Edge of Danger (27 page)

 
“Hi,” she said, still feeling drowsy and deliciously lethargic. She didn’t know how long she’d slept, but the angle of the sun had changed.

 
“I didn’t mean to wake you.” His voice was raspy and sexy. His hair looked pretty neat for a man who’d been rolling about for hours; she bet hers looked as though she’d stuck a finger in an electrical outlet. She raised her hand self-consciously, and he pulled her hand to his mouth, kissed her open palm.

 
“Leave it, you have the sexiest hair I’ve ever seen. All those wild curls are messy from my hands. Looks sexy. Hot.”

 
He nibbled her fingers until she squirmed on the warm sheets. His broad shoulders were tanned, his skin smooth as satin overlaying rock-hard muscle. Eden ran an appreciative glance down his chest with its light furring of crisp dark hair. Small dark nipples beckoned her mouth and she lifted her head and closed her lips around one flat peak, thrilling to the sound of his harsh, indrawn breath.

 
She tasted the slightly salty skin on his chest, letting her lips climb to the steady pulse in the base of his throat. Brushing her mouth beneath his stubborn chin she felt the prickle of his beard abrading her lips. She smiled, letting her lips roam over his chin to find the firmness of his mouth.

 
“Yum,” she murmured, nibbling and laving until he moaned and opened for her. He rolled over, taking her with him, so she was on top. Head on his chest, Eden opened her legs to straddle his hips.

 
He was already hard and ready for her. She lifted her head an inch, and opened her eyes.

 
“Hmm.” She gave the opulent room a vaguely quizzical glance as she sheathed herself over him. “When. Did. This. Oh, God, Gabriel! Happen?”

 
“You were too busy to notice.” He nuzzled her neck, making her shiver deliciously. She closed her eyes again, more interested in what Gabriel was doing than in the heavy masculine decor surrounding them.

 
She shuddered as ripples of pleasure surged through her as he lifted her body so that he could reach her breasts. Then shivered at the brush of his lips across her nipple as an answering heat twisted through the very core of her. She clung to his shoulders; the very wildness of his hunger called out to everything in her that was female, and ignited her own fire to fever pitch.

 
He whispered against her skin. Words of admiration, shocking words, soothing words that blurred into the soft sibilant sounds of the ocean tide. Pulling her deeper and deeper into the riptide where her feet would be knocked from under her and she’d be pulled out of her depth with no hope of surviving.

 
She made a small pleading sound as the tip of his tongue traced a circle around the peak of her nipple. He closed his teeth with admirable restraint over the hard bud, and her body arched against his mouth. He cupped her other breast in his palm, gently massaging it, brushing his thumb over the nipple.

 
The heat of his breath caressed her skin, and she felt the mounting tension in his body as she ran her hands over the hard sculptured muscles of his upper arms. His skin was sleek and smooth, hard as tensile steel and hot beneath her marauding caresses.

 
She ran her hand down his body. He shuddered, capturing her hand and bringing it to his lips. He gently bit down on the fleshy pad of her thumb.

 
His long fingers caressed the soft skin of her inner thigh and then skimmed even higher to find a softer, more tender spot. She started to say something, but the words were lost as his thumb moved again.

 
She shuddered as the magical sensation shot through her body. His fingers took her to the pinnacle, then held her there, trembling on the brink of release.

 
Anticipation coiled impossibly higher. She tried to say his name, but coherent speech was impossible. He filled her, every part of her. Leaving room for nothing but pure, sharp, sensation.

 
It was a long time before the sensual storm passed, leaving them exhausted, their bodies damply entwined.

 
The sun shone directly over the bed, accentuating the dark stubble on his face that had so deliciously abraded her skin. His eyes shone like indigo crystal. Dark and glittering. Eden caressed his strong jaw, loving the feel of him, and ignored the regret she saw in his eyes.

 
A shower had gone a long way to waking her up after a long afternoon of lovemaking. While Eden felt lethargic and lazy, Gabriel appeared to be wired. He’d insisted on showering alone. Disappointed, she’d showered in his large, granite shower by herself. He’d been waiting for her when she’d returned to his bedroom. While she’d been in the bathroom he’d retrieved a change of clothes for her, jeans and a pale blue T-shirt, and her gold sandals with very high heels.

 
He’d also brought in the small blue bottle of Je Reviens perfume. He had specific ideas about where each dab should be applied, and they’d ended up making love again.

 
The setting sun lanced through the narrow Gothic windows directly opposite the staircase, spilling mellow golden light on the treads as they went downstairs an hour later.

 
They’d spent the better part of the day making love, and she ached in unexpected places. Under the circumstances, Eden felt ridiculously at peace. And not just because her body had been well loved. She’d never been kissed with such attention to detail by any man in her life. Gabriel Edge’s kisses were addictive. She loved the shape of his mouth, she loved the texture of his mouth. God, she loved the
taste
of his mouth.

 
She felt…centered. Centered in a way, she now realized, that she’d never felt before. The man walking so far away from her right now knew her body intimately. More intimately than any man ever had. Yet she knew practically nothing about him. And what she did know should scare her to death, but didn’t.

