softness fitting the hardened planes of his body.

"I'm nervous."

"Will Elsie miss you?" he breathed against her temple.

She kissed his chest above his heart. "No."

Their feet moved to music only they heard in the silence of the night. A night that was not so silent at all

and filled with the resonating rhythm of promise.

Chastely, he bent and kissed her lips. Tasting. Testing. Challenging.

Then he angled his mouth and took a little more.

Their breaths mingled.

"Stay with me." There was a husky tenor to his voice, a strange desperation. "Stay with me until dawn."

She looked up into his shadowed eyes. "I will."

Spreading his fingers across her narrow waist and back, he smiled into her hair. He'd already hardened

to a libidinous length, but knowing he had all night, was in no hurry to take her. For consume her he

would. His body ached.

He molded his hand to her ribs and traced the ribbing of her bodice to claim her breast. She groaned softly in her throat and closed the faint distance between their lips.

"You fit perfectly in my hand," he whispered into her mouth. "Do you know that?" He splayed his fingers across her stomach and slid his hand over her mons, claiming her through her skirts. "And here."

The kiss began to smolder, and what had been controlled and restrained changed into something more.

Something more powerful. More profound.

Heat pooled inside him. He slid his palms up the curve of her back and cupped her jaw, holding her face between his hands, and the world narrowed to a pinpoint of auburn light. He fisted his hands in the thickness of her hair, pulling her head back to expose the curve of her throat to his assault. He began to lose the iron guard that kept his emotions bound close and private. She raked her fingers through his hair, avoiding the lump at the back of his head. Thrown off-balance, Ryan couldn't prevent himself from enveloping her with his arms, from taking a step forward as if to climb inside her, to swallow her. They came up against the wall or a door, he wasn't sure anymore where he was. The kiss turned primal.

His hands closed around the fabric of her skirt, and he yearned to rip off her clothes. Even as he no longer fought to hold back the scorching need that rose within him, he gripped her bottom, lifting her off the floor until she was pressed flush against his body. She raised her legs to wrap them around his hips. Her searing heat burned through his clothing until the cadence of his movement drove him hard between her thighs. Propelling him toward orgasm even as he remained fully dressed.

He tore his mouth from hers with a gasp.

Her chest rose and fell with her own heated exertion. Her lips were swollen and wet from his kiss, her eyes wide.

"We're going too fast." He pressed his forehead against hers, holding himself steady between her legs. "I 'm in serious jeopardy of disgracing myself."

Her long slender fingers had worked the buttons on his shirt, and it hung open to his waist. "We should slow down," she amiably agreed, and tongued his nipple, sending scions of pleasure racing through his flesh.

"Slowing down would be wise." Gripping her hips, Ryan moved his hands up her calves and over the warm globes of her bottom. He moved her body against the hard length of him. "You feel so bloody good."

Rachel's head fell back. "Perhaps...you are right." Her back braced the wall. "We should slow down. I cannot...breathe."

Wearing her corset, she was seriously in danger of passing out.

He lowered her feet to the floor and turned her around. Bracing both hands on the wall, she drew in breath around her.

"Relax, Rachel. When you pass out it will be beneath me."

She choked on a laugh. His words were offhand as he divested her of her dress. Her thoughts were not. All that existed in this room stood behind her, swallowing her in his enormous shadow. She could not speak as he turned her around to face him. His dark head bent; he unfastened her corset with hands that seemed steadier than hers. A nervous pang fluttered through her stomach. "What are you thinking?" she asked him, when he stood back and gazed down at her.

His eyes raised to fix on her face. She touched his hair, nearly velvety black in the dancing firelight. "You have soft hair."

"Do I?" His tone was deceptively mild.

"Beautiful hair." She strove to sound dignified.

He filled his hands with her breasts. With the corset gone and wearing only her chemise, she felt the contact like a jolt of electricity against her flesh, a relentless wave pouring through her veins. She closed her eyes, enmeshed in the sensual contact. His mouth moved over hers. "I'm thinking that I've never seen you naked, Rachel."

He pulled her chemise over her head, and suddenly she was standing before him only in her pantalets. Not that she was resisting, but she was nervous, a fact he seemed to grasp. His hand cupped her cheek. "Are you sure you don't want anything to drink? This is going to be a long night."

She closed her hand over the sponge she'd pulled from her pocket when her skirt had dropped to a puddle at her feet. "I need privacy," she blurted out.

"Rachel...we're getting naked together. There is no such word as privacy."

"Merely a momentary retreat." She stepped over her clothes and walked through the nearest door if only to breathe past the suffocating constriction that seemed to tighten her chest. Rachel had never been more nervous in her entire life. Not even before she'd taken her final civil engineering exams.

Halting, she stopped when she came up against the iron bedstead, and spun to see Ryan braced with his arms against the doorframe, watching her.

His eyes dark as jet, his shirt hung open, no longer tucked in his waistband. A deepening shadow hazed his jaw and matched the wildness surrounding him.

The restraint she'd sensed in him when they'd arrived at the cottage had been replaced by something far more compelling. Rachel couldn't read his expression but felt his awareness of her. She shivered, every sense attuned to his blatant sensuality.

He stepped into the room, increasing the spiraling tension a thousandfold. If he raised his arms, he would easily touch the ceiling. "Truly, Ryan..."

"Rachel-" He caught her wrist, gently but insistently turning her hand palm up.

Rachel inhaled the warm scent of him. She glimpsed the shadow of hair in his armpits. It occurred to her that she was far more undressed than he was. That fact penetrated her whirling mind as she opened her fist, struggling to draw breath before she lifted her gaze. "It's a sponge," she felt obligated to say.

