Free Wanting What She Can't Have by Yvonne Lindsay

bed and walked quickly toward the door.
    “Raoul?” she asked, as she turned the knob and opened the door wide.
    His eyes flew across her, taking in her silk nightgown—one of her few indulgences from her time in Italy last year—and her bare feet in one sweep.
    “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have disturbed you.”
    He went to walk away but she put out a hand to stop him.
    “It’s okay. Did you need me for something?”
    He looked at her in the dark, and through the sheen of moonlight that filtered into her room she saw the glitter of his eyes. His face was pale, his whiskers a dark shadow on his cheeks and jaw. He’d never before looked so dangerous, or so appealing to her. She took an involuntary step back and saw the look of chagrin that crossed his face.
    “I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.”
    “You’re hurting. I—” She stopped herself before she could repeat her earlier words of understanding.
    He’d been right. She couldn’t possibly know or understand what he’d been through. Bree had been her friend for years, but the last two years of Bree’s life she’d barely even spoken to her, battling with envy, then guilt, after Bree and Raoul had gotten together. Now, even though she desperately missed her friend, those bitter emotions were all still there. The envy that, even in death, her friend could command such unceasing love—and the guilt that she continued to not only want that for herself, but that she wanted it from the very same man.
    She drew in a breath. “There’s no need to apologize, Raoul. I should have been more sensitive to your needs.”
    “My needs? I don’t even know what they are anymore. Sometimes I feel as if I don’t know anything anymore.”
    She made a sound of sympathy and reached up to cup his face with one hand. “You’ve been through hell. You’re still there. It’s okay. I’ll back off with the social stuff. You obviously need more time.”
    He lifted a hand to press against hers and she felt the heat of his palm on one side, the rasp of his unshaven jaw on the other. The mingled sensations sent a tingle of longing up her arm and she was appalled that even as the man was visibly struggling with a devastating loss, she couldn’t hold her attraction back. That her body, having a recalcitrant mind of its own, was right now warming to his very presence. Her nipples were beading against the sheer fabric of her nightgown and she felt a long slow pull of hunger dragging from her core.
    “Time is something I have too much of. Time to think. I don’t want to think anymore, Alexis. For once, I just want to feel.”
    “Feel...?”
    “Yes, feel. Something, anything other than the pain inside. I want the emptiness to go away.”
    He turned his head so that his lips were now pressing against her palm. If he’d seared her skin with a branding iron it couldn’t have had a more overwhelming effect. She gasped at the jolt of electricity that shuddered through her hand and down her arm. When he bent his head to hers and his hot dry lips captured her own she felt her knees buckle beneath her. Momentarily she gave an inward groan at how clichéd her reaction was, but it was only seconds before awareness of clichés, or anything else other than this man and how he made her feel, fled from her consciousness.
    All there was right now was scalding heat, flames of need licking up through her body as she clung to Raoul, as she anchored herself to his strength and poured all her years of forbidden longing into returning his kiss. When he lifted his mouth from hers she just stood there, dazed by the power of her feelings for him and by the emotion he aroused in her.
    “Come with me, to my room,” he rasped. “I can’t do this in here.”
    She nodded, letting him draw her down the hallway and into his room. The bedroom door snicked closed behind them and he led her to his bed.
    She tumbled into the sheets, Raoul following close behind. As the weight of his body settled