The entire evening had been calculated to destroy her unspoken resolve. That much was obvious to Dani as she slipped into Duke’s arms for yet another slow dance.
What was less clear was why he had gone to so much trouble. After a couple of glasses of bubbly champagne and a few spins around the deserted dance floor, the answer was fuzzier than ever.
Okay, he wanted to seduce her. Nothing unclear or unexpected about that. But he also seemed determined to make the whole evening memorable.
Not that he had to worry with regard to the sex, she thought wryly. She was already anticipating making love with Duke so eagerly that he couldn’t possibly think she needed additional persuading. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that he would make love with the same passion with which he tackled everything in his life.
No, he seemed to be after more than her surrender in bed. Champagne, candles, fresh flowers, they all added up to a man on a romantic mission, a forever kind of mission.
“Stop thinking so hard,” he advised, regarding her with amusement.
Her gaze snapped up to clash with his. Was the man psychic or what? “I just wish I could figure out what you’re up to,” she said a little wistfully.
“Who says I’m up to something?”
“You do. Every now and then this vaguely guilty expression flits across your face. What’s that about?”
He shrugged. “I can’t imagine. I don’t feel the least bit guilty about anything.”
“Not even luring me to Fort Worth with a storm on the way?”
He chuckled at the accusation and executed a tricky spin designed to rob her of the ability to speak.
“Are you giving me credit for controlling the weather?” he inquired lightly as she tried to get her equilibrium back.
“No, just taking advantage of it.”
“Darlin’, a wise man takes advantage of all life’s opportunities.”
“So whatever plotting has been going on in that head of yours began when the first drop of rain fell earlier this afternoon and not a moment before?” she asked skeptically.
He did look vaguely uncomfortable at that. “Not exactly.”
As one song ended and there was a pause before the next, she took the opportunity to look him in the eye. “When exactly did this particular opportunity present itself?” she inquired.
“Does it really matter?”
“It does to me. Let’s just call it a test of faith.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, I want to see if you have enough faith in me to tell me the truth.”
He stared hard at her, as if searching for loopholes. Dani kept her gaze unblinking.
“Okay, okay,” he finally mumbled. “When the boys started talking about wanting to learn to ride, I saw an opportunity to get you alone for a while. Just for the day, though.”
“Not overnight?”
As the music began again, he grinned unrepentantly and swept her back into his arms. “No,” he insisted, “this is just a bonus.”
Dani couldn’t help it. She chuckled. “There now, that wasn’t so difficult, was it? See how honesty pays?”
“I suppose that depends on whether you ask the Perezes to let you bunk with them or come back to our room with me.” His gaze locked with hers. “So, Dani, it’s the moment of truth. What’s it going to be?”
She should have left him dangling, held off on an answer until dessert just to torment him, but she couldn’t do it. “I suppose, since you’ve gone to so much trouble…”
His lips began a slow curve into a smile. “The room?”
“The room,” she agreed softly.
“Now?” he inquired with ego-boosting eagerness, already heading back to their table for the check.
She grinned and shook her head, then deliberately pulled out her chair and sat. “Settle down, cowboy,” she advised. “This is one opportunity that doesn’t need to be claimed in a rush.”
* * *
For a while there Duke’s heart had been in his throat. Dani had seen straight through him, guessed all—well, almost all—of his devious little secrets and, he’d been almost certain, had been about to bring his whole scheme crashing down around his head. That she hadn’t was testament to the depth of her feelings. He wondered if she even recognized how revealing her reactions had been. He doubted it. She would hate that he could see into her heart, especially since she’d worked so hard to hide all the soft spots.
Comforting himself that his goal was all but certain, Duke settled back in his chair and forced himself to relax. It wasn’t all that difficult. He simply set out to enjoy the play of candlelight across her face, the shimmering of gold it set off in her hair. He relished the hitching of her breath whenever his fingers chanced to graze hers.
In fact, he discovered that the slow build of anticipation had its own reward. It had been a long time since he’d felt the kind of insistent, gut-deep hunger for a woman that he was feeling for Dani by the time they clasped hands and walked slowly back to their room.
The temperature hadn’t dropped nearly as precipitously as had been predicted. The rain had softened to little more than a gentle shower, leaving the air cleansed and crisp.
