This Perfect Kiss (19 page)

A smile flickered over her face and then she cast a glance toward the backseat. “Except for today. I felt her hand today. I’ll always be grateful to you for that.”

Greg stared at her. “I still don’t understand. If your—your skin is numb and you don’t feel anything, why have you still been trying to avoid my touch?”

“Because.” Her whisper scraped like a razor across his heart. “Because I thought—I hoped, maybe—it might be different with you.”

And she hadn’t wanted to know if it wasn’t any different
. That was what she didn’t say. And what she also didn’t say was that it
wasn’t
different. Greg wiped his palm down his face. God.

Pain filled his belly, head, heart. When her touch felt like a crack of lightning against his skin, she felt nothing when
he
touched
her
.

His hands started to shake. To lose her, to find her, to find out that he couldn’t arouse her. Why had this happened? Was this his punishment?

Cool air blew across him as she opened her door. He leaned toward it. “Kim…” He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to think. “Are you sure?”

Her small smile twisted the knife in his gut.
“I’m sure. No matter what my heart says, my body’s just not in it.” Then she looked at her daughter a last time and was gone.

Once again he’d let her get away.

Close to midnight, after too much talk with too many people, Rory pulled Jilly down the hallway toward their suite.

“Wait, wait, you’re going too fast,” she protested.

He didn’t slow until he reached their door. Unwilling to let go of her, he slid the card-key in and out one-handed, then jerked open the door. Once inside, he slammed it shut and grabbed Jilly above the elbows, spinning her to face him.

“I should spank you,” he said.

She lifted her chin. “Why?”

“You know exactly why. All this time you knew the senator and didn’t tell me.”

She shook her head vigorously. “But I didn’t know who he was to you. I avoid politics like other people avoid heights. Honest, I had no idea what he had to do with the Blue Party or with you.”

Rory didn’t let go of her arms. “Until the closet.”

Even under the dimmed lights, he could see her flush. “Until the closet. But come on. I had to
listen to all your warnings about what I should wear and how I should behave. Admit you deserved just a
little
torture.”

He didn’t want to. “You should have told me right away, right then in the closet, dammit, that Senator Fitzpatrick was ‘Uncle Fitz’ to you. That he was your dear old family friend. The one who’s an ‘ex-Navy man,’” he said through his teeth.

“Why? You were having so much fun worrying about what kind of detriment a woman like me might be to your political career.”

Rory took a deep breath. “I never said that.”

Jilly stomped on her bad-girl high heels toward her bedroom. Then she spun to face him. “But it’s what you’ve always thought, right?” There was an unfamiliar glitter in her eyes.

“I never said that,” he repeated, feeling cornered. To get more air, he quickly loosened his bow tie and unfastened the top button of his tuxedo shirt.

“Humph,” Jilly said, her toe starting an annoyed—and annoying—tap. Curling tendrils of her hair had escaped the velvet band and were dancing against her forehead. “You know, this weekend of playing fiancée was
never
part of our deal. As a matter of fact, I’m suddenly aware that I’m getting nothing for all this trouble.” Her mouth set moodily.

“Oh, yeah?” Rory said softly, feeling more than a little moody himself. Because, speaking of nothing, she’d been so occupied with the senator for the entire evening that Rory had seen little of her. He’d told himself he was mad and getting mad
der by the minute over the joke she’d played on him, but he admitted now that he’d hated giving her up to the senator and the others. He’d wanted to watch her mouth as she talked, watch her breasts rise and fall with each breath.

But she’d seemed to have forgotten she was there as his woman, his
fiancée
.

“So you wish you were getting some…thing?” he asked, unfamiliar, dangerous heat in his voice. The need to punish her was rising in him again, uncontrollable and as wild as she looked in that black, satin-striped tuxedo.

Her eyes narrowed and she took a step back. “Y-yes. No.”

“Which is it?” Rory stepped closer. “Yes or no?” She was corruption, temptation, every dark sin and every secret desire. And he was damn tired of denying himself.

She put her hand on his chest, but she didn’t push him away. “Rory…” Her eyes widened as he took her in his arms and pulled her against him.

“Yes or no, Jilly?”

Her little body was hot against his. He could feel her trembling and she parted her lips, swallowed, parted them again. “Rory…”

“Yes or no?” he whispered. His hand slid beneath her hair, cupping the bare skin of her nape with his palm.

At his touch, she jerked. Then her pupils dilated, her arms slid up to circle his neck, and she pulled down his head.

Jilly’s mouth was a drug. Rory promised himself to outlaw it, once in Washington, and once he’d had his fill of it. The taste of her chugged
through his blood, moving with fierce, steady purpose, turning him on hotter and harder than he’d ever known.

