“Shadow,” she said, giggling. They rolled over and over in the snow, and she didn’t mind the cold that inched down her neck. When they came to a stop she lay flat on her back, and Kieran crouched over her, blotting out the sun.
Kieran. Not Shadow. Her vision cleared and her mouth went too dry for laughter.
Not Shadow. His golden gaze held something that had never existed in the eyes of a wolf. She couldn’t look away from his eyes, so beautiful, so mesmerizing.
“Alexandra,” he said. “Alexandra.”
Her own name was something he used to caress her as he pinned her there, his arms to either side of her shoulders, his thighs embracing hers. The ends of his hair brushed her cheek, the most delicate of touches that started a trembling she couldn’t control.
“You… win,” she whispered, trying to make a joke of it. But it was too late. This was no game. She wasn’t a little girl with a young wolf for a playmate.
His body felt hard and warm along the length of hers. A man’s body. A shape her own body identified with the truest of instincts.
Her flesh remembered what her intellect had tried to forget: the powerful stirring in blood and nerves at the caress of a man’s hands. The memory of Kieran’s hands touching her in bed that first morning, when she’d thought he was Peter. And woke as she realized Peter had never touched her so gently.
She stared at his mouth. His lips were slightly parted, a man’s lips, that had brushed hers once before. The muscles of his arms pushed against his shirt as he braced himself, and she remembered the security of being held in a man’s arms, of knowing she belonged there. The wild, urgently physical and emotional need she thought she would never face again.
“A passionate woman,” Peter had called her once. He had made her believe it, skilled as he was. Made her believe he could really want her.
But he hadn’t. He’d taught her a lesson she’d never forget, put her beyond any risk of responding to a man again. And yet now her body responded to Kieran. Impossibly, against her will, her body betrayed her just as Peter had done.
She tried to fight it, but she couldn’t think. Her head was filled with light, and her heart was beating too hard and fast for her to hear her own thoughts. The heat of Kieran’s body melted her, made her throb and yearn and shudder.
Kieran bent closer, impossibly closer. “Alexandra,” he said again. His hair formed a veil that hid them from the world. She forgot to flinch when his fingers brushed her cheek and passed over the scar.
It was a dream. His jaw slid along hers, a gentle nuzzling; his breath puffed against her heated skin. The tip of his tongue stroked her eyelid. Strong arms lifted her from the snow, away from even the memory of cold.
There was a kind of wonder in his eyes as he touched his lips to hers.
Chapter 7
Her mouth gentled under Kieran’s for a single miraculous moment. He should have been content with that, content to feel her so pliant in his arms, ready to accept his touch. It was all he wanted, to be close to her.
But it wasn’t enough. Not when he heard and felt the changes in her body that so closely echoed those in himself. Not when he felt how perfectly her softness fit against him, as if they were two halves of one creature.
Not when a new need came on him—to be inside her, to mingle with her very essence. To taste her more thoroughly than he ever had before.
Memory guided him, too compelling to be questioned. He slid his mouth along her lips with greater pressure, probed with his tongue, asked entrance to her body.
He had almost no warning before her knee thrust between them and caught the most sensitive, aching part of him. He stiffened with a startled grunt and bounded clear of her. Alex rolled over and scrambled to her feet.
“Damn you!” Her words came out as a thin, grating cry. “What the hell did you think you were doing?” Her blow had struck hard, but her words were far more painful. His sweat chilled to ice as he watched her.