by Anna Durand
"That won't be necessary." She picked up a menu, flipped it open, and froze. "Are these prices in American dollars or Indian rupees? I've never seen this many zeroes on a menu."
"Don't worry about the price. A billionaire is paying for our dinner."
"Right. Okay." She blew out a breath. "Oh, lobster sounds fabulous."
We both ordered the lobster and talked while we waited for our meal. I told Serena stories about my barmy cousins, and she told me about how she met Keely and some of the things they'd done together to entertain themselves in Carrefour, Utah. During dessert, she asked me about the MacTaggart clan's love for the Highland games.
"Not every MacTaggart enjoys sports," I said. "Ask Evan about shinty, and you'll get an earful."
"He had fun playing it last summer."
"Aye, but he refuses to admit he doesn't hate shinty anymore."
"Do you like it?"
"Yes." I swallowed my last bite of dessert and leaned back, aiming my most devilish smile at her. "I like any chance to batter someone. The Buchanans can attest to that."
"Come off it, Logan. You are not a bad man." She patted my cheek. "You are the strangest MacTaggart I've met, though."
"You must not have met Rory or Iain."
"Oh, I know them both. They're odd, but you're weirder."
I didn't know whether to be offended or honored she'd given me the title of oddest MacTaggart. "What about Evan? He's strange too."
"Sure, but you're the only one in your family who wants everybody to think you're a villain."
The tack of this conversation had shifted, and I didn't like it. We were veering dangerously close to the serious topics I'd wanted to put off until later. All through dinner, I'd listened to her talk about her friendship with Keely, and I'd been entranced. Her face lit up when she told me about the people she loved, and every time that happened, all I could think about was taking her upstairs and making love to her.
"Have you been to the Highland games?" I asked. "The MacTaggart version, that is."
"Not yet. I hear Rory's hosting them behind his castle again this year."
"Aye, Rory loves to show off for his wife. He says she gets very randy when she watches him toss cabers."
"Guess you ought to toss a few around for me."
"I don't need cabers to make you randy."
"That's true." She settled her hand on my thigh. "Let's go upstairs."
"Not yet." I got up and offered her my hand. "It's time for dancing."
"I thought you were joking when you said that."
"No, gràidh, I want to dance with you."
She looked mildly startled for a moment, but then switched her attention to my hand, regarding it with suspicion. "I don't know how."
"Neither do I." Bending over, I leveled our gazes. "Can you shuffle your feet?"
"Yeah, but—"
"Let's shuffle together." I straightened and offered her my hand again. "Please."
She settled her palm on mine.
I led her out onto the dance floor, where couples engaged in various versions of dancing, everything from regal ballroom style to foot-shuffling worse than mine. I held Serena close, one hand on her back, the other clasping hers. We moved across the floor with our gazes bound to each other while a small band played a romantic melody, but I paid no attention to the music. My focus stayed on her, on those beautiful gray eyes that studied me in a different way now, a softer way, and I found myself entranced by this woman, the only woman who'd ever made me want to romance her. And I did want to do that. As much as I'd enjoyed arguing with her, something had changed between us. I'd fought it for days, even trying to make her angry so I could avoid confronting whatever this was that she made me feel.
Last night, while I lay awake contemplating my bad behavior, I'd come to a realization. I wanted more with Serena. Forget rude, disgusting Logan. Tonight, all I wanted was to give her what she deserved.
Which was everything.
The song ended, and we wandered back to our table so I could sign the credit card slip, then we hurried to the elevator. Four people piled into the car with us. I silently cursed their presence, because I needed to kiss Serena this instant. I needed to have my hands on her sensual body and to taste her mouth, and to not give up that pleasure until the elevator stopped on our floor. I couldn't do any of that. The two men and two women who'd joined us in the car all knew each other and seemed to have started their partying already, based on their overly boisterous laughter and the way they kept stumbling into each other.
I settled for holding Serena's hand.