Sweet punishment.

His tongue was deep in her mouth, her body was plastered against his, yet she twisted against him restlessly. He slid his hands up and down her back to soothe her, to slow himself, but Jilly moaned so erotically that he had to lift his head to catch his breath.

Her head dropped bonelessly back. With her eyes closed and her mouth wet, she looked on the brink of orgasm. Rory’s head spun, and he groaned and ground his hips against her. Jilly’s eyes opened to slits, glittering greenly, greedily.

Their light lit him on fire. He bent his head, kissing her neck, biting it, sucking it, no taste enough. Startled by the thought, he lifted his head again, reining in the impulses that were driving him.

She opened her eyes slowly, as if coming awake. “How do you do that?” she whispered. “You make me so hot.”

He laughed, the sound strangely shaky, and he held her with one arm so he could draw the cruel velvet band from her extravagant curls. “It’s you,” he said, tossing the band away. “You’re the one making it hot.”

She shook her head and her hair fanned out. Then she slid her hands from his neck to his shoulders, to push off his jacket. It fell to the floor behind him. “Maybe this will cool you down.”

But he didn’t think so, because then Jilly started plucking at the studs fastening his shirt.
His heart slammed against her fingers, and she made a face as she awkwardly managed to undo them. Then she pulled out his shirt—delicious agony as it slid over his erection—from his pants. The tails fluttered to his thighs.

“There,” she said, taking a tiny step back.

There?
There
? Two could play that game.

With a slow smile, he reached toward the buttons of her tuxedo jacket. He heard her suck in a breath, but he didn’t dare look at her face, or anywhere else. He concentrated on his fingers, freeing the buttons without touching her skin.

Once unbuttoned, the jacket parted to show only an inch of her pale flesh and a small strip of tantalizing black lace, right at the point of her cleavage. Rory let his hands fall to his sides. “There,” he whispered.

Her breath exhaled in a small moan, and the edges of the jacket inched farther apart. Rory looked up, into Jilly’s green eyes. “I’m still hot,” he said, holding her gaze as he shrugged out of his shirt.

Her hand crept toward his bare chest. Jilly’s gaze broke from Rory’s to watch her own fingers as they moved toward him. Rory’s belly clenched in anticipation. God, she was good at this.

Four fingertips met the wall of his chest, just below his shoulder. He clenched his teeth, his muscles, locked his knees to keep perfectly still as her fingers stroked downward, burning four separate trails, and leaving four separate swaths of goose bumps behind. The nail of her middle finger bumped over his pebbled nipple, and he was
so hellishly tense his groan couldn’t fight past his tight throat.

Her fingers met the waistband of his pants and fell away. Her gaze moved up to his. There was something in her eyes—uncertainty? nerves?—but both must be wrong. Even though she was trembling, she played these sexy games too well to be nervous.

He ran his fingers down her hot cheek anyway, a comforting gesture. “My turn,” he said. His fingertips slid inside her tuxedo jacket at her shoulders. He meant to go slow, he meant to build the anticipation just like she had, but God, he didn’t have her control. Suddenly he couldn’t wait anymore.

In one quick movement, he jerked the jacket off her shoulders.

She gasped.

He thought he just might die. She’d been working up to killing him since the moment he’d met her, and if her hooker high heels or her decadent taste didn’t do him in, the heaven-sent abundance of her breasts would take care of it. They spilled over the top of a black, lacy bra, plump and pale, their color as pure as snow dusted with freckles of angel gold.

Oh, but before they buried him six feet under, he needed more. See more, taste more, have more.

His hands shook as he grasped the black bra straps and pushed them down her arms. Air dragged in and out of his lungs, rough and painful, as he then pulled on the straps to drag the
lace cups over her stiff nipples until the bra settled at her waist.

She swayed. “Rory,” she breathed.

“Shh.” He slid one arm around her back and cupped one breast in his other hand. Its full weight settled hot and sweet into his palm.

“Rory.”

“Shh.” He bent his head, his heart pounding in an unholy, reckless rhythm, and licked her nipple. She cried out, her body arching in a genuine, generous response that wound his arousal even tighter and set his erection throbbing against the black wool of his pants. He licked again, her taste and scent entering his bloodstream, that addictive drug that drove every other need but the need for her from his head.

His body shook as he bent her over his arm and took her breast in his mouth, sucking on her nipple as if he could fill himself with her taste. In the distance he heard her cry out, and he felt her skin go even hotter.

