memory of that time was swept away by the breeze off the water and the woman’s voice beside him.
“If you didn’t follow me or come to meet someone, why are you here?”
“Curiosity.” It wasn’t a complete lie. He was definitely intrigued by her. “You?”
“To think.”
“About?”
“The nature of happiness. Whether it’s a goal worth pursuing when there are no guarantees I’ll find it. That it would come at the expense of others if I did.”
“Nothing too heavy, then,” he drawled. Her hand was close to his on the wall, pale and ringless. “In my experience, happiness is a fleeting thing. A moment. Not a state of being.”
“And if a moment is all you have?”
His scalp prickled beneath his hat. He turned his head and tucked his chin, trying to see through the dark and the holes in his mask to read her expression, but it was impossible.
“Regret is also a moment. A choice not to seize happiness when it presents itself.”
“I would regret it if I didn’t take a chance,” she agreed with a nod of contemplation.
“What kind of chance?”
She let a couple of seconds tick by with crushing silence, then said in a thicker voice, “An overture. Letting my interest in someone be known.” Her hand had been curled into a tense fist, but it unfurled, her pinkie finger splaying toward him.
His stomach knotted. “Are you married?”
“No.” Through the rush of relief in his ears, he heard her add, “But obligations to do so loom. And I don’t want to risk making a fool of myself when I don’t know if he’s even—”
“He is,” he cut in. His chest felt tight and his throat could barely form words. “He’s interested.”
PIA’S HEART WAS pounding so hard, she ought to have hammered down the walls around her.
“Do you know who I am?” she asked faintly.
“Should I?”
“No.” If he did, he would be treating her differently. With kid gloves, because of her family’s influence. There would be no intimate questions about whether she was meeting someone or encouragement to act impulsively.
It was enormously refreshing not to carry the weight of history and expectation, which had been the nature of her dilemma when she’d come up here. That ever so brief moment with him in the marquee had sent her into a spiral of doubt about duty to family versus selfish pursuits.
“Are you married?” she asked.
“I’m not involved with anyone. But a moment is all I have, too.” His velvety timbre was layered with regret.
She kept trying to place his voice, certain she would remember if she’d heard him before.
“I don’t even know what I want except not to let this moment pass without...”
“Seizing it?” he suggested.
“Stealing it,” she said wryly, finding the idea deeply seductive. It was the best of both worlds. She could briefly shed mousy, dutiful Pia Montero without giving her up for good. It was safe.
“Strangers in the night.” He held out a hand as if inviting her to dance.
Her hand went into his even though the music was a distant drone without a discernible tempo.
He was too compelling to resist, though. It wasn’t the outfit, either. She understood that some animals were innately dominant. He was one of them and he ought to send her scurrying, but she was too fascinated. She was utterly riveted by him and her reaction to his air of supremacy.
She distantly noted that she would have to tell her mother to find her a good-natured beta male so she wouldn’t be so completely overwhelmed by the simple act of being held in a man’s arms.
This was biology, she told herself through the fog of her deepening attraction. She was reacting to a chemistry that didn’t come from a mix of beakers, but from the scent of pheromones off skin. Receptive male meets receptive female. The pseudoerotic nature of their disguised identities and their clandestine meeting on an unlit rooftop exaggerated the excitement.
But even as her head tried to explain it and dismiss it, her body grew pliant and her feet shifted closer into his sphere. She wasn’t acting like herself, but she would never have an encounter like this again, when she could be someone else, free of commitment and the constraints of being Pia Montero. When her physical appearance and other shackles of identity were so absent she was nothing but the energy of pure, universal womanhood.
And he was all man.
“I want to kiss you,” he said in a voice that rumbled deep in his chest.
Her pulse skipped. It was only a kiss. She wanted to feel his mouth, to experience him. “I want that, too.”
“Come here.”
It was magnetic attraction rather than his arms that pulled her as she followed him into the shadow of the chimney. She couldn’t discern his features at all as he slipped his mask up, knocking his hat away.
His arms encircled her and his mouth brushed against her cheek, seeking and finding hers.
An electric current jolted through her at first contact, leaving her tense and waiting when he drew back slightly, his breath catching the way hers had.
She wasn’t great at kissing. It was yet another of those human interactions that had eluded her, but as his mouth returned, she discovered she liked it. His lips settled firmly across hers, flooding her with incredible heat, smooth and unhurried. As if they had all the time in the world for stolen kisses.
Her hand found his stubbled cheek and she enjoyed the abrasion against her palm as much as the lazy play of his mouth against hers. He teased her like that a few times, deepening the kiss with incremental degrees until she was parting her lips to catch his, wanting more. Her tongue darted out on instinct, practically begging for more.
With a growl in his throat, he settled into a hot kiss of intense passion, something she recognized with a fresh jolt of surprise and excitement. Then she lost the ability to consider what was happening to her as his strong arms pulled her into a world of pure sensual pleasure. The strength and safety of his embrace was all that held her together as she shuddered under an onslaught of pleasure so intense a helpless noise throbbed in her throat.
“Stop?” he whispered against her lips.
“Never. This is...” Overwhelming. Glorious. Essential.
She touched the back of his head, brought him back into the kiss and tried to give him the same sort of pleasure she was receiving. She offered all of herself, completely open to whatever he needed. She had never experienced anything so extraordinary.
He made another noise, this one more unfettered, as though he was slipping loose of whatever sort of control he held himself under—which perversely thrilled her. His hands stroked firmly through the layers of her velvet jacket and full skirt, molding her form, lighting a fire under her skin, sending a heavy ache into her loins.
“I’ve never felt like this,” she told him in a rasp of need, burrowing her hands beneath his cloak, into the heat beneath his vest. She had never been so forward, seeking so compulsively to touch a man, to take in his textures and musculature.
He swore. “Me, either.” His hand cupped the back of her neck and his breath pooled hotly against her throat. “But this can’t happen.” He scraped his teeth against her