His words, a raw, ragged breath of warning—Do not tempt me—hung in the charged air between them, more intimate than a kiss, more dangerous than a blade. The world seemed to narrow to the space of a heartbeat, to the inches that separated her skin from his, to the storm she saw raging in the depths of his frozen eyes.
For a dizzying moment, she was lost in it, caught in the sheer, gravitational pull of him. This was the man beneath the Duke's mask. Not cold, not empty, but a creature of ancient, violent, and closely guarded fires. And those fires were, impossibly, burning for her.
Then, her own fire, the defiant, rebellious core of her that refused to be cowed, roared back to life. She wrenched her arm from his grasp, the sudden absence of his touch a shock of cold. She stumbled back a step, putting the desk between them once more, a fragile barricade against the tempest he had unleashed in her quiet sitting room.