One of the men pointed at me and laughed a bit too vigorously. "Look at the guy in a skirt. Do you wear a bra too?"
I ignored the drunken eejit. Worse men had lobbed far worse insults at me.
The eejit staggered toward Serena, and his gaze swerved to her breasts. "Whoa, you look like a real girl—a real hot one. What are you doing with a guy in a skirt? If you want a real man, I'm available."
"No thank you," Serena said coolly. "Real men wear plaid skirts."
She turned to face the doors.
The eejit swung an arm up, intent on grabbing hers.
I seized his wrist, nailed him with my coldest stare, and spoke in a deceptively hushed tone. "Best think about that, laddie. I could separate your shoulder with one small movement. Is harassing my woman worth the agony?"
The laddie stared at me, his eyes bulging and his face going pale. "I-I was only fooling around. Sorry."
I released his wrist. "Don't try it again."
He staggered backward, shaking his head.
The elevator stopped. The second the door slid open, the eejit and his friends rushed out.
As the doors glided shut, Serena turned toward me. "Wow, you really scared the living daylights out of them. I've seen steely glares before, but yours is the best by far."
"It's easy to scare off a drunk eejit."
"He was an idiot, for sure." She ran her tongue across her lip in a sensuous glide. "But I got a tingle down my spine when you told that toad to buzz off."
"I didn't tell him to buzz off. I told him I could dislocate his shoulder."
"Yeah, I know." She moved closer and skated her hands up my chest. "Never knew threats of violence could make me so hot, but I want to shove my head under your skirt and do filthy things to you."
My cock twitched, roused by her offer, but I couldn't let her do it. I meant to seduce her the right way, not the way I'd done twice before. Take my time. Make love to her slowly.
She bent her knees, lowering her face closer and closer to my kilt.
I grasped her shoulders and urged her upward. "I want to kiss you, leannan."
Now I was calling her sweetheart in Gaelic. Maybe she was right, and I had gone mushy.
Her lips kinked into a naughty smile. "A kiss? That's what I was trying to give you."
"No, Serena." I pushed her back against the wall and molded my body to hers, caging her there. "On the mouth. That's how I mean to kiss you."
I caught her lower lip between my teeth and released it little by little.
She sucked in a breath.
And I kissed her.
Chapter Eighteen
Serena
Logan kissed me like he'd never kissed me before, with a tenderness and gentleness that stunned me, and yet somehow made it even more sensual. He savored my lips for the whole ride to our floor, never taking the kiss deeper, seeming satisfied to simply revel in the feel of my lips. I reveled too, in the way he swept his lips over mine, back and forth, and sneaked his tongue out to taste my skin. I sampled his flesh too, licking and nibbling until he groaned long and low.
When the elevator doors opened, we couldn't stop kissing.
He thrust a hand out to prevent the doors from closing, and without separating his mouth from mine, he wrapped an arm around me and guided us out of the car. We stumbled down the hallway toward our adjacent sui
tes. Our kissing grew more passionate as our tongues delved deep and twined around each other, our hands groped each other's bodies, and we both grunted and moaned from the sheer pleasure of devouring each other.
Logan pushed me up against a wall and pulled his head back.
Breathing hard from our kiss, I glanced around and gradually made sense of our surroundings. "This is my suite."
"Aye. It has a larger bed than mine. It's bigger overall."
"Why didn't Evan give you the bigger bed? You are more sizable than me."
"Evan and I agreed you should have the larger room." He stepped back a few inches, enough that he could rake his molten gaze over my whole body. "Where's your keycard?"
I shoved a hand inside my bodice, under my breast, and retrieved the keycard I'd taped there. I offered it to Logan. "Here you go."
He smirked as he took it and noticed the two strips of clear tape dangling from it. "That's an interesting place to keep your room key."
"No pockets in this dress, and I didn't want to carry a purse. This was a practical solution."
"It's still warm." He pressed the keycard to his cheek, then held it to his nose so he could sniff it. "And it smells like you."
