Thirty Nights Page 6

  “All right.” His voice twined around her like an ebony velvet cord. “I’ll help you. This first time.”

  She pressed a hand against his chest. “Hunter. Don’t do this.”

  He ignored her faint protest. “I like the way you say my name. In that throaty tone, with just a little hitch in your voice.” He ran his fingertips along the cowl neckline of her sweater, creating a trail of sparks. Then pressed his thumb against the pulsing hollow at the base of her throat. “Are you afraid of me, Gillian?”

  When she didn’t—couldn’t—answer, he slipped his fingers beneath the soft wool.

  Having spent so many of her childhood years in a home devoid of affection, where even her mother’s touches had been saved for men other than her husband, men like Hunter St. John, Gillian had never thought of herself as a physical person. Until now.

  “You needn’t be afraid.” His deep voice was strangely hypnotic, like that of a dark angel leading her into dangerous temptation. “I told you, I promise not to do anything that you truly—deep down inside—don’t want me to do.”

  His fingers were creating havoc to her nerve endings, making her feel as if she were standing on the very edge of the cliff outside the wall of glass, about to fling her body into the endless ebony void.

  Without warning, he yanked the sweater over her head.

  “I never would have taken you for a white cotton girl, Gillian,” he murmured with a faint note of amusement as he eyed her utilitarian bra. “Cotton’s comfortable.”

  “It’s also not the least bit erotic.” Imprisoning both her wrists in his right hand, he released the front catch with a deft flick of the hook. “It reminds me of something a nun might wear to keep impure thoughts at bay. You won’t wear this again while you’re here.”

  “I would think I should be allowed to wear whatever I please,” she murmured even as her heart beat faster. Harder. “At least, during the days you promised would be my own.”

  “I lied.”

  Seeming entranced with the paleness of her skin, he reached out and traced a slender blue vein from the wall of her chest to her left nipple. Then continued the sensual titillation on the other breast while watching her face for her reaction. Which, though she struggled not to show him, Gillian suspected was bordering on intoxication.

  She couldn’t decide who she was angrier with— Hunter for creating this outrageous scenario, or herself for having foolishly believed she could handle it.

  Through the pounding of blood in her head, Gillian realized that she was standing on the edge of emotional quicksand. The trick, she realized as Hunter continued to batter away at her senses, was to escape before she sank in over her head.

  She jerked away. “Dammit, Hunter, if you’re going to insist I follow through with this ridiculous farce, could you please knock off the fake seduction routine and just get it over with?”

  “It’s no farce.”

  “Isn’t it? Do you always have to blackmail women to get them into your bed?”

  “No.” He seemed almost amused by her continued defiance. “You’re the first.”

  Unable to find anything remotely humorous about this situation, Gillian welcomed the anger stimulated by the sardonic quirk of his lips. It helped take her mind off the strange, unbidden burning, melting sensation caused by his wicked touch.

  “I don’t suppose you thought of trying some other more typical seduction tactic? Like sending flowers? Or inviting me to dinner?”

  “I considered them. Especially since too many women seem to feel freer if they can wrap what’s basically animal lust up into pretty, romanticized packages. But in your case, I chose to go with a more direct method.”

  Gillian suspected that pretending romanticized feelings toward her would have also deprived him of what he’d really wanted—the pleasure of watching her father squirm when he’d tossed his outrageous proposition in the older man’s face.

  “Tell me, Gillian, if I had sent you baskets of hot-house red roses and gilded boxes of chocolate truffles, and even perhaps, penned flowery notes comparing your beauty to a summer’s day, would you have gone to bed with me?”

  “Not on a bet.” All right. So perhaps it wasn’t the absolute truth. Gillian was rapidly discovering that despite his horrid behavior, she was as susceptible to this man as she’d been all those years ago. Perhaps even more so, now that she understood those unnamed feelings she’d experienced.

  A challenging silence stretched between them. The air in the bedroom became charged with sensuality.

