for one brief, painful moment. “Not when there’s a very good chance that I’ll be arrested today.”
“Not on Christmas!”
Despite the severity of their situation, Roman couldn’t help smiling. “I doubt a holiday will stand in the way of O’Malley doing his job.”
“You’re not the man he’s looking for.”
The absolute certainty in her tone gave Roman hope where only weeks ago there’d been none. “You sound so sure of that.”
“I am!” She put her cup on the bedside table and got up on her knees, wrapping her arms around his rigid shoulders. “You’re a warm and wonderful and loving man, Roman Falconer. You could never rape a woman.”
“You can still say that? After last night?”
“Dammit!” She was off the bed in a flash. “I told you, there’s no similarity between fantasy and reality.” She was pacing, her hands waving like birds, her body quivering with emotion. “You and I made love, Roman. What that sick, murderous pervert does has everything to do with hate.”
Looking at her standing there without a stitch of clothing on, radiating passion, love and righteous indignation, her hands on her slender hips, Roman thought yet again that she was the most spectacular creature he’d ever seen.
“How about my car being at the scene?”
“We’ve covered that. It was obviously stolen while you were inside the house, probably drunk.”
He wondered idly at the fact that she’d never questioned why, exactly, he had seen fit to stay as drunk as possible when they’d fir
st met. He reached into his pocket. “How about this?”
She stared at the police sketch. “Where did you get that?”
“I found it on the floor this morning. It obviously fell out of your robe pocket. I suppose you also have an explanation for why the alleged rapist looks like the face I see every morning in the mirror when I shave?”
“Coincidence.” She dragged her hair back from her forehead with trembling hands. “Everyone knows police sketches aren’t that accurate.”
“This one certainly is.”
Unfortunately, she couldn’t deny that. “They say everyone has a double.”
He shook his head, loving this sensual, loyal woman so much that it literally hurt. “One more question.”
“Dammit, Roman, it’s Christmas. I don’t—”
“One more.”
She exhaled a long, frustrated breath and plopped down beside him on the bed. “One more.”
“You want to tell me why I know what he does? Before he does it? And sometimes while he’s doing it?”
The fatal questions, spoken in that low, flat tone, hit her like a body blow to the gut. And the heart. Fortunately, her head remained unaffected.
“That’s impossible.”
“It should be. If I’m innocent,” he agreed. “But if that’s the case, then why the hell do I know things about the crimes that the police aren’t even revealing?”
“Such as?” She lifted her chin, refusing to believe such a preposterous claim.
“The scarlet ribbons, for one. Ribbons he uses to tie the girls up.”
She felt the color literally drain from her face, turning her skin to ice. “You could have guessed,” she insisted, her voice not quite as strong as it had been. “From reading my books.”
“That’s one possibility. But there’s more.”
She was afraid there would be.
“I saw Tabitha in Whooping Crane Pond.” He paused, his eyes and face more grim than she’d ever seen them. “Before you got that call from your producer reporting that she’d been found.”
“That’s impossible.”