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badly, he could taste the blood in his mouth. It doesn’t matter, his conscience repeated. She said it doesn’t matter, so it doesn’t matter, and he drove in again.
    Her muffled cry exploded across his lips as his mouth lowered to kiss her.
    “Oh, hell.” He exhaled deeply, drawing back, and, poised on his elbows, looked down at her uncertainly, his long dark hair framing his face like black silk.
    “I won’t cry out again,” she whispered, her voice more certain than the poignant depths of her shadowy eyes. “Please … I must have the money.”
    It was all too odd and too sudden and too out of character for him. Damn … plundering a virgin, making her cry in fear and pain.
Steady, you’ll live if you don’t have her
, he told himself, but quivering need played devil’s advocate to that platitude. She was urging him on. His body was even more fiercely demanding he take her. “Hell and damnation,” he muttered disgruntedly. The problem was terrible, demanding immediate answers, and he wasn’t thinking too clearly, only feeling a delirious excitement quite detached from moral judgment. And adamant. “Bloody hell,” he breathed, and in that moment, rational thought gained a fingertip control on the ragged edges of his lust. “Keep the money. I don’t want to—” He said it quickly, before he’d change his mind, then paused and smiled. “Obviously that’s not entirely true, but I don’t ruin virgins,” he said levelly.
    Empress had not survived the death of her parents and the months following, struggling to stay alive in the wilderness, without discovering in herself immense strength. She summonedit now, shakily but determinedly. “It’s not a moral dilemma. It’s a business matter and my responsibility. I insist.”
    He laughed, his smile close and deliciously warm. “Here I’m refusing a woman insisting I take her virginity. I must be crazy.”
    “The world’s crazy sometimes, I think,” she replied softly, aware of the complex reasons prompting her conduct.
    “Tonight, at least,” he murmured, “it’s more off track than usual.” But even for a wild young man notorious as a womanizer, the offered innocence was too strangely bizarre. And maybe too businesslike for a man who found pleasure and delight in the act. It was not flattering to be a surrogate for a business matter. “Look,” he said with an obvious effort, “thanks but no thanks. I’m not interested. But keep the money. I admire your courage.” And rolling off her, he lay on his back and shouted,
“Flo!”
    “No!” Empress cried, and was on top of him before he drew his next breath, terrified he’d change his mind about the money, terrified he’d change his mind in the morning when his head was clear and he woke up in Flo’s arms. Fifty thousand dollars was a huge sum of money to give away on a whim, or to lose to some misplaced moral scruple. She must convince him to stay with her, then at least she could earn the money. Or at least try.
    Lying like silken enchantment on his lean, muscled body, she covered his face with kisses. Breathless, rushing kisses, a young girl’s simple closemouthed kisses. Then, in a flush of boldness, driven by necessity, a tentative dancing lick of her small tongue slid down his straight nose, to his waiting mouth. When her tongue lightly caressed the arched curve of his upper lip, his hands came up and closed on her naked shoulders, and he drew the teasing tip into his mouth. He sucked on it gently, slowly, as if he envisioned a lifetime without interruptions, until the small, sun-kissed shoulders beneath his hands trembled in tiny quivers.
    Strange, fluttering wing beats sped through her heating blood, and a curious languor caused Empress to twine her arms around Trey’s strong neck. But her heart was beating hard like the Indian drums whose sound carried far up to their hidden valley in summer, for fear outweighed languor still. He mustn’t go to Flo. Slipping her fingers