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“I dress to work,” she told him stiffly. “This,” she waved her hand down the outfit, “is safe. Unassuming. And completes the image of the poor little orphan child the Vanderales felt sorry for. It gets results. I’m not seen as a threat, nor am I seen as someone who needs to be suspected of searching for secrets.”
“And you didn’t risk your heart, because you made certain you wore a shield that screamed keep away,” he told her.
He could see it now. He had seen it the moment she stepped off the plane, those sharp eyes taking everything in, that homely bun in place and those dowdy clothes covering her body.
She was silent. She crossed her arms over her breasts and stared back at him impassively.
That look made something rise inside him that had him cautiously probing for the feral displacement he was so wary of. It was like a primal stretching, an arch of challenge to an inner part of him that he hadn’t felt in so long it gave him pause.
As though the animal the scientists thought they had killed inside him were reaching out, demanding that he push her, to bring out the woman he knew hid behind those eyes.
“What would you wear for me, Ria?” he asked her, letting his eyes rove over her body. “You have gorgeous legs. High heels instead of those thick heels you’re wearing?”
Her lips pressed together tightly.
“You wear silk to sleep in, gowns that make my mouth water to chew off your pretty body. I know your breasts are perfect, perfect for my hands, for my lips. Would you wear silk that hinted at those curves? Skirts that bared your pretty legs?”
“Trying to change me already, Mercury?” she asked with false sweetness. “You actually lasted longer than I expected.”
He grinned at that. He was pushing her, daring her, and pricking at needs he knew she had. She had been Vanderale’s paper pusher for so damned long she didn’t know how to be anything else. He wanted her to be herself. He wanted that wild woman he could glimpse within her. The one who scratched at his shoulders, who bit his arm when she came, just as he bit her shoulder.
“I dare you.” He voiced what he knew she didn’t want to hear. “Just one day. Just with me. Show the woman you hide, Ria. Show me how she dresses, how she laughs. Show me how she lives.”
Her eyes darkened, regret and pain, want and need flickering within them.
She shook her head and looked down at her clothes. “What you see is what you get, Mercury.”
He shook his head to that. “What I see is the shell of the woman who opens up and screams beneath me every night. I want all of you, Ria. Everything.”
“What you see is what you get!” she repeated as she straightened from where she leaned against the table. She jerked the files that she needed from the table and stalked back to the desk.
He was waiting on her.
As she moved past him, Mercury reached out, catching her around her hips and dragging her to his lap. He caught the files before she could drop them and placed them safely on the table beside him as he stilled her struggles by the simple means of kissing her.
He kissed her wild and hard, the sudden need to fill her with all the lust riding him causing a growl to tear from his throat.
Damn her. She made him crazy to kiss her. It was like sinking into pure fire, being enveloped by it and loving every second of it.
He wanted her naked; he wanted to be naked with her. He wanted to feel her rubbing against him, stroking his flesh and pleading with those desperate little moans for him to make her come.
“Mercury.” She sighed his name as his lips parted from hers and he opened his eyes, staring into her face, seeing the beauty she tried to hide from the world.
Delicate cheekbones, such beautiful hair. Long and thick and sensual. He could bury his hands in it and never have to worry about not having enough of the thick, silken strands to caress.
That stubborn chin. Perfectly arched brows. And beneath those clothes, created to drive men mad with their own fantasies of what she might be attempting to hide, was a gorgeous body.
“Be wild with me, Ria,” he crooned softly as he let his lips trail over that stubborn little chin. “Stop hiding on me. Don’t hide from me.”
He wanted the woman he had sensed in her from the moment he met her. The woman straining beneath her flesh to emerge.
“Who could hide from you?” she whispered nervously. “You don’t even give a girl a chance to think before you start pulling her out of her safety zone.”
“You don’t need a safety zone, Ria,” he promised her, lifting his head to stare down at her, feeling the hard, intense drive rising inside him, to take her as he felt her buttocks clench against the rise of his erection beneath his mission uniform. “You never needed one. Al
l you need is all that wild passion inside you.” He grinned at the thought of it. “And you’ll make me crazy with it, even while I’ll love watching the woman you are.”
Ria forced herself to struggle from his grip, to come to her feet and push her hair back over her shoulders as she stared at Mercury in confusion.