  “You know,” Hunter said finally. “I believe I’ll change the rules to our little game.”

  “Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  He shook his head and clucked his tongue. “This unfortunate habit you have of responding with sarcasm to my attempts at conversation—conversation you said you wanted,” he reminded her, “is going to have to stop. Right now.”

  She tensed, momentarily afraid that he was going to renege on his promise not to strike her. But instead, he released her, went over to where Ben Adams had left her luggage, unzipped the smaller of the two bags, found the compartment where she’d packed her underwear and scooped it up. Gillian was shocked when he took the unadorned panties and bras and threw them in the fireplace.

  “You can’t do that!”

  “My game, my rules. I can do anything I want, remember?” he asked on a silky, threatening tone that both unnerved and aroused her.

  While she watched in stunned shock as flames scorched her panties and bras, he walked over to the dresser, opened a drawer and retrieved a pile of brightly hued silk and satin lingerie that reminded her of a treasure trove of purloined jewels.

  “I suppose those were confiscated from other members of your harem?” she asked dryly.

  “George was right,” he murmured. “Not only do you have a mind of your own, you’re obviously not afraid to speak it.”

  “If you want a silent lover you can bend to your every will, I’d suggest a blowup doll,” she suggested with saccharine sweetness.

  Hunter appeared unwounded by her insult. “I think I’d rather join an order of Trappist monks than resort to that. And as it happens, I bought all this for you.”

  “Oh.” Although she’d never indulged in fancy lingerie, Gillian found the sight of those lace confections as undeniably seductive as the nightgown. “I have difficulty picturing you shopping at Victoria’s Secret.”

  “You’d be surprised what you can buy on the Internet these days.”

  “Surely you’re not going to burn them, too?” He wouldn’t. Then she realized that she was no longer certain about anything concerning this man.

  There was another long pause, during which Hunter studied the colorful lingerie, seeming to honestly consider that idea.

  “No,” he decided finally. “I don’t think so. Perhaps we’ll find a use for them later.” His smile was vibrant with sexual insinuation. “Much, much later…

  “In the meantime, I’m beginning to come to the reluctant conclusion that you’re too sexually repressed, Gillian. Which, I’ll have to admit is a revelation, since your music suggests that you’re a woman of great passion.

  “And while I’d planned a great many erotic pleasures for your first night in my home, I believe we’ll have to slow the timetable a bit.”

  He dropped the bits of silk and satin onto the mattress, where they looked like confetti, then came to stand in front of her again. The long dark fingers of his right hand cupped her breast.

  Then, while his eyes held hers with the sheer strength of masculine will, he slowly lowered his head until his mouth was a mere breath away from hers.

  “Feel how your body warms to my touch, Gillian,” he murmured, his words feathering across her lips like a soft summer breeze. She could smell the cognac he’d mentioned earlier on his breath. He lifted her breast and kissed the pale crevice beneath it, causing her heart to leap beneath his lips.

  “I could drag you down to the floor and take you right now. And then, while you were still trembling from the strongest orgasm of your life, I could make you come again. And again, all night long. I could give you the best sex of your life, Gillian. And leave you begging for more.”

  His words, along with the raw hunger glittering in his eyes, conspired to make Gillian feel needy. And confused. Her memories of Hunter had always been wrapped in the misty gauze of an adoring adolescent’s fantasy. She never would have believed that such a crude description could make every nerve in her body thrum.

  She realized that her conflicted feelings were binding her to Hunter—and to this unsettling sexual scenario—as inexorably as a pair of velvet handcuffs might bind her to his bed.

  Gillian was trying to think of something, anything to say, when his head swooped down and his mouth captured hers in a rough, searing assault that took her breath away.

  Like his words, meant to shock and arouse her, there was no subtlety to the savage kiss. His lips ground against hers, his unshaven jaw felt like sandpaper against her skin, his teeth punished. He thrust his tongue between her teeth, plunging deeply.