To his amazement, Dani stepped out from under the shelter of the covered walkway and tilted her face up to the sky. A fine mist settled on her skin, leaving it as dewy as a spring morning and a hundred times more appealing. She held out her arms as if to embrace the night. The gesture was so totally unselfconscious, so gloriously uninhibited and happy that Duke found himself joining her, getting soaked for the second time that night. He hardly even noticed.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she murmured, meeting his gaze.
“It’s wet,” he observed, concluding that she was definitely a little tipsy.
“It reminds me of ‘Singing in the Rain,’ one of my all-time favorite movies,” she said, looking nostalgic.
He recalled the specific scene vividly. “Gene Kelly dancing in the street,” he said with a smile. “Are you planning to launch into song or dance any second now?”
“No,” she said with a wistful sigh. “I can’t sing and I can’t dance.”
“Who says?” he protested. “No one’s grading you out here. Come on, darlin’. Go for it.”
He encouraged her by whistling the first few bars of the song. She did a little skip, then something vaguely resembling a tap routine. She was no Gene Kelly, that was for sure, but her face was glowing and her eyes were sparkling under the twinkling display of neon that splashed color across the damp pavement.
“You, too,” she insisted, grabbing his hand.
“I’ll sing,” he offered instead, belting out what he considered to be a credible rendition of the movie’s title song. He grabbed her off her feet and twirled her around for the sheer exhilarating fun of it. It was, if he did say so himself, quite a finale.
Or, perhaps, an extraordinary opening, if the main production was yet to come. Either way, he was well and truly caught up in the storyline.
Especially when her body slid slowly down his as he lowered her feet back to the ground. Eyes wide, she met his gaze evenly, then slowly, so slowly that his body throbbed with the anticipation of it, she lifted her hands to his cheeks and framed his face. When she stood on tiptoe and kissed him, he was more or less convinced that the whole state of Texas shook.
“Oh, baby,” he whispered raggedly, when he could catch his breath at all. “That was a real show-stopper.”
She grinned at him, her expression very feminine and very smug. “Come along. I’m not waiting around out here for the applause. Something tells me it’ll be a long time coming, and I have better things to do.”
“Really? You turning brazen on me, darlin’?” he inquired hopefully.
“I’m thinking about it,” she said, leading the way to the doorstep of their room.
Duke decided he was enjoying her seduction far too much to race right inside. Instead of opening the door, he leaned down and stole one more kiss, a real barn burner of a kiss.
It was Dani who eventually dragged her mouth away from his and stared up at him with dazed eyes. “Inside,” she murmured. It came out as part command, part plea.
Duke nodded. “Fine by me.”
“Open the door, then.”
“I think I’ll leave that up to you.”
Her gaze faltered. “But you have the key.” Alarm flared for a second in her eyes. “You do have the key, don’t you?”
“Sure do. It’s in my pocket. Anytime you want to slide your hand in there and get it,” he suggested provocatively, “we can go right on in.”
She regarded him with amusement. “Think you’re real smart, don’t you?”
He feigned a disinterested expression. “Smart enough.”
“Okay, mister, let’s see if you can take what you dish out,” she said, offering her own challenge.
The glittering dare in her eyes made Duke vaguely uneasy. He braced himself for the torment of her touch. It would be interesting to see just how far she would go to prove which of them was the more clever.
“Which pocket?” she inquired with mild curiosity, after a visual survey of the alternatives.
When he would have replied, she touched a silencing finger to his lips. “Never mind. I think I’ll just take my time and figure it out.”
She stepped in very close, until her breasts were pressed against his chest and her warm breath was fanning across his cheek. Her arms circled his waist and she very, very slowly ran one hand up the curve of his backside until she reached the top of his pocket. Duke’s blood began to hammer in his veins.
She searched that pocket so thoroughly and with such lingering, devilish caresses he thought for sure his heart would burst.
Then, when he was sure that his jeans couldn’t possibly be any more uncomfortable, she did the exact same thing all over again with the other back pocket.
“Not here,” she finally concluded, regarding him gravely. “Now where could that key be?”
Duke was totally incapable of replying. Maybe if he could have, maybe if he’d snatched the darn thing out himself, he could have saved himself from the wicked probing of his remaining pockets.
She slid her hands up his chest, examined the pockets in his shirt with care, finally satisfying herself that the key was elsewhere. He was breathing hard when she was done.
Then she moved on to the front pockets of his jeans. Deft fingers managed to skim far more than the depths of those pockets. With some sort of uncanny intuition she had managed to save the one that actually held the key until last. By then he was relatively certain that his body was one caress away from coming apart.
