In Bed with Beauty by Katherine Garbera Page B

his leg from between her own.
    His hands rubbed slowly up and down her back. She looked up at him. His face was flushed, his breathing still too rapid.
    She reached between their bodies, wanting to share the same release he’d given her with him. But he stopped her.
    “Why?”
    “Because we need the bed for what I have in mind,” he said, scooping her up and carrying her down the short hall into the darkened bedroom. He set her on her feet.
    “Don’t move.”
    “Yes, sir,” she said.
    “I like the sound of respect in the bedroom,” he said. He switched on the light on the nightstand. The room was still mostly shadows with a great cone of light in the center. Sarah hovered on the edge of the darkness. Feeling too exposed in this room. It seemed all her dreams and desires were bared to him.
    “Into domination?” she asked, lightly. Trying to mask her own deepest needs. She didn’t want him to know that she needed him with a desperation she’d never felt before. She wasn’t sure of herself at all with Harris.
    “No. But lately I’ve been obsessed with getting into you.” His words were a rasp in the shadowy room. They brushed over her aroused senses like a mink glove and she shivered, needing to be in his arms again.
    “Really?” she asked, giving up the pretense that she wanted to be anywhere but here with him. She couldn’t believe that this worldly man needed anything from her—Sarah Malcolm and not just any woman. She remembered what Ray had said earlier that maybe part of her appeal to Harris was that she wasn’t like the women he was used to. Suddenly she very glad for that.
    He took her hand and carried it to his crotch. All thoughts other than ones about primal mating left her mind. He pulsed against her. She slid her fingers along his zipper caressing him. He moaned deep in his throat.
    “Don’t doubt that this is real,” he said.
    She measured him with her hand. His hips rocked against her and she tightened her grip. She couldn’t wait to touch his naked flesh. “I’m not.”
    “This might be all I have to give you,” he said.
    “I’m betting that I can make you believe in something more.”
    “I can’t make any promises,” he said.
    The fireworks continued to echo in the night and she stared up at his dear face in the dark room. “I’m only asking for one tonight.”
    He watched her. “What’s that?”
    “Make me yours,” she said, standing on tiptoe and wrapping her arms around his neck.

    Harris had glimpsed the dark underbelly of his soul only twice in his life. The first time he’d been six and clinging desperately to his mother’s legs as she’d walked out of the Connecticut mansion they’d called home. The second time he’d been a young man of twenty-one and he’d pleaded with Mona to give them one more chance. Tonight as he held Sarah in his arms he realized that he was tempted to make her say she’d never leave him.
    Damn it. She didn’t mean anything to him. He wouldn’t let her. This was an affair nothing more. Nothing less. He should have offered to make her his mistress. He’d have felt better about their affair knowing all his cards were on the table.
    They’d talked too much already tonight. In the morning he’d make sure she understood everything. Her soft breath brushed against his neck. He didn’t want to believe what he saw in Sarah’s eyes—the knowledge that she thought this was more than an affair.
    He was the master of illusion and tonight he was the embodiment of his training. Suave, sophisticated—an experienced man who wanted only to share a night filled with pleasure with the woman in his arms.
    He’d meant for this to be sweet seduction but he had needed her too badly. Needed to brand her as his if only for this short time. She felt fragile and very feminine in his hands. Though he refused to acknowledge that he might have the power to hurt her. Instead he swept his hands over her body, removing her clothing as he went.
    “No,” she