  Both hand and hook tangled in her hair and dragged her head back, taking the kiss deeper, darker, devouring her.

  Then, when her head was swimming and her bones felt as if they were melting from the inside out, the devastating kiss ended as swiftly as it had begun.

  “You’ve had a long flight. A long day,” he said. “We’ll continue this tomorrow.”

  Gillian stared up at Hunter through the lingering fog of unwilling desire, trying to make sense of his words. But confused and shaken as she was, he could have been speaking a foreign language.

  “I don’t understand what you want from me.”

  “What do I want, lovely Gilly?”

/>   He ran the back of his hand down her cheek in a long sweep that started her trembling all over again. His gaze, which had turned remote, was no less compelling.

  “Everything.”

  With that ominous declaration, he scooped up the lingerie from the bed and left the room.

  The whips she’d feared earlier could not have hurt Gillian as much as his sudden detachment. What kind of man could turn from flame to ice in the blink of an eye? His game, she reminded herself bleakly.

  Shaken to the core, Gillian sank down on the mattress, put her hand to her head, closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. Then buried her face in her hands and tried not to weep.

  SHE WAS STILL SITTING there looking even more fragile and vulnerable when Hunter returned. He stood in the doorway and took in the sight of her, sitting on his wide empty bed, her lovely face covered by those long pianist’s fingers.

  Something that felt uncomfortably like guilt stirred and was immediately restrained.

  Gillian Cassidy was a grown woman, Hunter reminded himself. No one had forced her to come here to Castle Mountain. She’d come of her free will, understanding that for the next thirty nights she would be at his command, for him to use in whatever way he wanted, for his pleasure.

  But she’d be pleasured, too. Beyond her wildest imagination. It was obvious that despite the ugly underwear, she was as much a sexual adventuress as Toni. Why else, he asked himself, would she have agreed to his demands?

  The moment his mouth had captured hers, Hunter had felt the shock followed by a momentous fear rock through Gillian. Then, as she’d given herself over to sexual sensation of his tongue embracing hers, teasing it into a dance of compliance, he’d felt her surrender.

  That single kiss had confirmed what her music had suggested: beneath that innocent facade, hidden fires smoldered. Hunter suspected it would not take much to fan those flames into a conflagration.

  So why, he wondered, did she seem so damn distressed? So lost?

  He watched her rub at her temples with trembling fingers, as if to soothe the wildness he’d planted in her mind, and felt a strange, uncharacteristic urge to stroke her hair or even, perhaps, to offer some words of comfort.

  Hunter had wanted Gillian from the first moment he’d seen her video. That sharp tug of desire hadn’t particularly disturbed him; he’d wanted women before. Before that letter bomb had nearly killed him, he’d enjoyed an active and varied sex life. He’d certainly never felt any need to apologize for being male and human.

  But never had any woman taken such hold of his mind the way this woman had. He thought about her during the day, when he should be working; he dreamed about her during the night, when he should be sleeping. And he couldn’t even count the times he’d watched that damn Celtic concert tape.

  If all that wasn’t bad enough, there was the little fact that never in his life had he ever needed a woman like he needed Gillian at this moment.

  Which was why Hunter had decided it would be wise to step back—literally and figuratively—from this potentially volatile situation.

  Uneasy at the tug of unfamiliar emotion, he entered the room, pulled her hand away from her forehead, then pressed a glass into it with more pressure than necessary.

  “I brought you something to help you sleep.”

  Gillian slowly opened her eyes and frowned suspiciously at the small white tablet he was holding out to her.

  “I don’t take sleeping pills. Drugs always make me feel too groggy the next day.”

  “It’s not a drug. It’s herbal and completely safe. I’ve used it myself, on occasion in the past, to prevent jet lag.”

  “I never get jet lag.”

  “And you probably always sleep like a baby, too. But why don’t you take it, just the same?” The suggestion was swathed in silk, but no less an order.

