Free What Price Love? by Stephanie Laurens Page A

and he constantly won, seizing as his reward the right to caress, explicit and knowing, until shudders of plea sure racked her spine.
    She was breathing all but entirely through him, helpless in his arms, unable to retreat. To call a halt, to step back from the engagement she’d started, to break away from what it had become.
    There was heat and fire in him; with him wrapped about her she couldn’t mistake it. Couldn’t miss the rigid evidence of his desire so flagrantly impressed against her belly. Yet there was a coolness behind all he did—that aloof control that despite her best efforts, her fond hopes, she hadn’t rattled or rocked in the least.
    Even while he engaged with her, even while he set her wits spinning, her senses whirling, he was watching her. Steering her.
    He wasn’t lost in this unfamiliar world. He wasn’t out of control—he was dictating.
    This, she suddenly realized, was a lesson—a warning.
    As if he sensed her realization, his hands, until then splayed firmly across her back, shifted. One rose slightly, holding her pressed to him while his other hand slid slowly down, over her hips, then lower.
    Even through the velvet of her habit, she felt the sensual assessment in his touch, the blatant possession.
    Far from reacting with contemptuous fury, her traitorous body and even more traitorous senses all but swooned. Heat raced over her skin, prickled beneath his palm as he fondled, then more explicitly caressed.
    His head angled over hers, his lips pressing hers farther apart; the ruthless yet languid thrust of his tongue became even more openly intimate, more devastatingly erotic.
    She couldn’t stand against him—couldn’t stand against herself, the self he connected with, that he could command. That he’d called forth and turned against her.
    Her defenses crumbled; all resistance—in her mind, in her bones and sinews—simply faded away. On a shattered sigh, half-tortured moan, she surrendered.
    Dillon knew it; he had to wage a war with himself not to react. Not to brace her against the tree, lift her skirts, and sheathe himself in her wanton heat.
    He closed his eyes tight, sank into her mouth, and fought to leash his demons, his almost overpowering need to have her, here and now. Fought to convince himself that what he’d already taken, what he’d already enjoyed, was enough. For now.
    He’d won, triumphed, but he hadn’t expected the battle to rage so far. Recognizing her tack, he’d responded in the only way that, in the heat of the moment, he’d deemed possible—in kind. But he hadn’t expected her to meet him and match him on field after field, hadn’t expected her to defend so recklessly, to hold against him until they’d come to this—this critical point in passion’s dance; he’d expected her to yield long since. He hadn’t expected to have to press her so hard, to have to wield his own sensual weapons so strongly, not to this extent.
    To the extent where he was inwardly shaking, racked with volcanic yet unslaked desire, raked by passion’s claws.
    A self he didn’t recognize, one driven by hot desire, reminded him she’d started this. He’d called her bet—shouldn’t she pay his price?
    With her locked against him, her slender body and lush mouth fully yielded, all his, the temptation to ravish her—to deal with what she’d started in the most appropriate way—whispered darkly throughhis mind.
    Yet now she’d surrendered and was no longer fighting him, there was a subtle innocence in her responses; no longer screened by her determination to counter him, she—the woman within—seemed so very vulnerable.
    He might wish—that harder, darker side of him might want—but he didn’t have it in him to harm her.
    Drawing back from the kiss required effort; they’d traveled too far along passion’s road to simply stop and