His grin was startling. “You tempt me, Mac.” He flashed one last look across the room, but the dance had begun and Caroline and Perry were lost in a crowd of couples. He held out his hand. “Will you do me the honor, Miss MacKenzie?”
She gripped his fingers. “Of course, Mr. O’Shea. Wouldn’t want to disappoint you.”
Liam maneuvered them into the dance with surprising grace. Mac concentrated on keeping pace with him until she got the rhythm.
“You’re not as bad as you claimed, Mac,” he said.
But after the first few steps Mac wasn’t thinking about her feet. She was thinking about other parts of her body, and his: the heat of his hand at her waist, burning through the layers of cloth as if they were nothing; the strength of his fingers joined with hers, cradling them as if they were fragile; the breadth of his chest brushing her breasts, the flex of muscles beneath his trousers, the width of his shoulder under her palm.
“You seem preoccupied,” Liam said, his tone oddly husky. “Nothing to say, for once?”
“I… I’m trying not to step on your feet.”
Liam whirled her about so that they danced at the very edge of the crowd. “Come, Mac. This will be our last dance together. We should make the most of it.”
“Last dance” didn’t sound very good at all. “It’s also our first,” she quipped. “Can’t expect to be Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.”
“Another of your strange jests? I may not be this Astaire, but perhaps I can make up for the lapse.”
And he did, with a vengeance. As the next phrase of the waltz began he pulled her into a ferocious embrace that carried her like a whirlwind about the room.
No formality here, holding her at arm’s length; not for Mac the swirling, floating waltz of a Scarlett O’Hara in her crinolines. The bustle required a more sedate, boxlike motion, but Liam pushed well beyond anything sedate. Mac didn’t have to concentrate on her steps; Liam controlled every move. He made the waltz the devil’s dance people had once named it.
The air left Mac’s lungs and never quite returned. Liam’s breath sighed against her temple, her cheek, her lips. His arm was like a vise around her waist.
“Are you enjoying yourself now, Mac?” he asked.
“I’m still trying to decide if you’re breaking a social rule.”
“By dancing with a scapegrace vixen?”
“No. By trying to see if we can occupy the same space at the same time.”
His chuckle held an edge. “Ah. You mean this.” He pulled her impossibly closer, so that she could feel every bump and plane on his body from knee to chest. “We know each other, Mac. Why should we be formal?”
“Does that mean you finally think of me as a friend?”
“Friend?” His mouth was very close to her ear. “I don’t make friends with women.”
“What a thing to say to a lady,” she said. “But then again, you’ve pointed out that I’m not a lady.”
“Admitting the truth at last? I could almost admire your honesty.”
“That’s a start. I’ll bet you could find something else to admire if you worked at it.”
“You may even be right, Mac.” His voice had gone lower still, almost caressing. Shivers raced from the nape of Mac’s neck to the base of her spine. An area Liam was rubbing with the palm of his hand…
“This is much nicer,” she said quickly, “than the silent treatment you’ve been giving me. Formality puts up so many barriers between people, doesn’t it?”
“Rather like a corset,” he said, “which you are not wearing.”
His hand flexed on her waist in emphasis. Damn it, she was blushing, and it had been her choice to dump the torture device—without telling Caroline, of course. No one would know the difference, unless they were holding her the way Liam was…
“You’re right,” she said. “I’m not. Where I come from, we don’t need that kind of armor to protect ourselves.”
“You speak as if you had something to protect.”
She flashed her teeth. “Not anything I can’t defend on my own.”
Liam held her eyes so long and intently that she almost lost her footing. Good grief, he wasn’t making it easy for her to work up the nerve for what she was preparing to do.