of her spoke clearly enough and loudly enough that she could understand. She wanted to touch the heat. She didn’t want to be alone. She didn’t want to be cold. Here where everything was so warm, why shouldn’t she be?
As though he had read her thoughts, he placed a hand on her waist, leaning in, his lips brushing the shell of her ear. “And what do you think of the party?”
“I’ve never been a part of anything like that. I mean, at university I saw parties like that, but I never took part in them.”
He moved his thumb up and down, smoothing it over the indent of her waist and leaving a trail of fire in its wake. “You never let yourself play, do you? Are you always so good?”
“The way I see it,” she said, her voice, her breathing so obviously labored, “we get a certain amount of mistakes allotted to us in the beginning. If we overplay our hand we might lose everything. I overplayed my hand. My mistake amounted to a whole lot and I’ve never seen the point in taking a risk since. I feel I was lucky not being disowned entirely after putting my father’s livelihood and reputation at risk the way that I did. You know, Nathan was married.” The reason he had never touched her, which had become clear later. While Nathan had seen no issue with luring her into an emotional affair, he clearly hadn’t seen it as being unfaithful so long as he didn’t reciprocate and so long as he didn’t touch her.
They had kissed but nothing more. Not for a lack of trying on her part. That last night together, before she’d found out the truth, she’d met him in her room, naked. And he’d...he’d covered her with a blanket. As though she were a child. Not a woman. As though there was nothing remotely arousing or sexual about her.
Sometimes, after she had discovered the truth about him, she’d lain awake at night imagining him going over the game plan with his wife. Imagining him gaining permission to kiss her and touch her over her shirt. To tell her that he loved her, as long as he never entered her body, as long as he never really meant what he said.
She imagined them laughing at how easy a conquest she would be. Imagined him telling his wife what a pale, gangly creature she’d been and how her naked body hadn’t even been an enticement.
And that she hated almost more than anything else. That she had been so easily tricked by her emotions, by her passions. And that those passions had been so easily discarded.
Though, in this moment what she hated more was that she had allowed Nathan to have them.
She’d never looked at it quite the way Dmitri had presented it to her before. Certainly Nathan’s interaction with her hadn’t changed him one bit. It had changed his circumstances, but she was sure it hadn’t changed him emotionally.
While she had contorted and rearranged everything she was because of him. In response to anger, in response to heartbreak and disgust, but nevertheless because of him.
If not for him, where would she be? The answer to that question had terrified her before, but now she was torn. If he hadn’t made her feel ashamed of her bare skin and everything beneath it, who would she be now?
There was something strange about this city that turned everything she thought and believed in on its head. There was something strange about this man who made her clothes feel too tight and made her heart feel too big for her chest.
Who could shrink her entire world down to the sensation of his thumb moving over the slick fabric of her top, his heat seeping through to her skin.
“You wish you were down there, don’t you, Victoria?” His breath was hot on her neck, sending a shiver down her spine.
“No, I don’t.” And when she spoke the words she realized how true they were. She didn’t want to be down there with them; she wanted to be right up here, so long as she was with him.
“What were you like before him?” The words were rough, sliding over her skin like a patch of velvet being rubbed the wrong way.
“I barely remember.”
“Try.” He tilted his head, and she felt the firm press of his mouth on the side of her neck. She stiffened, shock immobilizing her. Dimly, she thought that she should move away from him. That she should stop this madness before it progressed any further. But she didn’t. She stayed rooted to the spot, held captive by her curiosity, by the desire to find out what he might do next.
“I was—” her voice was unsteady “—normal, I suppose. I wanted the same thing every teenager wants. To experience love and desire, to be wanted. I thought I found it, so I didn’t examine it too closely. I was impetuous, and I led with my heart. And that I don’t wish I could have back.”
“What is it you wish you could have back?”
The word reverberated deep inside her, echoed in the empty chambers where it had once been. “Passion.”
Somehow, just by saying it she felt as though she’d opened the door. As though she had broken locks that had been firmly closed for years.
He shifted their position slightly, tightening his hold on her, sliding his hand around to rest firmly on her stomach as he moved them both into the shadows of the balcony, so that she could just barely see the revelers through the twisting, twining ivy on the wrought-iron railings.
“I do not think you lost any of it. I think perhaps you might simply be sleeping.”
“Do you think so?”
“I know how to wake you up.”
All of the air rushed from her lungs. “How?”
“The only way to wake an enchanted princesses is with a kiss.”
She should say no. She should tell him that he had taken the ruse too far, that she would never go back to being the girl she was, because she had learned far too much since then, and that girl was stupid. That he should understand because he knew that sometimes it was necessary to leave behind the old things. To let the old foolish self stay dead.
But she didn’t do any of those things. Instead, she stood motionless as he swept his hand around to cup her cheek, his fingertips tracing lightly along the line of her jaw as he gently angled her head to face to the side.
As he bent down slowly—achingly so—his mouth now a whisper from hers.
She had plenty of time to turn away, plenty of time to tell him to stop. But she didn’t.
Because for the first time in twelve years Victoria Calder was lost in passion, and she didn’t want to be found.
The image of Nathan as he turned away from what she offered was blotted out by her need for Dmitri.
Instead of embracing her fear, her hard lessons learned, she tilted her chin upward and closed the distance between them, their mouths meeting abruptly. It was like touching a match to an oil slick, an inferno igniting between them that she never could’ve anticipated.
She had not kissed a man since Nathan. The closest she had come was Stavros a few years back, but it had felt nothing like this. The prelude hadn’t held this much intensity, and she knew for a fact the kiss would never have been this explosive.
Dmitri groaned, deep and rough, the sound so wild it should’ve been unsettling. It wasn’t. If anything, it added fuel to the flame, urging her on.
She raised her arm, resting her hand on the back of his neck, curling her fingers around his skin and holding him fast, parting her lips and deepening the kiss, letting her tongue slide against his.
Desire shot through her like an arrow, hitting its target straight and true between her thighs, sending an ache reverberating through her body.
Need, want, passion. Her mind was blank of anything else. She wanted nothing more than to continue to exist in this moment, nothing more at all. In this moment there were no department stores, there was no sin to be atoned for. There was only new sin to find and explore.
And she wanted to explore it all with him.
His