This night, it meant nothing. It was not forever. It was for now.
So she should not care if he had other women here. In this magnificent, extravagant, ridiculous room.
“I have not,” he said, and the pleasure that came with the words – with the knowledge that he told the truth – was acute.
He removed his shirt then, pulling it over his head, revealing a long, sinewed torso, all curves and crevices. Her mouth went dry. No man outside of classical sculpture should look this way. No man outside of classical sculpture did look this way.
Poseidon flashed again, and she resisted the silly thought.
But she did not stop looking.
Until he reached for the falls of his trousers, his fingers working the buttons there, and she could not look any longer. Her gaze found his face, his gaze all knowing, as though he was in her head. As though he knew she had compared him to Poseidon in her thoughts.
He was an insufferable man.
“You are overdressed.”
She willed the embarrassment away. She’d agreed to this moment, had she not? To this night? And she was Anna, was she not? Experienced in all things. In every way a woman should be.
It did not matter that the last was a slight fabrication.
Fine. A significant fabrication.
She had the dress to bear it out. And it was the clothes that made the man, was it not? In Duncan West’s case, it seemed the clothes did him a disservice, but that was not the point.
She took a deep breath. Shored up her courage.
And dropped the dress, baring everything to him.
Later, when she was not so embarrassed, she would laugh at the memory of his response – shocked to the core that she’d been able to undress without help and looking as though he’d received a very firm, very serious blow to the head.
But laughter was very far from her mind at the moment. Her mind was too occupied with embarrassment. And nervousness. And awareness of all the oddly shaped, strangely stretched bits that she usually kept under pretty, silk wraps. And the keen, unsettling combination of desire and terror.
So she did what any self-respecting nude woman would do in the same situation. She turned and dove into the dark pool.
She surfaced a handful of yards away from the edge, marveling at the temperature of the water, like a cool summer bath. She turned to face the spot where she’d entered, to find him there, watching her, hands at his hips.
Naked.
She tried not to look. She really did.
But it was rather difficult to miss.
She swam backward, grateful for the dim light. For the fact that he couldn’t be certain that she was staring at him, long and hard and utterly unsettling.
“Is it comfortable?”
She swallowed. Brazened through even as she continued to put distance between them. “Quite.”
“If you want to swim,” he said, “you should do it now.”
It was a strange thing to say, as it was a swimming pool, and she was already swimming. “Why?”
“Because once I get to you, swimming will be the last thing on your mind.”
The words shot through her like lightning, enhanced by the feel of the water all over her body, on places that should not be bared to this glorious place. She waited for a moment, watching him, taking in the beauty of him, all muscle and bone. Perfection, wrought here, in this water.
Where he would have her.
The thought made her bold, and she stopped moving backward. “I find I’ve lost my taste for swimming.”
He was beneath the water before she finished the sentence, and her heart pounded as she waited for him to surface, the silence that fell after he dove making her fairly tremble with anticipation. She watched the ink black surface of the water, wondering where he would emerge.
And then she felt him, his fingers brushing against her stomach, followed by his palms, sliding to her sides. She gasped at the touch as he rose up, inches from her, Poseidon rising from the sea.
In her surprise, she set her hands to his shoulders, and he took the opportunity to pull her tight against him, his arms like steel around her waist, his legs tangling with hers. She felt him hot and hard against her stomach. “I am very grateful,” he said at her ear, the words more breath than sound, sending a thrill of anticipation through her, “to whoever taught you to swim.”
She did not have to think of an appropriate answer to the words, because he was already kissing her, lifting her effortlessly in the water, his hands spreading down to cup her rear, to pull her close, to match them in that dark, secret place where they were so evenly matched.
He groaned at the sensation, and she sighed her reply as he moved her to the edge of the pool. It was coming, she thought. She wanted it, quite desperately, and he was going to give it to her. It had been years since she’d been this close to another person, to a man. A lifetime.
At the edge of the pool, he spread her arms wide, laying her open palms against the beautiful mosaic tile, holding her up in the water. His face was cast in the orange light of the fires behind her, fires that seemed to burn hot as the sun as he slid his hands down the length of her arms, entangling his fingers with hers, kissing down the side of her neck and across the bare skin of her shoulders and chest
“You didn’t give me a chance to look,” he whispered there, just above the place where the water lapped against her, teasing the tips of her breasts, hard and aching for him. “You shocked the hell out of me and ran away.”
“This does not feel like running,” she said as he released one of her hands and cupped a bare breast, lifting it above the waterline, running a thumb over the pebbled tip.
“No,” he said, “but here we are again, in the darkness. And once again, I can’t see you. I can’t see these.”