As she slowly and triumphantly removed the key, he stepped back so fast he almost tumbled off the curb. “Satisfied?” he muttered.
“Not yet,” she said, giving him a saucy smile. “You?”
“Definitely not yet.”
“Well, then, I guess we should go inside before we make a spectacle of ourselves.”
Duke regarded her curiously. “What just happened here?”
“I’m pretty sure I proved that I know how to get you all hot and bothered,” she said with obvious satisfaction. She opened the door and stepped inside, then gave him a head-to-toe survey that could have melted steel before adding, “It remains to be seen if you can do the same.”
He shook his head. “Darlin’, don’t you know how dangerous it is to issue that kind of a challenge to a man as close to the end of his rope as I am?”
“No,” she said, then added innocently, “Perhaps you should show me.”
Duke stepped inside and slammed the door so hard behind him, it rocked on its hinges. Dani grinned at the impatient gesture.
“Careful there. If we want any privacy, we need that door right where it is.”
“Very amusing,” he said and reached for her.
She put up very little resistance when he tugged her into his arms and settled his mouth over hers. There was nothing careful or tentative about this claiming. He was a man possessed. He wanted to taste her, to make very sure she knew that from this night on she belonged only to him.
Duke had never felt this demanding need for a woman. Not that he hadn’t enjoyed sex. He had the usual appetite for the feel of a soft body beneath his own, for being surrounded by slick, moist heat.
But this hot, urgent passion seemed to run deeper than that. It was as if he needed to prove that beyond the teasing and the provocation, beyond the flirting and kisses, there was more. For the first time in his life, he felt as if he were putting some new part of himself on the line.
Perhaps his heart.
His pulse hitched at the thought. But not even the terror that should have followed would have been enough to get him to walk out of this room tonight.
Oddly enough, though, the panic never came. He would have to figure out why later.
In fact at the moment, as his fingers made short work of buttons and snaps, then skimmed over bare flesh, all he felt was the exhilaration of a man who was right where he wanted to be, with the woman with whom he belonged.
Forcing himself to drag in a deep, calming breath, he slowed down. He lifted Dani off her feet, then placed her on the bed as reverently as he’d ever touched anything in his life.
Dani returned his gaze with a hooded, smoldering look of her own. He was relieved by that, glad that there was no evidence of the lost, vulnerable woman he had met a few months ago. Whatever she felt for him in her heart, she was meeting him tonight as a strong, decisive woman, the kind of woman he’d seen evidenced in her work. Maybe, he thought, he’d played some small part in giving her back her confidence.
His gaze danced over her, then took a slower, lingering survey. She was so lovely. Small and delicate in many ways, there was a surprising, but unmistakable strength about her. He followed the subtle definition in her arms, stopped to savor the gentle sweep of a shoulder, then moved on to admire the generous curve of her breasts. He trailed a finger down that soft slope to a tip that was as hard as a pebble beneath his touch, then repeated the action on her other breast until she gasped with pleasure and her eyes drifted closed.
When his mouth closed over one sensitive peak, her eyes flew open and her hands tunneled through his hair as if to keep him there.
Duke was far from finished, though. Each breast was but a stopping point on his journey of discovery. He wanted to know every inch of her, to discover textures and tastes and secret pleasure spots. He wanted her to remember every second, every caress.
He stopped his intimate examination of a sensitive spot on the inside of her thigh and met her gaze. “Yes?”
“Look at me,” she pleaded softly. “Look at me and make love to me. I want you inside me now.”
“In a minute, darlin’. I’m not quite through with my survey.”
“Your survey is making me crazy,” she confessed.
He hid a grin. “That’s the general idea.”
“But I want to make you crazy, too.”
“Oh, baby, you do,” he vowed. He reached for her hand. “Here, feel.” When he placed her hand over the hard shaft of his arousal, a slow smile spread across her face. Confidence returned. Her gaze met his boldly.
“If that’s the case,” she said, “then let’s go for it.”
“We’re not racing a clock, are we?”
“I just thought it would be good to seize the opportunity,” she pointed out.
Duke chuckled. “Like you told me, this opportunity isn’t going anywhere. In fact, we’re just now starting to take full advantage of it.”
He set out to prove to her the exquisite torture of slow, deliberate caresses and deep, bone-melting kisses. She was slick with perspiration and writhing against the sheets by the time he knelt between her thighs and slowly entered her.
The moist, welcoming heat claimed him as surely as he’d set out to claim her. She was slick and tight and eager. The movement of her hips was timed perfectly to him as if they’d learned this rhythm in another lifetime and only in each other’s arms. He was all but certain it had never been like this before.
