Only 05 - Autumn Lover

taking your own breath inside me?”
    “Do forgive me,” she said recklessly. “I’ll be certain never to ask you to dance again!”
    “If I weren’t a gentleman,” Hunter said bluntly, “I would have taken the invitation in your smile and kissed you breathless.”
    “No man has ever made me breathless.”
    Hunter smiled.
    Abruptly Elyssa realized that baiting Hunter was not like baiting her English cousins. They hadn’t sent an elemental female awareness through her nerves.
    Hunter did.
    Especially when he stood as he was standing now, so close that his heat radiated through her clothing, sinking into her very flesh.
    “Dance with me,” he said softly.
    “I thought you had lost the ability.”
    “So did I.”
    With that Hunter bowed and held out his hand as though they were on a polished dance floor with silken ladies and well-dressed men all around.
    Automatically Elyssa put her hand in Hunter’s. Without speaking he led her toward the stream, where cottonwood leaves whispered and trembled with each breath of wind. Beneath one huge old tree the ground was clear of everything but fallen leaves. They made a hushed carpet underfoot.
    “I’ll stumble,” Elyssa said shakily.
    “I’ll catch you.”
    Hunter turned and faced her. Deliberately he took Elyssa’s left hand and put it against his chest. Only then did he slide his right hand from the curve of her waist to the small of her back.
    The intimacy of the act made Elyssa’s mouth go dry. Other men had held her like this and she had been unmoved. Some had tried to hold her closer, which had only annoyed her.
    None of those men had made her pulse race. None of them had made her dizzy with a touch, a glance. None of them had made her feel lighter than fire, more delicate, more mysterious.
    Hunter did.
    For Elyssa it was like being in one of her restlessdreams—darkness and moonlight, the scent of rosemary and the rippling murmur of water, Hunter’s eyes watching her with a hunger that made her heart turn over.
    “Sing for us,” he whispered.
    At first Elyssa’s throat refused to cooperate. She swallowed and tried again.
    The husky, hesitant strains of a waltz lifted into the night.
    Hunter gathered Elyssa into his arms and began to dance as though in a ballroom suffused with laughter and lamplight. Gracefully she followed his lead, despite the uneven ground.
    When Elyssa stumbled, she felt the power of Hunter’s lean body. He lifted her without effort, breathed a word over her hair, and set her back on her feet once more in a swirl of silk.
    “What did you say?” she whispered.
    “Nothing.”
    “But you did.”
    Without warning Hunter turned in a full circle, then another, then a third, spinning Elyssa with him until she was breathless. She smiled, watching him with yearning in her eyes and a song on her lips.
    “I dreamed of this,” Elyssa said huskily.
    “Of dancing?”
    “Dancing. Moonlight. You.”
    She felt the subtle tightening of Hunter’s body.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “My cousins berated me for not being coy.”
    Hunter didn’t want to talk about how Elyssa’s loose conduct had shocked her proper English cousins. He didn’t even want to think about it.
    He just wanted to enjoy a bit of it himself before he called a halt and taught Elyssa that all men couldn’t be controlled by the sleek, hot promise of a woman’s body.
    With an eagerness Hunter barely concealed, he allowed his arms to do what they had been wanting to do for a long time. Slowly he pulled Elyssa close, then closer still.
    A subtle stiffening overtook her body as his thighs pressed against hers though layers of cloth.
    “Why fight me?” Hunter whispered. “You sense the wildfire waiting for us as clearly as I do.”
    “What?”
    “This.”
    Very carefully, Hunter fitted his mouth to Elyssa’s.
    The first smooth touch of her lips burned him so fiercely that it was all he could do not to groan aloud. The depth of his hunger shocked him.
    Hunter wanted to thrust his tongue between Elyssa’s lips and demand entrance to her mouth, but only a fool revealed the extent of his hunger to a flirt. Hunter wasn’t a fool.
    All he permitted himself was a chaste kiss…and a sweet nibbling along the line of Elyssa’s mouth that was just short of a plea.
    The catch and sigh of her minty breath over Hunter’s lips was as heady as whiskey to his heightened senses. His arms tightened just a bit more, pulling Elyssa closer to the hungry contours of his