"I can see that."

She caught only the briefest glimpse of his eyes as he bent his head and kissed her. "I even have an idea where it goes."

She met his eyes boldly, found breath enough to breathe, and lingered in his arms. "I suppose you've seen these before?"

His hand shifted to her face, long-fingered and solid against her jaw. "Lie down."

She backed away a step, dismayed that he would seek to perform such an intimate task. But she shouldn 't have been. Her body thrummed with the desire to experience what she saw in his eyes, the blatantly erotic appraisal that laid waste to her senses. "You cannot do what you are thinking..."

His smile turned sinful and, slowly, without even touching her, he continued to stalk her backward, removing his shirt, balling it in his hand as he tossed it aside with his shoes. "And you cannot possibly understand how much I want to touch you," he said, as she sat abruptly on the bed, her wide gaze sliding over his chest. "Did you think to put this sponge in all by yourself?" he asked.

He was solidly built. Magnificent, with ridged muscles and black, coarse hair that trailed down his abdomen to disappear in the waistband of his trousers. His body bore the strength of a man comfortable with danger. She felt diminutive.

She felt feminine and alive.

On fire.

"I used to dream of this." He leaned over her and caught himself against his palms above her. "I used to dream of what you would feel like, look like, all naked and flushed with desire on my bed. What you would taste like."

His mouth suckled and teased her breasts, drawing each nipple between his lips. She groaned and thrashed, grabbing his head between her palms. Braced above her, he moved down her body. His lips hot against her stomach, his tongue circled her navel.

"Ryan-"

She felt strange. Wonderfully feverish, as if the hot flush rushing over her was not caused by anticipation.

"Trust me, Rachel."

There were those three little controlling words she hated.

Before she caught her breath and regained her senses enough to exert some control over this matter, he

moved lower over her abdomen, taking her pantalets with him, leaving her body exposed, the most intimate part of her vulnerable to his gaze.

"You are so beautiful." He surrendered the word like a caress.His broad shoulders gleamed with moisture, his jaw rasped against her tender flesh. A sudden burst ofshyness made her want to clamp her thighs together. She had not been able to breathe when he'dtouched her with his eyes. Now he touched her in ways she'd never imagined. His fingers entered thecleft between her legs, igniting her body, until she was on fire, half-mad with passion. No longerpossessing any control, she let her legs fall open, granting him more access, until his mouth replaced hisfingers, and the shock nearly drove her upright. She grabbed fistfuls of his hair.

He laved her, tortured her, did things that were so deliciously wicked, her head fell back, and her hands closed on his skull, encouraging and welcoming him.

She couldn't breathe.

Her body tightened with passion. Tightened even more with something devastatingly elusive.

"Not yet, Rachel." She could hear the grin in his voice.

"You are such a bastard," she uttered, boneless and frustrated by the ease of his domination. Her knees remained opened.

"Call me what you will." She felt him part her and slide the sponge inside her until it rested against her

cervix. "But when you come, I'll be the one looking in your eyes."

Rachel struggled to her elbows and caught herself on her hair. He was standing above her, his deft fingers working the buttons on his trousers before he slid them off.

Hesitantly, she dragged her gaze over every glorious length of him to touch the fire in his eyes, and the intimacy of the moment slid into her thoughts.

This was Ryan.

Her Ryan.

Shrouded in more than mystery, yet so familiar. The bane of her childhood, her dream lover, her hero in

more ways than she had ever remembered. She marveled at his feral naked grace, unable to recall a time when he had not been part of her existence.

"I want to touch you-" She caught both hands around the width and length of him.

Ryan's grip manacled her wrists almost at once and drew her hands from him. "Not yet." He pressed her into the mattress, kissing her thoroughly, diverting her. "I swear I haven't the control to withstand it, Rache."

She felt the heat of his skin, tasted herself on his mouth. He moved between her legs, his voice a hoarse whisper. "Tell me that you are sure."

"Yes." Her heart pounded against her ribs. Her vision blurred. She needed to know that he felt the same rush of madness in his blood. The same vulnerability. "And you?"

"Jaysus, Rachel." His whisper touched her lips. "I have wanted you always."

Then he entered her, pressing deeper until she'd opened to take him all the way inside her. She was tight, and he was big. He was larger than she imagined. Though she'd held the full length of him in her hand, she had not imagined the feel of him inside her. Her body arched into his hips, joining his passion to hers, filling her completely.

She heard the deep primal groan that might have come from her or Ryan. She didn't know for sure. The muscles in his back were hard beneath her gliding palms.

"Rachel..."

Opening her eyes, she looked into his face, inches from hers, their breath ragged, their mouths so close they touched. So many shadows played in his eyes. "Don't...stop," she cried out, feeling the rising tension climb, wanting him with her when she peaked.

She clawed her fingers in his hair and pulled his mouth to hers, opening him to her hunger. Her tongue moved in tandem with him, equally driven by the welling need fusing their bodies. He increased the rhythm of their lovemaking. Then he pulled back as if to watch her face, to see into her eyes. Her lungs grabbed on to his name, her gaze trapped in his, she opened her mouth on a scream, but the sound remained locked in her throat, coalesced inside her, sweeping over, until she was arching high against him, crying out, mindless. But he had not seen her. Eyes closing, his mouth came crushing down on hers, swallowing her cries where physical and emotional desires melded and imploded.

Together.

Where there was only Ryan.

Lost in his own climax, his British facade broken, he gripped her hips in his palms, and swore like a real Irishman. The heat of him poured hot inside her. He lost himself in the lips that plundered his, before he collapsed on his elbows, weak as she.