Hoping that no one would notice, she raised a hand slowly, intending to wipe the tears away. Tracker’s arm brushed against hers when he stepped closer and pressed a handkerchief into her hand, and she felt heat streak right down to her toes.
“You okay, Princess?”
Okay? How could she be okay when her insides had become as liquid as the tears running down her face? And when the man who was responsible was treating her like a kid sister? Dabbing at her eyes, she managed a nod.
Wasn’t that the story of her life? The men who wanted to seduce her were after her money, and the one man she wanted to seduce her was perfectly content to merely watch over her like a protective older brother.
Blinking rapidly, Sophie willed the tears to stop. She’d come here to change that. If plan A—making Tracker jealous—had been a bust, she’d just have to come up with another one. Quick.
As she watched her brother and her best friend turn to face the applause of their guests, she stepped to the side and, for a moment, let her eyes meet Tracker’s. When a jolt moved through her right down to her toes, she waited a beat, then two, for her system to stabilize. Dressed all in black, he exuded an air of mystery and danger. And sex—raw, primitive and irresistible.
She was in trouble. It was one thing to plan a seduction in the abstract and quite another to put it into action when just looking at him turned her knees to jelly.
And it was just her luck that he was a triple threat kind of guy. First, he had a great body, strong and athletic. Second, he had a great mouth. It was better not to look at it too long. And then there were his eyes and the way he looked at her—as if he knew all her secrets and was just waiting for her to make a move so that he could counter it.
It made her want to do something, anything that he wouldn’t expect.
That was the key. Drawing in a deep breath, she stiffened her spine. She had to think of something he wouldn’t expect, something subtle, sneaky. The challenge sent a little ripple of anticipation through her.
“Hey, you two,” Lucas said.
With a start, Sophie tore her eyes away from Tracker’s and glanced at her brother. He and Mac had already started to make their way down the “aisle” formed by the guests.
“Stay close,” Lucas continued, once he had their attention. “We’re going right to the dance floor just as we did at the wedding.”
Yes, Sophie decided as she walked with Tracker toward the platform that had been set up for dancing. A dance was a good start. And maybe an innocent little game…
A DANCE. That’s all it was. Just a polite, social gesture—one of the many rituals that Lucas was determined to repeat for his bride. That’s what Tracker told himself as he steered Sophie onto the dancing platform. It had been a year since he’d held the Princess in his arms, a year since he’d decided that he had to keep his distance from her. However much he thought he’d prepared himself, he couldn’t prevent his body from hardening in anticipation of holding her, the reaction so automatic it was as if he had already been intimate with her.
And he had been very intimate with her in the fantasies that had fueled his dreams every night for the past year. A few of them flickered at the edge of his mind as the music began. Then her hand was in his, pressed palm to palm, and she raised the other one to rest on his shoulder. They touched nowhere else, but he could imagine her strong, slender fingers brushing over his skin, and flames licked along his nerve endings at the thought.
Fantasies were all he would ever have with Sophie Wainwright, Tracker reminded himself. Hardly a day went by that he didn’t review the reasons why he’d resolved to steer clear of her. First off, she was his boss’s sister—a boss who happened to be his best friend and the closest thing to family he’d ever known. Having an affair with Sophie Wainwright was out of the question. And anything else was impossible. They came from different worlds. Only in fairy tales did the princess and the knight who guarded her believe they might have anything more.
But she was close now, and each time the movements of the dance brought their bodies into contact, the hard knot of desire tightened inside of him. One thing was clear. He couldn’t control his response to her any more than he’d been able to keep himself entirely away from her.
Lucas had asked him to keep an eye on her after the kidnapping. There were plenty of men Tracker could have assigned to watch over her. But he hadn’t been able to give up watching over her himself.
That one simple fact worried him. Developing an iron-willed control over his emotions was one of the few things in his life he was proud of. His father had been a violent man, and Tracker knew that he’d inherited some of those tendencies. The work he’d done for the government had proved it. He couldn’t allow anyone to get too close, especially not Sophie, who threatened his control as no woman ever had before.
Even now he couldn’t seem to prevent himself from drawing her closer and torturing himself with the brush of her body against his. Each time she shifted, he felt the movement, along with an ache that began to grow deeper and sharper within him.
He wanted Sophie. To have her this close and not be able to take more was sheer torture.
“It’s just not fair,” Sophie said.
Her statement so clearly echoed his own thoughts that for a second Tracker wondered if she could read his mind.
“What isn’t fair?” he asked, glancing down. In that first moment of looking into those amber-colored eyes of hers, his mind went completely blank. All he could see, all he could absorb, was Sophie. She had the finest damn face—fair skinned, oval. This close, he could see what he never saw in his fantasies: there were flaws in that pale, almost translucent, skin. A sprinkle of freckles across her nose, the faintest scar on her chin… A man might be fooled into thinking she was delicate if he didn’t notice the stubbornness in the strong line of her jaw.
Then his gaze fastened on her mouth. Her lips were parted, moist…and moving. He gave his head a quick shake to clear it when he realized she was talking to him.
“…agree with me?”
A short, balding man spun by, jostling against them and nearly losing the tall woman in his arms. For the first time, Tracker became aware that other couples had joined them on the dance floor. The beat of the music had picked up, too. How long had he been holding Sophie and fantasizing?
“Well, don’t you?” she asked.
She was smiling at him. Tracker narrowed his eyes. The Princess didn’t do that very often, and it made him wary. “Agree with you about what?”
“That it’s simply not fair. You know everything about me, and I know next to nothing about you.”
“You know everything you need to know about me.”
Sophie shook her head. “I don’t even know your real name. Lucas says you’re called Tracker because in the service there wasn’t anything you couldn’t track. I don’t know where you came from, either. Why don’t we play a little game?”
Tracker frowned. “What kind of a game?”
“Oh, stop being so suspicious. I’m suggesting a game of twenty questions, and we’ll take turns. You ask me a question and then I ask you one.”
Tracker studied her as he steered her nearer the edge of the dance platform. He’d learned a lot about her when she’d donned a wig and led him on a merry chase cross-country last year, and she was definitely up to something. There was an unmistakable gleam of mischief in her eyes that he couldn’t help but respond to. “What happens if I don’t want to answer a particular question?”
“You can pass. But you have to pay a penalty, of course. Let’s say…something simple to begin with…” Pausing, she tapped a finger on