“There is a price, of course.”
“I told you, you can have my money.” Her voice wavered and she watched his smile deepen. He’d heard the fear in her tone. Damn him, as well.
“I do not want your money. I so enjoy taking it from those who do not want to part with it, but that joy dims when it is given freely.” He reached out his other hand to her. “I want a kiss in exchange for the story. I do not think that a too high price; after all, it took me many months to write it. It will only take you but a moment to kiss me.”
“No,” Kieran said flatly, and she stood. Grabbing her cloak, she turned and moved toward the door. She cast a haughty glare over her shoulder as she placed her hand on the doorknob. “Perhaps you should have been more clear when you offered to help me. Had I known there would be a physical price, I never would have allowed myself to be tempted.”
“But you are tempted, because you know this is what you need.”
“What I need, signore, is to be left alone.”
“Alone with your pain. For how long?” The tone of his voice changed, dropped low, and grew rough. “What you need is vengeance. To punish the one who hurt you. Punish him for what he did, and then you will have satisfaction. You can rise above how you feel when you think of him, and instead of the rage and the hurt, you will feel peace in knowing he paid for his sin, and that it was you who exacted payment.”
Again, his words rooted her in place and fired her imagination. It was as if he offered food to a starving person. Kieran craved that knowledge, hungered for it. “How?”
Matteo held the manuscript up to her again. “A kiss.”
“You are a bastard.”
“You really have very little idea how correct you are,” Matteo said, unperturbed. “What will it be?”
“Why?” Kieran asked in what came out as nearly a whimper.
“We all want things, bella. Every single human who haunts this earth wants, yearns, craves, desires. We are creatures of such need. At this moment, I desire to kiss you.” Matteo shrugged his shoulders in a careless motion, and his lips quirked in a way that communicated ironic amusement. “I always seem to crave that which does not belong to me.”
Kieran looked at the sheaf of papers and then back to his eyes, trying to ascertain his truth. The dark eyes were mesmerizing in their velvety softness: they glistened in the lantern light, lit with flecks of amber and fringed with long, thick lashes beneath slashing black brows. Matteo lifted a brow as she studied him, his full lips twitched with humor.
“Behold the ice princess as she weighs her decision.”
She lifted her chin. “Do not mock me.”
“I apologize, bella, but I fail to see the gravity of this trade. I am Venetian; to us kisses are like wine and food: pleasurable, to be enjoyed. Perhaps your reluctance is an English problem?”
The gauntlet was thrown down, the price named. And Kieran could not walk out of that door. Not when her mind whirled with images of retribution, an avenger of her own honor. Her decision, she realized, was made.
“There is no problem. I want the story, so kiss me and get it done with. The hour grows late.”
Matteo tossed the sheaf of bound papers onto the chair that Kieran had recently vacated as he walked toward her.
Her heart was in her throat. No man had touched her since that night, not so much as a kiss had been pressed upon her glove. Ice princess, he’d called her, and the sobriquet stung, for it was a label lain on her by many a shunned suitor.
Lonely heart. Ice princess. And the truth was that Kieran hated those names because they were true and she did not know how to get herself back. She’d lost herself, and scarcely recognized the woman she’d become.
Matteo stood in front of her, and with cold disdain perfected from years of concealing any real feeling, Kieran looked up to him.
“Quickly,” she said, as if impatient. She cast her eyes to the ceiling and pursed her lips.
Matteo laughed and placed his hands on her shoulders. To her surprise, he turned her until she faced away from him, her back to his chest. She could feel the rise and fall of his breath, and the slight exhalation against her cheek, warm and scented with wine.
“I said a kiss is to be savored, no?”
She felt him lower his head to her hair, heard him inhale deeply. His fingers gripped her shoulders; they bore the pine scent of rosin and the acrid tang of ink. The warmth of his hands sank through her gown, and though his grip was strong, it wasn’t imprisoning.
“A woman is God’s most beautiful creation,” he said, his mouth by her ear. His breath was warm and humid, and Kieran tried to not feel the tingle that coursed through her body to her toes. “Her curves are like the cello.” Matteo’s left hand slid down her left arm, and grasping her wrist, he lifted it high above her head. “She is a delicate instrument, finely tuned, perfectly made, incredibly responsive.”
Matteo’s hand moved up and down over Kieran’s bare wrist, his fingers lightly oscillating as they’d done on the neck of the cello.
Shivering despite the warmth of the room, she pulled her wrist away.
“I agreed to a kiss. Will you not see out the bargain?” Kieran heard her own voice, the tremble in it.
Matteo simply reached down and pulled her arm back up, his fingers resuming the motion that made her breath come short.
“This is how I kiss,” he said softly, his mouth against her ear. With his right hand, he ran his fingers up the column of her neck until they reached her jaw, tracing the outline of her bone beneath her skin. He cupped her face and turned her head slightly until her neck was turned toward his lips.
And then, so lightly she could scarcely feel it, he kissed her beneath her ear. Sensations unlike any Kieran had ever felt coursed in her blood like liquid warmth. The brush of his stubble contrasted with the soft heat of his lips. His mouth moved and she leaned back against his chest, all the power gone from her legs. His fingers continued to slide up and down her wrist as his mouth moved over her neck, and suddenly there was no more breath in her lungs. She closed her eyes and gave in, just for a moment, to the music he was making in her body. A veritable symphony of sensations. A small, low murmur came from her throat, pulled by a force she did not control.
5
The sound snaked its way through Matteo’s blood. Kieran was warm and fluid and supple in his arms. Beneath his fingers her pulse pounded under soft skin, fine in its fragility. He cradled her wrist, the bones of which were slimmer than the neck of his cello. And she was infinitely more pleasurable to play. He nuzzled her neck; tasted her sweetness. He moved his lips up and breathed in the scent of her hair once more. She smelled wonderful, an exotic garden of sandalwood and jasmine. Why did she wear such an unusual scent?
She was everything he pursued in life: beauty and intrigue and thinly veiled passions. She awoke in him the urge to possess her, to solve her mysteries, to unlock the heat that simmered beneath her icy veneer.
The ship rocked like a gondola, and somewhere Matteo could hear a man call out to another on the upper decks. For a brief moment Matteo considered what Rogan Mullen would think about how his young sister was spending the midnight hour.
And then Matteo pushed that worry away. No matter whose sister she was, she was a woman, not a girl, and in Matteo’s opinion, desperately in need of a man’s touch. Did she not sigh in his arms, melt beneath his kisses?
So why was he plagued with what was, for him, the rarest of emotions: guilt.
Even as he held her, he felt guilty for bargaining for her kiss. So much so, that when she reluctantly gave what he had demanded, he could