Free Iris Johansen by The Ladyand the Unicorn Page B

down at her with an intensity that caused her to tremble slightly in his grasp. “I don’t give a damn about Waterman one way or the other. If it would make you happier, I’ll put the skids under him without a qualm. Shall I do it?”
    She shook her head dazedly. “No, of course not,” she said huskily. “That would make me as much of a destroyer as they are.” She bit her lower lip in perplexity. “But why would you do that for me?”
    “How the hell should I know?” he muttered in exasperation, giving her shoulders a little shake. “I think I’ve gone a little crazy since the moment I saw you last night. Why should I care that you’re so soft that you bleed inside at the sight of a blasted fur coat? Why should I feel your pain as if it were myown? It doesn’t make any sense, damn it. I don’t want to feel like this toward
anyone
, much less some little starry-eyed idealist who has no more defenses than a day-old kitten.”
    Her eyes were wide and startled looking at his hard stormy face, and she instinctively made a motion to move away from him. It was a move that was frustrated immediately by the possessive tightening of his hands on her shoulders. “No, stay where you are,” he said thickly. “I won’t hurt you, little doe. I don’t think I’ve ever known tenderness for a woman before. It feels strange as hell. Come here, Janna.”
    He drew her carefully into his arms, and she flowed wearily into them with a strange sense of inevitability. His hands were gently massaging her back in an almost hypnotically soothing motion, all of his former awkwardness gone. “You look so fragile,” he said, “yet I can feel the warmth and strength of you under my hands.” Those hands were exploring the lithe tendons in the small of her back with the curiosity a child might show, yet they generated a slowbuilding heat that caused her to melt closer to him with a little indrawn breath.
    He flinched as if the touch of her had burned him, and she could feel his muscles tense and harden against her yielding softness. “Mine,” he muttered softly, his arms tightening around her. “Why do you feel as if you belong to me? I thought I just wanted to comfort you, but all I had to do was brush against you and you’ve got me ready to tear your clothes off and lose myself in that smooth, supple body.” His hands traveled slowly from the small of her back to the soft yellow jersey that covered one shoulder, and bared it with a deliberation that caused Janna to rouse momentarily from her state of languid apathy and try to wriggle away from him.
    “No,” she whispered frantically, her hands pushing lightly against his chest. “I don’t belong to you. I don’t belong to anyone. Let me go.”
    “Shhhh,” he said tenderly as his lips brushed gently against the soft, vulnerable skin beneath her collarbone. She could feel the flesh tauten and burn beneath the teasing touch of his tongue. “Can’t you see that I can’t let you go? I don’t like what’s happened, but it’s too late to worry about that now for either of us. I think it was too late the first time I saw you walking across the courtyard.”
    “You weren’t even sure that I appealed to you last night,” she protested faintly, while his lips moved toward the hollow of her throat, lingering on the pulse that was beating so erratically.
    “You appealed to me all right,” he growled softly, his lips traveling up the graceful cord of her neck to her ear and nibbling gently at her earlobe. “I watched you sitting there before me on the ottoman with those big brown eyes gazing at me like an earnest child, and all I could think of was how much I’d like to see you lying naked in my bed holding out your arms to me and pleading with me to love you. I’d never wanted anyone so much before in my life.”
    Janna’s breath caught in her throat, and she was beginning to feel an odd aching in her loins. Every word muttered in that sandpaper-velvet voice was