Bollywood and the Beast (Bollywood Confidential) by Suleikha Snyder Page B

his unruly emotions into cool mockery. “Does my little brother at least succeed at that where I cannot?”
    It was an image almost as nauseating as the ones that had just played in his subconscious. Nowhere near as appealing as her eyebrows arching in challenge, her hands clenching at her hips.
    “Is that your way of saying you want to make love to me, Taj?” She cocked her head, her hair spilling to the side like a fall of dark brown silk. “Does your mouth ‘beg for my kiss’? Is that why your heart’s racing?”
    She threw his words back at him like sharp punches. At any other moment, perhaps he could have hit back. Now, with gooseflesh still raised on his arms and flames still dancing on his eyelid, all he could do was say… “Yes.”
    “What?” Her pale eyes widened. And when he reached out this time, it wasn’t blindly. He closed his fingers around her slim wrist and tugged, yanking her down to the edge of the bed. “Taj…what are you doing? Stop it.”
    “ Phir ‘stop’. Always ‘stop’. You asked what you can do for me…you can do this.” And with that, he lowered his mouth to hers. This was the water to wash down his medicine. Cool and soothing, dousing the burn, even with her lips stubbornly closed against the tip of his tongue. He tangled his free hand in her hair, drinking her in. Sweet Rocky…so sweet indeed.
    Taj had tasted fear. Now, he feasted on need.
     
    It wasn’t the first time she’d been kissed. Worse, it wasn’t even the first time she’d been kissed without her expressed permission. Rocky had, on the whole, enough experience with kissing to know that doing it with Taj, like this, was wrong. But she didn’t pull away. And when her hand should have come up to shove him, it instead curled into the open vee of his shirt.
    Her body hadn’t gotten her brain’s memo. Her body, damn its curiosity, wanted to know just how far he would take this. The soft pressure of his lips. At odds with the desperate grip on her hair. The cautious stroke of his tongue across her bottom lip. So much kinder than when he used it to talk. It all made heat spiral out from the ball of sparks that had settled in the pit of her stomach the first time he’d propositioned her.
    There was no denying he turned her on. Every light in her house was ablaze, the current crackling even as she tried to pretend otherwise.
    His name escaped her lips in a breathy moan, destroying the last vestiges of the act. With her lips parted in that one white flag, he captured her tongue. And the rest of her. He pulled her atop him, until she was straddling him and the bunched up bedcovers he’d tossed aside in his panic, and slanted his mouth across hers in the kind of lewd, wet assault that would demand a dozen retakes on camera.
    This was still wrong, still a mistake. They didn’t even like each other. But, for just this precious handful of moments, the Beast’s spell was broken. He’d made himself just as vulnerable to her as she was to him. She wasn’t going to waste it. So she kissed him back. And she touched him, wresting loose the hand he’d pressed against the mattress so she could finally feel this gorgeous monster who’d battered down her defenses. One side of his face was as smooth as polished marble, the other like the quarry it came from: all jagged furrows and caverns. He shuddered as she traced every scar, every gouge, his trembling only stilling when she wrapped her palm around the back of his neck and waged her own attack on his lips.
    It could’ve been minutes; it could’ve been hours. He was deliciously hard. All over. All Rocky knew was the strength of him, and it robbed her of breath to the point where she had to wrench away just to gasp for air.
    “Enough?” he asked softly, his knuckles stroking her cheek, his lips warm and sexy as they tugged on her earlobe.
    No. Never. She would never have enough of this.
    It took a second for her to register that the question wasn’t an erotic one,