Free Earth Bound by Christine Feehan Page B

perversely, when she didn’t look at him, he wanted nothing else.
    â€œWoman,” he said, exasperated with himself. “You’re enough to drive a man to drink.”
    She blinked and looked up at his face, into his eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m so shocked that you survived. Get on the bed and just relax. It will take a few minutes.”
    He shook his head. If someone had told him he’d be lying naked on a bed for a woman to “examine” his old injuries, he would have told them they were insane. He found himself obediently following her instructions, pulling up the sheet and tossing the towel aside, taking time to slide the gun under the other pillow.
    He watched her moving around the room, lighting candles and incense, and found her soothing. There was a bowl of herbs on the nightstand. He had a sense of the surreal, a dreamworld that didn’t exist, one where his woman enjoyed caring for him.
    Lexi returned to the bed, a look of concentration on her face. Her hand brushed back the hair on his forehead, the lightest of gestures, barely there, but it could have been a burning brand pressing her straight through skin and muscle to bone. She was taking him over, and he was just lying there, allowing her to do it.
    He forced himself not to react, staying very still whileshe climbed up on the bed, her gaze on his chest. He was a mass of scars and he’d never really thought about it before. Front and back, there was hardly a place that had normal skin. She knelt close to his body, bending over him.
    The first touch of her hands nearly had him coming off the bed in alarm. Her eyes were closed, but her hands lay against his skin lightly, palms down. Every muscle in his body tightened. Every cell responded to her touch. The feel of her skin against his skin took his breath away. He’d felt a woman’s hand on his body many times, strokes and caresses meant to inflame him, to arouse him, yet not a single one had ever affected him the way her touch did.
    She wasn’t trying to be sensual. Her lashes were long and dark against her fair skin. Her face was a mask of concentration, not sensuality, yet his body reacted naturally to her touch, coming alive under the pads of her fingers and the stroke of her palms. His heart beat too fast. His breath came in ragged, labored gasps. If she looked at him, she’d see his features carved with harsh sensuality, when she felt none of that terrible arousal threatening to consume him.
    He tried to breathe away the sensation. It was absurd how much pleasure her touch generated when she wasn’t trying to arouse him. It was illogical and irrational how much he wanted her when such things were completely foreign to his nature. He was always logical, unemotional and detached. She turned his well-ordered world upside down.
    The energy Lexi generated was so intense heat flashed through his entire body as her palms and fingers slipped over his chest. She stopped in places and the most adorable little frown would appear, then smooth out when she found whatever she was looking for and she would continue on.
    Her hands moved over the heavy muscles of his chest, covering each of the three stab wounds there with the ridges of scars and then began to move lower. Gavriil gritted his teeth. This was worse than the training when he’d been a boy and they’d sent women to arouse him, doing all sorts of things to his body. He’d been beaten if he reacted—or didn’t react—depending on what he was toldto do. The lesson had been all about control and discipline, and he had that—or did, until Lexi.
    There was no controlling his body’s reaction when her hands slid lower over the defined muscles of his abdomen and the four stab wounds surrounded by scar tissue. If her eyes hadn’t been closed and her concentration hadn’t been so complete, she would have run screaming from the room.
    His cock raged at him,