"Open the damn door already."
He grinned, the expression so wickedly erotic it made my sex throb. "I love it when you're ravenous."
Before I could swear at him again, he unlocked the door and ushered me inside.
I'd left a lamp on, the one on the bedside table. It provided the only illumination, since I'd shut the drapes to cover the floor-to-ceiling windows. Logan ambled over to the table by the windows and switched on the lamp beside it. The bulbs of both lamps provided a warm glow that spilled out around us, a sensuous kind of light that seemed to caress my skin.
He held out his hand to me.
I took his hand, letting him usher me toward a chair by the windows.
"Sit," he said. "Please."
"Why? I want to undress you. Been waiting a long time to see you naked."
"The wait is over." He gestured for me to sit. "But I want to take it slow with you tonight, and feeling your hands on me will destroy my willpower."
Destroy his willpower? No man had ever claimed I affected him that powerfully.
Logan certainly shattered my willpower, for reasons I still couldn't understand. Maybe I didn't need to. He made me feel things I hadn't experienced in a long time, and some things I'd never experienced before. Maybe all I needed to know was how good he made me feel.
He sauntered to the bed, pulled something out of his inside jacket pocket, and dropped it onto the table. As he turned back toward me, I saw what he'd left behind.
Condoms.
Oh yes, a man like Logan would never forget protection.
Logan perched on the bed's edge, removing his big black boots and his socks. Rising, he moved past the foot of the bed to take up a position directly in front of me but a couple yards away. He was granting me a perfect view of him from head to toe, with the lamplight spilling over him. The canny Scot had chosen the perfect spot to stand in, so I would have the best view of his nakedness. He knew how much I wanted to see him, and he always gave me what I wanted.
In terms of sex.
And at dinner tonight. He'd been the perfect date, sexy and charming, considerate and exclusively focused on me.
Logan shrugged out of his jacket, folded it over, and tossed it with a seemingly careless movement. The jacket landed on the chair across the table from mine, draped over it like he'd planned for it to end up like that.
I had no doubts he had planned it. Logan MacTaggart had skills, and I'd only scratched the surface of his many hidden talents.
He tugged his shirt hem out from under his kilt and the belt that held it in place, then removed his tie. He tossed it away as expertly as he had gotten rid of his jacket. One by one, he unhooked the buttons of his shirt, revealing his muscled chest a little at a time, teasing me with increasing glimpses of his toned flesh. Once he'd undone the last button, he slid the shirt off his shoulders and let it fall to the floor.
My God, the man had a gorgeous chest. His years of working outdoors, as a bricklayer, had sculpted his body into a masterpiece of Classical beauty. With my gaze, I traced the lines of his pectorals, then followed a path along the center of his well-defined abs straight down to his kilt. His skin was smooth, with only the barest hint of fine, dark hairs that tapered down to the region below his kilt, where he hid the rest of his manly treasures.
Oh yes, I knew without any doubt he kept a priceless treasure down there. I'd glimpsed it, felt it inside me, and come with my body clenched around it.
Logan unhooked his belt, slowly, deliberately, his gaze on me the whole time.
I glanced up at him twice, but I couldn't keep my attention away from what he was doing. His strong fingers eased the leather out of the buckle millimeter by millimeter, and I knew he was teasing me in a different way now. No humor, just pure sensual determination.
He ditched the belt, and it thumped down on the table. He held his kilt in place with one hand, the plaid clenched in his fist.
My pulse raced. I couldn't catch my breath, overcome by a ridiculous anticipation. I'd seen men naked before. Lots of men. Well, maybe not lots, but more than a few. The realization I was about to see Logan naked for the first time shouldn't have set my tummy to fluttering and my sex to tingling.
He dropped the kilt.
