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aroused because of a strange, sweet innocence that had never interested him before?
    She reached for the top button of his shirt, and slowly undid it. The buttons were bone, pale, finely polished, an animal of some kind carved in their centers. The design was exquisitely intricate, hours of work lavished on each individual button. Empress gently ran her fingertip over the couchantanimal. A mountain lion? A puma? It was too dark, though, she reflected idly. “A black cougar.”
    She hadn’t realized she’d said it aloud until Trey softly replied, “My good-luck charm.”
    Her eyes lifted to meet his. “They’re beautiful,” she said, and her mind diffidently included the warm, silvery eyes staring into hers.
    “But outclassed tonight, darling,” Trey murmured, his attention on her exquisite face.
    Empress blushed at the low, heated compliment, at the desire flaring like fire in his gaze, and in a small nervous flurry she unbuttoned the last button on his shirt. Taking a calming breath, she reminded herself why she was there, the sacrifice to expediency and what was at stake, then forced her girlish tremors aside. The transient flutters displaced, she slid his wool shirt down and, brushing her palms over his powerful shoulders, said, “You’re very strong.”
    “And you’re very …” He wanted to say
desirable
, so damned lush and desirable that he wanted to push her down on the bed and take her that instant without preliminaries. “… good at undressing me,” he murmured instead, smiling a lazy seductive smile that lit his pale eyes with flashes of gold.
    “I’ve a baby brother to practice on,” she replied frankly, with her own faint smile and a teasing lift of her ragged, dark brows.
    The prosaic frankness astonished him for a moment.
    It should have curtailed the sensuality she provoked in him—the mention of home and family and baby brothers—but strangely it added erotic mystery to the fragile beauty who knelt naked beside him, undressing him with a languor that he couldn’t decide was deliberate or artless. She was curiously unabashed, and that tinged the whole bizarre circumstance with a rich opulence. As if a precocious nymph had appeared in disguise on a snow-swept winter night in Montana to please him and pleasure him and teach him a new meaning of sensation.
    “Do you have brothers?” she quietly asked, tugging his shirttails out of his trousers.
    “No.”
    “Sisters?”
    “No.”
    “I’ve both,” she said.
    He was about to answer politely, or at least make the attempt with the focus of his mind absorbed so raptly in the pleasure coursing through his body, but her small hand slid down his bare stomach and brushed lightly over his pulsing erection, and he forgot what she’d said.
    “You like that, don’t you?” Empress whispered, watching Trey arch his back slightly in reaction, hearing his low groan of pleasure.
    He couldn’t tell when he opened his eyes whether she was teasing or candid, but he knew if he wasn’t going to hurt her in this denouement she called a business matter, and which he, in the small pockets of logic remaining in his brain, saw as madness, she was going to have to be readied, and very soon. “I like it,” he agreed in a husky voice, a smile spreading across his face. “Now come here, Empress, and tell me what
you
like.” Reaching out, his palm drifted over the soft curve of her breast, slid upward, and, grasping her lightly behind her neck, he pulled her head down to his and kissed her … a deep, intrusive, heated kiss that ate at her mouth and lips and caused, he noted with satisfaction, her breathing to change.
    “Is it always so nice?” she whispered when his mouth lifted from hers, blissful well-being inundating her mind.
    “It gets better”—he smiled a little—“guaranteed.”
    She looked down at him lying in casual disarray beside her, half dressed. “Could I have that in writing?” A touch of impishness sparkled in the sugary