Duke was struck by the stunning thought that this was what people meant when they referred to soul mates. That had always been an elusive concept to him, the idea that destiny chose two people and saw to it that they came together for eternity.
But as their bodies melded, as wave after wave of stunning pleasure washed over them, he began to wonder if he hadn’t been a little too quick to dismiss the notion.
When Dani’s cry of release shimmered around him, it was all he could do to hold back a triumphant shout. She was his now, as surely as if she’d already said yes to the proposal he had yet to make.
As for him, if he looked very, very closely inside his heart, he had a feeling he might discover that he was just as much her captive. To his astonishment, rather than being panicked by that, all he felt was a sort of intense, heady relief.
* * *
Dani stretched languorously. She had never felt better in her life. As long as she didn’t allow a lot of doubts to start crowding in, she would be just fine. Better than fine. She would be magnificent.
There was one sure way to see that doubts remained at bay. She slid across the mattress and tucked herself up against Duke, pausing to admire the hard planes and angles of his body. There wasn’t an ounce of spare flesh on him. And the man generated enough body heat to warm all of Texas. Her inquisitive, probing hands slid across his belly, then down. He moaned softly, then came wide-awake with a start. After a moment of obvious disorientation, he regarded her with amusement.
“What are you up to?” he inquired.
“Explain it to me, anyway.”
She grinned. “Just checking to see if this was one of those rare times when opportunity knocked twice.”
He regarded her balefully. “Twice? I’m fairly certain I recall it knocking several times during the night.”
“That was then. This is now.”
He studied her face intently. “Trying to keep the regrets at bay, by any chance?”
Dani stared at him in shock. Was she so obvious? “Why would you ask that?”
“Because I know you better than you think I do.” He grinned that lazy, sexy grin that destroyed her defenses. “Come on now, no regrets.”
“Easy for you to say. This doesn’t solve anything between us, Duke, not really.”
“I’m perfectly willing to make it legal,” he said. “Just say the word.”
She stared at him. His expression was neutral. Clearly he didn’t intend to give away whether he was serious or not. “You want to marry me?” she asked, spelling it out so there could be no mistake.
“You didn’t think this was some casual, one-night stand for me, did you? I’m not that kind of man.” He shook his head with exaggerated sorrow. “Never mind. I’ll prove it to you.”
“There’s no need.”
“Of course, there is. You can’t marry me, if you don’t trust me.”
Warning signals that had apparently been on the blink for too many hours were recharged now. They were clanging like the very dickens. “I’m not going to marry you, period,” she insisted, even though the pull of the idea made her limp with longing.
“We’ll see,” he said smugly.
Dani sighed. “Duke, we’re consenting adults here. This doesn’t require a proposal to make it okay.”
“Never said it did.” He shot her a chin-up, defiant look. “I’m asking you to marry me just the same.”
“No,” she said again, though her stomach was as jittery as if she’d said yes.
“Why not?” He met her gaze evenly. “And don’t try telling me you don’t love me, because I’m not buying it.”
“Well, aren’t you the cocky one?” she retorted. “Just because we made love doesn’t mean I’m in love.”
“Nope,” he agreed solemnly. “That’s not proof all by itself.”
“Then would you mind telling me where you got such a cockamamie idea?” Maybe then she could see to it that she never, ever did anything similar again.
“You women have your intuition,” he said. “We men have other ways.”
“Such as?”
“Darlin’, I’d be going against the code if I gave it away.”
“Code? What code? Gave what away?” she asked, thoroughly exasperated.
“It’s a guy thing.”
She stared at him incredulously. “It’s a guy thing? Well, this is a girl thing.” She climbed out of bed and draped herself in the bedspread, figuring that delivering her tirade stark naked would take a little of the sass out of it. “I am not now nor do I ever intend to be in love with you. I will not marry you.”
Duke didn’t seem to be the least bit distressed. “We’ll see.”
Dani marched off to the bathroom and slammed the door behind her. When it was closed, she leaned heavily against it.
“Well, damn,” she murmured.
How was she supposed to fight a man who was offering her the very thing she wanted most in the world: Marriage and a family every bit as strong as the one into which she’d been welcomed as a child.
By telling herself a thousand times a day that he didn’t really love her, she reminded herself. The only hitch to that was the fact that last night, in his arms, it had felt an awful lot like he might be loving her back.