Scanning every golden inch of his exposed skin, she suddenly noticed something was missing and before she could stop herself blurted, “You don’t have a tattoo.” Okay, so she sounded panicked. That’s only because she was.
His head jerked back, and he said, “I beg your pardon?”
“A tattoo. I can’t see one.” Cassie felt like a complete yahoo but if Adonis here didn’t have a tattoo, then the lover’s box couldn’t be what had delivered him to her house in the middle of the night. No-o-o-o-o! She was just about to throw herself down on the floor and wail at the unfairness of it all, when she saw that he was unbuttoning his pants.
“Uh…what are you doing?”
He grinned and her knees practically buckled. Yikes, the man had it going on. “You want to see my tattoo, right?”
Cassie nodded dumbly.
“Then I need to open my pants.”
And while Cassie opened her mouth to object, somehow the words, “Give me the flashlight. You’ll need your hands free,” came out instead, and she didn’t know which of them was more shocked.
He stilled, closed his eyes for a second, then handed her the light and went back to work on his zipper.
Well, this was certainly progressing nicely. It was all she could do not to yell out, Thank you, Minerva. Or wiggle the light and tell him to hurry up.
With the beam from the flashlight trained on the widening V of fabric at his fly as if he were a prisoner under police interrogation, she watched as dark lines of ink drawn into the writhing coils of a serpent, or maybe a dragon, arched over his hip bone. Cassie whimpered. Yep. It was a killer tattoo. Just as she’d written in her journal. Well, that settled that. The lover’s box worked, and his ass was hers. Yippee!
She suddenly felt light-headed. Her mouth went dry and with each more inch that she could see of the beautiful design on his skin, the sensation grew stronger. Beneath her towel, the tiny gold key decorating her nipple became almost hot. She gasped, the tip of her breast an erotic burn. Something was happening.
His fly was halfway open, and his pants were pulled down on one side to show his hip bone. He stopped his striptease a heartbeat before he gave her the money shot and ran his finger over the portion of the tattoo he’d exposed. Cassie swallowed. The artwork looked almost alive, caressing his flesh.
He shook his head as if he was trying to clear it, then said, “This is so weird.”
“You’re telling me,” she mumbled.
“No, I mean, it feels hot. My tattoo.” At his words the tiny key at her nipple gave a responding pulse of heat.
“Oh,” she gasped. She closed her eyes and swayed. She started to reach out to, well, grab him and jump his bones, but pulled the motion short. What was wrong with her? As much as she wanted to frog-march him upstairs to her bedroom and put him to work, she knew this wasn’t right. Surely the man didn’t just go throwing himself through glass windows whenever he felt horny. The lover’s box had done this to him and it was her fault. She was taking advantage of the poor genetically superior thing. Great, in one evening, she’d gone from desperate to sexual predator.
This didn’t upset her nearly as much as she knew it should.
She cleared her throat and forced herself to take a step backward, trying to put a little distance between them. She had no flipping idea what to say. Hello? How are you? I’m sorry that Gypsy magic brought you here tonight to satisfy my insatiable sexual demands?
Mercifully, he spoke, sparing her the first conversational gambit. He must have noticed her step backward, because he lifted his hands and said in the sort of voice used to talk a jumper down from a ledge, “Everything’s cool. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Cassie figured that whimpering out, “Hurt me, baby, hurt me,” would be completely inappropriate and kept her big yap shut.
Besides, the only thing she was afraid of at the moment was her bizarre lack of anxiety or fear. Sure, she was a bit flustered, but what female wouldn’t be if faced with the sort of pulling power this guy radiated in waves. Heck, he was his own magnetic field. He’d make a dominatrix feel gauche.
What on earth had she written in her darn journal? Truthfully, she couldn’t drum up an ounce of concern. She knew because she’d tried, and if this is what people meant when they talked about being comfortable with themselves and their surroundings, then this self-confidence crap was some heady stuff. Like a year’s worth of therapy with a Prozac chaser.
Okay, under normal circumstances, a person would run and call 9-1-1. (That was so-o-o-o not going to happen.) Or at the very least, ask a couple of questions, like, What the hell are you doing here? At this point she didn’t have much of a conscience to wrestle with in order to justify wild, pagan coupling with a complete stranger, but making sure that he knew where he was and why he was here seemed like the least she could do before she had her wicked way with him.
Cassie cleared her throat. “What’s going on? I mean, is there a reason you broke my window instead of knocking on the front door?”
“YES.” IT WAS THE BEST Max could manage.
He opened his mouth, still drew a blank, then closed it. Okay. This sucked. Badly. He’d finally met the lust of his life and he couldn’t think of a single lame-ass excuse for why he’d broken into the place. Usually he was the high king of BS but his silver tongue was too busy imagining how great it would feel rubbing and flicking against her own to fall back into his regular brand of shinola.
Truthfully, now that he’d clapped eyes on the curvy bundle of bliss before him, he didn’t give a flying flip about Rajko’s box. He’d get to it later, the whole treasure thing taking a major backseat to his new reason for breathing—slipping up the siren’s skimpy towel, then slipping up inside her. It was as if the second he’d seen her someone had waved the ultimate relic, like the Holy Grail or the exact GPS location of Atlantis, right under his nose.
Cocky as it sounded, Max had bedded more women than any one man should be allowed to, and he could honestly say that he’d never wanted to bump friendlies with a particular female so much in his life. Damn. His whole body was one massive, pounding urge. He wanted her. And he meant wanted her. Right now. But he needed to play it cool. Not totally scare her off before he got his hands, and a few other parts, all over her.
So far, she hadn’t run screaming from the room. Definitely a mark in the positive column. He just had to figure out a way to get her onboard with the program before he died from the most rapid onset of acute blue balls in the history of mankind.
“Oh, well then…” She’d let the silence stretch interminably as she’d waited for him to continue, and clearly didn’t know how to take his one-word answer. Since nothing sprang to mind that wouldn’t get his face slapped, he was sticking with his brief response. She added, “That’s good, I guess.”
She seemed pretty mind-whacked herself, because the only thing she did was give him a look that was one part dazed, one part confused and one part I-could-eat-you-for-days-and-never-get-enough. Obviously, it was this last one that he needed to cozy up to. But how, without freaking her right the hell out…?
All right. He was not without assets. As soon as he’d been old enough to realize that boys had tallywackers and girls didn’t, he’d also noticed that the poor tallywackerless side of the species seemed to be mighty partial to the way God had made him. Had he mentioned that he was a lucky son of a bitch?
She’d also shown an unholy interest in his tattoo, which he was prepared to exploit mercilessly.
While he’d been trying to figure out a way to suavely approach her and hold her still long enough to rock their worlds, she’d gone back to staring at the heart of the dragon. And he didn’t mean that as a euphemism. The dragon’s chest happened to be the part