She lifted her eyes to his. “When you call me Ivy, without the sarcasm.”
“Ivy. Ivy. … Ivy.”
She almost shuddered at the triple dose of sensuality he managed to infuse into her short name, almost liquefying by the third time he murmured it. Acutely aware of her vagina aching under her panties, she looked back at her hand, her pulse accelerating. The atmosphere was intimate. Only a few lamps were flicked on, and the sun had just set in the distance. Outside, the city began to come alive with lights.
Discomfortingly aware of the sound of his breathing, slow and deep, especially when compared to the sound of hers, which was much faster, Ivy changed three of her cards and was delighted to end up with a flush.
Cade had only a pair of Jacks.
He cocked a brow and dropped his hands to his shirt, pulling it off with a hard yank that made every muscle beneath it ripple.
Her breath stalled at the sight of his naked chest. His arms were corded and with every possible muscle perfectly delineated. A thin line of hair formed below his navel and traveled beneath the band of his jeans. His abs were ripped, every square of him. Her gaze traveled upward again, to his face, to those kissable lips, those angry eyebrows, that silken sable hair, and those high cheekbones and that square jaw.
He was smiling, really smiling for the first time in this whole nerve-racking night, and the sight gripped her gut and squeezed tight. It was a good look on him. A really good look on him, unfortunately.
“You’re going to go home and dream about me now, aren’t you, Ivy?”
Those unnaturally pale eyes were glowing with challenge. They filled her with images of them, having angry sex together.
“It would be a nightmare.”
“More like a fantasy.”
“You’re arrogant.”
“I’m right.”
He picked up the pile of cards and dealt again in silence. He exchanged two cards, while Ivy exchanged four. He nodded at the cards she held to her chest like miniature shields, for she felt already naked in her camisole and skirt. “Show me your game and I’ll show you mine.”
Heart pounding, she lowered her cards. She wasn’t sure what she feared most: if she was more afraid of taking off her knee-length skirt and remaining in a cami and underwear, or of him taking off his pants and showing her more of his sinful body.
His body had been made to perfection. He had a male body to drool over, fantasize over, and lose your ever loving mind over.
She forced her eyes down at their cards. Cade had a full house of eights. Ivy had a pair of Kings.
Shit.
Bye-bye skirt.
With a smug smile on his face, Cade leaned back and watched her take off her skirt. Her cheeks itched with heat as she stood, and her hair fell to cover her face as she unzipped and bent to sashay the material off her hips. A strange edginess swamped her as she kicked it off to the side, searching deep inside her for courage before she faced him.
His smug smile was gone.
His eyes shone with a light that was almost unholy, and it robbed her of her breath as he surveyed her legs, her panties-covered hips, those eerie eyes raking her top to bottom, bottom to top. When his gaze trekked back north yet again and latched onto hers, there was a crackling energy in the room so powerful Ivy almost felt electrified.
His chest rose and fell evenly, but the pale gray of his eyes had shifted by degrees, and now they glowed silver.
When he spoke, his voice rasped over her like sandpaper. “Do you want to deal, or do you want me to?”
Ivy swallowed and looked down at herself, all those layers of clothing gone—lying in a puddle at her side. She only had her camisole to open her bet with. A strange vulnerable feeling trembled through her, and she just did not have the courage to stand before this man, before those eyes, in her underwear. She sat back down and tugged at the thin fabric, having to swallow before speaking. “This doesn’t come off.”
He didn’t smile smugly, like she expected. His face was tight, almost glaring again, as though his grumpiness was her fault. Everything wrong about his life, her fault. “Well then, I guess I won,” he said in that coarse voice of his.
Panic grabbed her. “No. I … I’ll bet something else as opening bet. I’m not quitting yet.”
His dark black eyebrows drew low over his eyes, eyes that narrowed into glimmering slits. “Bet me a kiss, then,” he said. “And I’ll call it with everything I have.”
She held his challenging gaze, aware that the crackle was magnifying, making her heart pound. They sat there, caught in something without a name, his eyes wild and desperate, Ivy’s rising hunger gnawing her on the inside.
“Come here,” he whispered.
It was as if lightning coursed through her at his words. She had a heightened awareness of every part of her body that his eyes touched, and it made her tremble.
“Come here, Ivy,” he whispered, his voice gruffer.
She rose to her hands and knees and crawled unsteadily toward him, stopping a couple of inches away. He was breathing fast as he reached up with a big hand and scraped a finger over her jaw. When he cupped her entire cheek, engulfing it in his warm palm, Ivy’s lungs became paralyzed. Suddenly his free hand curled slowly around a piece of her camisole and dragged her a couple of inches closer, and fire licked painfully through her insides.
She shuddered as his fingers slid from her jaw to the back of her head, while he continued pulling her by the camisole. A tremor began in her very center, hot and strong, rendering her helpless against his magnetic force, tugging her forward until she stopped a hairsbreadth from his mouth. He was surprisingly gentle with the hand on her nape, but his grip on her camisole was firm. He tightened it harder as he lowered his head, their noses brushing.
Her throat closed with need; she was attracted to every inch of him.
She sensed as his plush lips went lower, and she wanted them so much, her eyes blurred. The moment his mouth touched hers, a rush of sensations burst through her. Her eyes slammed shut as he pushed her lips open with his, and she instantly yielded. He shuddered and let out a sound from his throat, a rumbling groan that blended with her own breathless moan.
Shivers of need ran through her as he thrust his tongue into her mouth and rubbed it hungrily against hers. She could feel the coiled tension in his hands, which trembled against her as he tried to maintain control. She dropped to her knees on the carpet and slid her fingers up his hard abdomen, aching to touch all his muscles, to soak up his strength.