The Dark Highlander

Head canted down, he looked at her from beneath his brows. It was the kind of look one warrior might give to another in challenge, or the kind of look a man gave a woman he intended to thoroughly plunder. Slowly, with lazy sensuality, he wet his lower lip. Dropped his gaze from hers, to her lips and back again.

Her eyes grew impossibly round and she swallowed.

He caught his full lower lip with his teeth and slowly released it, then smiled. It was not a smile meant to reassure. It was a smile that promised dark fantasies. Whether she wanted them or not.

“I’ll just be in the study,” she said faintly, hopping briskly from the sofa and practically running from the room.

Only after she’d left did he make that noise. A long, low growl of anticipation.

Chloe’s heart was hammering furiously and she wasn’t seeing a darned thing as she pretended to peer at the titles of the books on the shelves in his study.

Heavens, that look! Holy cow!

There he’d sat across from her, looking breathtakingly gorgeous in black from head to toe, his gorgeous midnight hair pulled back from his gorgeous face, essentially ignoring her, then he’d raised his eyes—but not his head—from the text and given her a look of … quintessential sexual heat.

No man had ever looked at Chloe Zanders like that. Like she was some kind of succulent dessert and he was coming off a week-long fast of bread and water.

And his lip—God, when he caught and released that sinfully full lower with his teeth, it made a girl just want to snack on it. For hours.

I do believe the man might be planning to seduce me, she thought wonderingly. Yes, she knew he was a womanizer, and yes, last night he’d seemed flirtatious, but she hadn’t taken it seriously. She wasn’t exactly the kind of woman that men like him fell all over themselves trying to get to. Chloe was pretty realistic about her looks; she wasn’t tall, leggy, model material, that was for sure. Even the Security guys had said she wasn’t his type.

But that look …

“He only did it to get you to leave, Zanders,” she muttered to herself. “And it worked. You willy-nilly chicken, you.”

She was on the verge of stomping back out there and calling his bluff; indeed, had moved back toward the door and was about to step out, when he made a sound.

A sound that made her shiver and close the door instead.

And lock it.

A hungry animal sound.

Leaning back against the door, Chloe took slow, deep breaths.

She was in way over her head. It was one thing to be held hostage by a criminal. To maybe fantasize about kisses. It was entirely another thing to be seduced by him. The dastardly man was both a thief and a kidnapper, and she dare not forget that.

She had to escape before it was too late. Before she was fabricating reasons, not merely to aid and abet the criminal, but to present him with her virginity on a silver platter.

When Chloe crept from the study half an hour later, the arrogant man actually let her get all the way to the door before he bothered moving. Then he stood slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, and gave her a look of gentle reproof and disappointment.

As if she was doing something wrong.

Defiantly, Chloe brandished the short sword she’d pilfered from his wall collection, having decided it was best for her size, eighteen inches of razor-sharp steel. “I told you I won’t tell anyone and I won’t. But I can’t stay here.”

“Put down the blade, lass.”

Chloe twisted the interior dead bolt.

The precise moment she tugged at the door, he lunged, and when it didn’t open she was stunned, then realized that it hadn’t been locked to begin with. Frantically, she scrabbled to turn it the other way, but his palm hit the door above her head and he crowded her with his body. Instinctively, she raised the sword and he stiffened, as the tip of it came to rest at his heart.

They stared at each other a long moment. Dimly, she realized his breath was coming as shallowly as hers.

“Do it, lass,” he said coolly.

“What?”

“Kill me. I’m a thief. The evidence is here. You’ll need but summon your police and show them that I am—or was—the Gaulish Ghost, that I held you captive. None will blame you for killing me to escape. ’Tis no more than any honest lass would do.”

She gaped. Kill him? She didn’t like hearing him speak about himself in the past tense. It put a cold, awful knot in her stomach.

“Do it,” he insisted.

“I don’t want to kill you. I just want to leave.”

“Because I’ve treated you so badly?”