Thirty Nights

4

HUNTER WAS IN THE SHADOWS, which precluded her from getting a good look at him. But he seemed even larger than Gillian remembered. And far more menacing. In his black sweater and black jeans, he reminded her of a creature of the night.

She pressed a hand against her breast where her runaway heart was beating like a terrified rabbit’s.

“You scared me to death!”

“I don’t know why. You knew I was in the house. I informed you in my note that I’d be joining you in my room after supper. You should have been expecting me.”

“Mrs. Adams said you didn’t usually leave your lab until after midnight.”

“Since Mrs. Adams has never stayed a minute past six in the three years she’s been employed here, I have no idea how she’d be cognizant of my work habits.”

He crossed the room, moving with a dangerous, stealthy grace, bent down and plucked the gown from the floor. “You aren’t dressed.”

Wary, but refusing to admit it, Gillian lifted her chin and met his gaze. It took every ounce of self-control she possessed not to gasp at the sight of the twisted scars marring the left side of the face she’d never quite been able to get out of her mind. Or the glint of the firelight flickering on what could only be described as a hook that had taken the place of his left hand.

She swallowed and kept her expression cool when what she longed to do was weep for whatever tragedy had befallen him. “Actually, I am dressed.”

His firmly cut lips twisted into a mockery of a smile that revealed not the faintest glimmer of humor. If the eyes were indeed windows to the soul, Hunter’s reminded her of storm shutters painted black.

It had been too long since he’d had a haircut; his shaggy jet hair, curling around his collar, was as unruly as his reputation. He also hadn’t shaved; the dark shadow on the still-unscarred side of his face added to his dangerously uncivilized appearance.

Gillian was a little afraid of him. She was even more afraid of herself. And the reckless, crazy way he was making her feel. Even as she felt a sharp tingle of misgiving, her fingers practically itched with the need to touch that roughened red flesh.

The desire to soothe warred with the old childhood taboo against revealing impolite fascination with any sort of disfigurement or handicap. And both those emotions battled with the unbidden feminine awareness that was humming through her veins.

“You’re still in your traveling clothes,” he said mildly. “I instructed you to wear this.” He held the nightgown toward her.

The contrast between the delicate pastel silk and the cold steel caused a distinct twinge somewhere deep in her feminine core. With the exception of her music, Gillian had always been a woman who’d ruled her emotions—rather than letting them rule her. That being the case, she reminded herself about her determination to set some ground rules to this strange game Hunter had brought her here to play.

“I thought it might be a nice idea if we could have a chance to talk, first.”

“You don’t seem to understand.”

Apparently deciding not to push the issue of the gown for now, he sat down in a black suede tub chair. He was no longer towering over her, but when he stretched his long legs out in front of him, spreading them open to reveal his blatant arousal, Gillian felt no less threatened. And even more emotionally rattled.

“There’s nothing for us to talk about,” he said.

“We could begin with hello.”

He sighed heavily. Wearily. “Hello.” The word was offered without a hint of welcome. His hooded eyes flicked over her—appraising, assessing. “You’ve grown up.”

“I suppose that’s inevitable. Since I was twelve years old the last time you saw me.”

“That’s why I barely remembered you.”

He had no way of knowing exactly how badly those words stung. A distinctly feminine part of her bridled at the unflattering remark.

“Well, no one could accuse you of trying to get a woman into bed by boosting her ego.”

“Would you rather I lie and tell you that I’d found you incredibly desirable back then? That thinking about you made me hot? That I laid awake nights, getting hard as I fantasized what it would feel like to strip that ugly schoolgirl uniform off your body and touch your soft, white, virginal, adolescent flesh all over?”

“Of course I wouldn’t have wanted you to notice me in that way,” she said, surprising herself by her ability to speak so calmly after his sarcastic words had slapped her as badly as if he’d struck her. Her fantasies, which may have admittedly been heightened by a bit of sexual desire she hadn’t understood at the time had always been of a gilded romantic nature, as if filmed with a soft-focus lens. “The very idea is disgusting.”

“On that we can agree. Believe me, sweetheart, the only females who have ever turned me on are well past the age of consent.”

“Like my mother.” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. Horrified, Gillian would have done anything to be able to call them back.

Hunter didn’t immediately respond. Instead, he treated her to another examination, this one longer, more intimate, starting at the top of her head, moving with tantalizing slowness over her body, down to her boots, then back up again to her face.

He was measuring her, in a flagrantly masculine way that made her vividly aware of every inch of skin his gaze touched.

“Irene was a very appealing woman, in her way. But you, Gillian, have surpassed her.”

The compliment, offered without an iota of warmth from a man capable of making her feel hot and icy all at the same time, should not have given her any pleasure, Gillian told herself. It shouldn’t. But, dammit, it did.

“Men have always found my mother sexually appealing.”

Which was why, Gillian knew, she’d been sent away to boarding school before her fourteenth birthday. It was, after all, difficult to appear endlessly young with a teenager in the house.

“To tell the truth,” Hunter said with a thoughtful frown, “Irene was always too obvious for my taste. She reminded me a lot of the moonshine we used to make in the lab in my undergraduate days—cheap, potent and capable of leaving a man with one helluva hangover afterward….

“Over the years I’ve come to prefer a smooth, complex cognac. The type that lingers on the tongue.”

When his gaze drifted wickedly back down to her breasts, the butterflies that had been flapping their wings in Gillian’s stomach turned to giant condors.

She decided the time had come to change the subject. To bring it back to her reason for having come to Castle Mountain island in the first place.

“My father told me about your threat to destroy him.”

“I assumed as much. Since you’re here.”

He pulled the silk through the delicate prongs of the hook, absently stroking it with his good hand in a way that suggested he was already envisioning her wearing it. And taking it off her.

“What a loyal daughter you are, Gillian. And what a shame that George Cassidy doesn’t deserve such a sacrifice.”

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