 
In some strange and mysterious way she felt as though she’d known Gabriel Edge forever.

 
Her friend Gigi, an artist, insisted on living every moment of every day with gusto. Eden decided she’d take a leaf out of her friend’s book. This feeling she had right now shouldn’t be wasted on regrets. Sunlight glinted off the metallic straps of her sandals and illuminated the deep gold swirls in the carpet. She smiled, sliding her palm down the smooth mahogany banister as she observed each step she took. She wondered if it would be safe to glance at him again, then realized that looking at Gabriel Edge would never be safe. He was always going to appeal to her. Always going to make her heart kick in her chest. Always make her want to be in his arms.

 
Gabriel and his Edridge Castle were a long way from a trailer park in Sacramento, California. And this fabulous staircase was a very long way away from the peach box her family had used as a makeshift step.

 
Gabriel, walking a good ten feet away, turned to look at her. “What are you smiling about?”

 
“Know what I wanted more than anything in the world when I was thirteen?”

 
He glanced over at her. “What?”

 
She shook her head. “You’ll think I’m nuts—Okay. Proper
stairs.
We lived in a trailer park outside of Sacramento. Single-wide. My father wasn’t too handy. The step was gone long before I was born. As far back as I can remember we had a box—not always the same box mind you, but a box. I didn’t care about the inside of the house, but I’d seen
Gone with the Wind,
and I wanted a staircase just like—” her smile widened. “This.

 
“And now that I come to think of it, I wanted that satisfied morning-after smile that Scarlett wore, too.”

 
“At thirteen? What a precocious child you were.” His eyes crinkled and his lips twitched. Oh, it wasn’t a full-blown smile, but he
was
amused.

 
The look in his eyes made her heart thud in her chest. It was more complicated than mere lust. If anything about their relationship could be mere anything. His eyes showed her that he, too, had felt some of the magic they’d made together upstairs, that he found her attractive, and appealing, and at times amusing. He wasn’t just attracted to her brain.

 
The look in his dark blue eyes also told Eden that he knew that what they shared transcended the physical in some mysterious way.

 
Something inside her shifted and settled and she knew she was lost. She’d been right. Sex with Gabriel had changed her irrevocably. She wondered how she could recognize something she’d never felt before. How this jumble of insane emotions had suddenly gelled into…it couldn’t be love, for God’s sake. Could it? She almost stumbled, tightening her fingers around the handrail just in time.

 
He was looking at her expectantly. Was what she felt inside showing on her face? God. She hoped not. She marshaled the rational side of her brain and continued the conversation, hoping like hell she sounded halfway rational right now. “I thought Scarlett was so happy because she had such a lovely big bed.”

 
“You were poor.”

 
“Yeah. We were. In every way there was. Dad got my mom pregnant with me when she was fifteen. Lust, not love got them to the altar. They were just kids, and didn’t like each other very much. Then I came along, and they liked each other even less, but stuck it out. I think more out of apathy than any real commitment.”

 
“Tough on a kid.”

 
“Tough on the two kids stuck in a single-wide with a baby,” she said dryly. “One thing I knew for sure; they both loved
me.
Didn’t understand me,” she added dryly. “But they did,
do,
love me.”

 
All her life she’d been…
apart
from the people around her. All through school she’d been years younger, years less street-smart than the other students in her classes. In college she’d been stared at, never included. Her marriage to Adam had separated her further. She’d always felt somewhat detached from the people around her, a shield against the anticipation of rejection. She’d allowed Adam inside her insular little world because she’d been ripe for attention that had nothing to do with her IQ. She’d been wrong. So wrong.

 
And look at her now, Eden thought with an inward shudder. Falling in love with a man so far out of her normal world that to compare him to the mistake with Adam was like comparing a minnow to a great white shark.

 
“Are you close?”

 
She smiled, because the alternative was to run screaming for the hills. “As close as three people can be who don’t understand the first thing about one another. My father lives near Las Vegas; he never remarried after they divorced. My mother’s had a succession of boyfriends and two more husbands.” Her mother liked her men rich and dumb. The current flame managed the local gas station. Her mother’s high aspirations were low.

 
They stepped down onto the uncarpeted floor of the entry hall. The vast space was warm, filled with the last dying rays of the sun. Eden enjoyed the tap-tap-tap of her heels on the ancient stone floor as they headed toward the library. “MacBain told me a little about your parents. It must have been hard on your mom and you and your brothers to have your father so far away from you.”

 
“We didn’t know any different,” Gabriel said mildly, shoving open the door to the room. “The marriage was ill-fated from the start. They loved each other, had three kids together, and spent most of their lives apart, just waiting for the Curse to kick in, and for my mother to drop dead. Like your parents, they would’ve been better off not marrying. Not each other anyway.”

 
“I’m sure
they
didn’t feel that way,” she added, crossing to one of the dark leather sofas. “They had three children, after all.”

 
“A fact that they appeared to forget most of the time,” Gabriel told her. “They were so busy mourning their loss of each other, there wasn’t room for anything as prosaic as kids.”