  “I suppose if I don’t, you’ll just thrust it down my throat.” Dammit, her voice—frail, fractured and needy—strummed countless unnamed chords inside Hunter.

  “I told you, Gillian,” he replied with a patience he was currently a very long way from feeling. “You won’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  What he wanted was her surrender. Her absolute submission, given freely. Fortunately, in his years as a research scientist he had acquired patience. While it wasn’t his first choice, he could wait.

  “But you’ve had a long day, a grueling flight, you’re going to be sleeping in a strange bed and you can deny it all you want, but you’re every bit as stimulated by me as I am by you.”

  Giving into impulse, he ran his palm down the rippling red-gold waves tumbling over her bare shoulders.

  “We’re going to be a perfect match, Gillian. Together we’re going to do things you’ve never done, things you never could have dreamed you wanted done to you. I’m going to push you beyond what you’ve always believed to be your sexual limits, then have you begging for more. We’re going to free you, Gillian. Free you from the veil of repression you seem to have donned like a nun’s habit. Then I’ll bring you with me, naked, into the fire.”

  His hand slid beneath the silk of her hair; his fingers massaged the nape of her neck. “But you can put your concerns away, at least for tonight.”

  He stood up and looked down at her, aroused by the lingering sensuality smoldering in her eyes. Thunder rumbled through his cock even as his heart was oddly and uncomfortably touched by the apprehension he viewed in those gentle green depths.

  He wanted to touch her one more time, but because it was imperative that he maintain control over this situation—over her and himself—Hunter refused to give in to the almost overwhelming urge.

  “You’ll dream of me.”

  He flashed her a wicked, practiced grin, then turned and walked out of the bedroom again, away from temptation.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Gillian grumpily decided that Hunter must be some sort of evil erotic wizard. Because, just as he’d promised, she did, indeed, dream of him. Hot, vividly sensual dreams that left the lush Egyptian cotton sheets hopelessly tangled and had her waking with her hand between her legs, her body aching with unsatiated need.

  She hadn’t been lying when she’d told Hunter that she never got jet lag. Fortunately, she’d always been one of those people for whom sleep came easily. Whether on a plane, in the back of a taxi, or in a strange bed in a foreign hotel room thousands of miles from home, she could drop off in an instant, doze for ten minutes, or sleep for six hours, and awake feeling renewed and rested.

  This made touring, while admittedly rigorous, less of a nightmare for her than for other performers. She could easily be on a concert stage at midnight and have no trouble arriving at the airport early the next morning feeling fresh and ready to tackle another day.

  But during her first night in Castle Mountain not only had her sleep been restless, she didn’t awaken until nearly noon. Horribly groggy, she managed to drag herself into the bathroom adjoining the luxurious bedroom suite.

  Although she tried not to even look at the Jacuzzi, it was difficult to avoid it, holding center stage as it did. For a fleeting moment her mind conjured up a fantasy of lying naked in Hunter’s arms while warm jets of water bubbled around them.

  “Safe herbal sleep remedy, ha,” she muttered, turning on the shower with a vicious twist of the wrist.

  The tile-and-glass cubicle filled with steam as Gillian stood beneath the needles of hot water, scrubbing viciously at her skin. After her shower, she wrapped herself in the thick robe hanging nearby. The robe enveloped her like a warm black cocoon.

  She knew instantly that it was Hunter’s. He’d worn it recently; she ran her hand absently down the lapel as she breathed in his scent.

  Gillian had never considered herself a very sexual person, which was how she’d managed to reach the age of twenty-five a virgin. Having witnessed her mother’s constant affairs and escapades, she’d made the decision long ago to never take sex lightly.

  Her mother had lost a great deal—her home, her husband, her daughter—because of her sad, desperate need to be desired. Watching Irene Cassidy’s hedonistic, yet at the same time self-destructive behavior over the years, Gillian had come to the conclusion that sex equaled surrender. The simple truth was that she’d never met a man she’d been tempted to relinquish control to.