My jaw crashed to the floor. It was a moronic response, to be slack-jawed and speechless, barely able to breathe, because I'd gotten my first good look at his dick. I couldn't help it. If I'd thought his upper body was gorgeous, it had nothing on his nether regions. Men's penises had always seemed to me like rather silly looking appendages. I mean, they just hung there most of the time, like limp bananas. Not that I'd ever told a man my opinion of their most treasured body part. Not even Rob knew. Some things a woman had to keep to herself.
But Logan... Holy shit, the man had a beautiful cock. Long, sleek, and thick, it hung between his legs in a manner I could only describe as majestic. It sounded stupid, and there was no way on earth I'd ever tell Logan that, but it really did seem like the best description. He also had the most muscular thighs I'd ever seen, with defined sinews I could imagine flexing with every thrust.
I licked my lips, my mouth watering.
His majestic cock twitched.
Logan strode up to me and knelt at my feet. With warm, sure hands, he slipped my high heels off my feet, letting his fingers trail down my inner ankles and along the sensitive skin on my soles. I shivered when he did that—twice, once for each foot. Two little shivers of heat and hunger. He did this to me so easily, with such skill and patience and single-minded focus.
He stood, gesturing for me to do the same. "Your turn."
Stripping for Logan? The thought of it made me instantly wet, instantly desperate to have him inside me. But he'd undressed for me, so I owed him a striptease of my own.
And God, I wanted to undress for him.
I moved to the spot where Logan had stood a moment ago.
He lowered his naked body onto the chair I'd vacated. A slow and lascivious smile spread across his lips. "The seat is still warm. From you."
My nipples had already gone hard, but the dirty way he spoke those words made the tips ache and harden even more.
I reached behind my neck for the zipper on my dress, but I couldn't quite get it. My fingers were trembling. Logan's striptease had gotten me so excited I couldn't grasp the tiny zipper. Great. I'd managed to get into the dress, but now I couldn't get out of the damn thing.
"Need a hand?" Logan asked.
"Um, yeah."
He crooked a finger.
I heeded his come-hither gesture and approached his chair, turning around to give him my back.
He pulled the zipper down inch by inch, letting his fingertips brush my skin, leaving a trail of electric pleasure in their
wake. Cool air kissed my back, from my shoulders all the way down to my waist, and I knew the dress hung wide open now. I hadn't worn a bra, since it would've shown through the sheer back of my dress.
I was about to move away when his lips touched my skin. Warm, sensual lips. He kissed his way up my spine, over my shoulder, and pressed an open-mouth kiss to my throat. His tongue flicked over my flesh, damp and velvety, and my breathing grew heavier. Desire settled low in my belly, making my clitoris pulsate.
Logan pulled away. "Finish."
His voice had gone rough.
I walked back to the stripping spot and pivoted toward him.
Eyes half closed, he drank me in while stroking himself with one hand, the movements measured and unhurried.
I eased the dress off my shoulders, letting it slide down until I'd exposed all of my breasts except for the nipples. Then I waited.
Logan hauled in a deep, ragged breath and released it in one big gust. "You're a vixen, aren't you? Teasing me with your body."
"You like it." I let the dress slip down to my waist, my arms still caught in the sleeves. "You teased me, so I'm teasing you."
He stopped stroking himself, though he kept his hand around his erection. "I don't have your self-control. I might come before you get your dress off."
"Self-control? I have none of that where you're concerned."
I wriggled my arms free of the sleeves and let the dress tumble to the floor to pool around my feet, leaving me in only a pair of sheer black-lace panties. I hooked my thumbs inside the panties, about to shove them down.
Logan held up a hand. "Let me do that."
He unfurled that big, beautiful body and strode toward me.
Standing face to face, inches apart, we gazed into each other's eyes for several seconds in silence, the sizzle between us so intense I expected to see waves of heat curling up around us. The green flecks in his eyes seemed darker somehow, probably thanks to the subdued lighting. The golden brown of his irises lured me in like he'd cast a spell over me to make me pliable to his will and his alone. What was it about this man? How did he mesmerize me without speaking a word or even touching me? I lost control with him, every time we were alone. That used to scare me.