His heart was slamming around his body, moving like a pinball from groin to wrist to chest to throat and he needed more Jilly to satisfy it. He lifted his head and gently squeezed her wet nipple between his thumb and forefinger as he moved to take the other in his mouth.

Her hands buried in his hair, she was rubbing against him, her hips pushing on his arousal, and he felt her movements quicken, thrusting against him in an unmistakable rhythm.
God
, Rory thought.
She’s almost there
.

He palmed the tender bud of her nipple one
last time, then released the breast he’d been toying with. But he kept sucking her other breast, listening to the beat of his blood, the beat strangely synched to her sinuous movements. His fingers trailed past the bra still fastened about her waist. Flattening his hand, he moved his fingers between their bodies until the tips brushed the vee of her thighs. She was so far gone she didn’t even seem to notice, but he shuddered at the heat there and at the telltale dampness.

“Oh, Jilly,” he murmured against her full, hot breast, and then, knowing what she needed, he cupped her firmly, pushing his fingers hard against her.

Her body jolted. She cried out. Her body shuddered again and again and again.

He knew when she came back to earth. His mouth drifted reluctantly from her breast up her throat, and he pressed a kiss against her soft, surprised mouth. He looked into her eyes and tenderly stroked her cheek. “Good flight, angel?”

She looked stunned. “What?”

He laughed softly, even though his body was aching with the need for a journey of its own. “Are you always so responsive?”

She blinked. “What?” She shuffled back and he let her go, because her bewilderment was so cute and he enjoyed the idea that he’d shaken up the sexpot. Her arms crossed over her magnificent breasts. “Oh, my God, Rory.” Her face flushed bright red.

He tweaked her nose. “It’s okay. I can make it happen again.”

She shook her head, obviously flustered, and backed away. “Oh, no, you can’t.”

Now he really laughed, even though the peek of her rosy nipples he could see through her fingers was making the throb in his groin even more painful. “Not your convent sex ed again? Jilly, honey, your choice of partners has been decidedly average if no one has ever proved to you your unlimited, um, capabilities.”

She still looked shocked.

He reached out toward her. “C’mon, sweetheart, let me take you to bed.”

“No. I told you. I can’t.” She bent down and picked something up from the floor, throwing it over her nakedness. His shirt. “I took a vow.”

“What?”

“I said I took a vow.”

Without warning, that gray cloud that was his constant companion once again took on an anvil weight. It fell on his chest, hard and ominous. “A vow? What the hell kind of vow are you talking about?”

She looked away. “Um. Well. You know.”

Rory sensed southern California in the air, and, of course, disaster.
“What kind of vow?”

Jilly licked her lips, still reddened from his kisses, then met his eyes. “A vow of celibacy. Four years ago I took a vow of celibacy.”

No. No way. He refused to believe it. He also couldn’t believe she’d even said such a stupid thing.

“Damn it, Jilly! If you don’t want to have sex, just say so.” He was mad at himself and mad at
her and mad at how difficult it was to ignore the pulsing insistence of his erection. “Just because we—you…fooled around, you’re still under no obligation. I thought I explained that. No elaborate excuses are necessary.”

Of course, he was going to have to find the ice machine and then find some way to stuff all six feet of himself inside it, but he meant what he said. Damn it.

Despite his reassurance, her expression was miserable. “I’m sorry, but it’s not an excuse. It’s a lifestyle. My lifestyle.”

She couldn’t be serious. But she looked serious. Her
lifestyle
.

“Why? No.” He pinched the bridge of his nose against a sudden headache. “Don’t tell me. This is something you cooked up with your astrologer, right?”

“No, it’s not like that at all.” Jilly slipped her arms into his shirtsleeves and wrapped the garment tightly around her body. “Maybe you won’t understand, but it’s like what you said before—about becoming the opposite of what you’re raised to be.”

He narrowed his eyes, still not sure he was buying this. “Yeah, but your grandmother sent you to convent school. To—what was her name?—Sister Bernice or whoever. Your grandmother
raised
you to be celibate.”

“But then expected the opposite when I moved to FreeWest. In her mind, I was my mother all over again. I wanted to prove to her how wrong she was about me. About both of us. Being celibate takes all the guesswork out of a sex life, you
see. No disease, no unwanted pregnancy. No emotional mistakes either.”

Rory just stared. To his mind, what Jilly needed was to take her sex a little less seriously. A long weekend on a soft bed with a hard man should do it.

But he wasn’t volunteering for the job, because he could tell by the determined set of her shoulders and the serious pleat of her brow that getting her there would take more effort than he was willing to put forth. Especially for some crazy woman from southern California who’d become the bane of his existence.