Then in the next instant he was on his feet and rushing around the counter. She was panting for breath even before he grabbed hold of her. He jerked her up against the length of his body and, running fast, fierce fingers through her hair, he held her for the crushing press of his mouth. An instant later his tongue was sweeping boldly into her mouth. The taste of tangerine exploded onto her taste buds. Tangerine and hot, sexy male. Suddenly she really wanted to lick every speck of citrus flavor from wherever it had ended up on him. Lips. Face. Fingers. There had even been some dripping down onto his chest.

Before she could control the impulse, she did exactly that. She started by catching his head between her hands and drawing back a little, holding his head still to keep him from chasing her down. Then she touched her tongue to his lips, this time licking him instead of kissing him. Her tongue ran over his bottom lip slowly and with purpose, until she heard a frustrated growl ejecting from him. It made her smile, made her revel, for that brief moment, in her power as a woman. Her power over him.

Her hand slid away from his face, over his shoulder, down his arm until she was picking up the hand that had held the sweet fruit. Then she drew back from his mouth and lifted his fingers to her lips. He was staring hard at her, breathing like he’d run a marathon, and when she touched her tongue to his index finger and subsequently drew it into her mouth, he ejected one of those savage sounding growls. And the more he made sounds like that, the more his flavor burst across her tongue, the more she wanted him.

“Ah, Kat lass,” he ground out heatedly. “Doona look at me like that if you doona want me tae fuck you where you stand.”

And what would be so wrong about that? she asked herself inanely as he withdrew his fingers from her mouth and swept her back up into a hot kiss. What would be so bad about taking large handfuls of virile Gargoyle and just having her wicked way with him? Maybe she wanted that. Maybe she wanted to be down and dirty like that.

Oh yes. Yes, she very much wanted to be dirty with him.

A sound of rough frustration burst into her mouth from his and she suddenly felt his hands on her hips hauling her feet up off the floor and with a slightly awkward plop she found herself sitting on top of her own kitchen countertop. He parted her knees roughly and injected his big body between her thighs, his hands on her ass dragging her forward over cold granite until the very center of her core was pressed up against the lower ridges of his abdomen. An abdomen left bare thanks to that low-riding towel around his hips. All she would have to do was grab for that knot and she would get to see beyond that sensuous path of dark hair leading down from his navel. Oh, so what if she’d seen him naked … seen him naked and aroused already. This time it was different. How it was different she couldn’t exactly say, but it was. This time she felt as if he were truly seeing in the clear … no fever or strange circumstance or misconception. He’d come for her, come across that room in order to take her taste over the taste of that perfect, ripe tangerine. He’d somehow seen into the heart of her desires and had acted on them. And God help her she was acting on them, too. The feel of him, so big and vital between her legs made her moan low in her throat. Apparently he liked the sound a great deal because his hands clenched tighter at her hips.

“Ah hell, Kat, I can feel the heat of you through these damned jeans.” His hand curved forward, running over the slope of her thigh until his fingers were burrowing along the center seam of the jeans that were confounding his efforts to touch her intimately. She gasped at the feel of his touch, the boldness of his fingers pressing against her as if all they wanted most in the world was to be running through the wet folds of her eager sex.

“Jesus, you’re hot,” he breathed into her mouth as he began to kiss her again in earnest. Had he been heated before? No. She realized she hadn’t known the meaning of the word. He was voracious against and within her mouth and she felt as though she were drinking pure acid, her mouth was so alive with sensation. It dripped down into her body burning and melting her from the inside out. It was hard for her to comprehend that less than twenty-four hours ago he had been unknown to her and even now, was still a total stranger but yet he knew something about her that she had not known for herself. She had not known she could be so passionate, so hungry for another being. A being she had barely come to know. In the past she had been so cautious, waiting until she was on the verge of true friendship before being brave enough to tell them about herself and her condition. Never mind becoming intimate with them on the level that she was being intimate with this man. But maybe it was because he was just as strange, just as afflicted as she was that allowed all of her defenses to drop.

And now she had his hands pressing intimately against her and it somehow felt more right than any other sexual interaction she’d had to date. Maybe because for the first time she wasn’t hung up so much on the details of what was wrong with her and was more focused on what was feeling so right.

Frustrated by her denim he went for a different level of assault. He grabbed for the bottom of her sweater and whipped it up over her head before she even could think about protesting. She gasped as her heated skin met the colder kitchen air. It was only truly warm in the living room and the bedroom, which shared the cozy heat of the fireplace. Left without heat, the kitchen had grown much colder over the past hours.

He stood away from her for a long moment, his eyes roaming over the freckles on her skin. “Ah, Kat lass, you’re a fair sight for some verra sore eyes.”

And for some reason she took utter delight in his words. Took pride in them. She was proud of herself for pleasing him. How insane was that? Pride for pleasing a complete stranger? It was a study in madness.

He reached out then with his right hand, his fingers splayed as he brushed the pads of them down over her breastbone and the beginning swell of her breasts. He narrowed to a single finger, tracing the crease of her cleavage right to the rim of her confining bra. And it was confining. It felt as though it were reining her in, holding her back from feeling all that she could feel. He stood away from her, making her feel all the more exposed for it. It would somehow be easier, she knew, if she could just be swept up in the heated moments of his demanding kisses. Then it was almost as though she were watching it all happen to someone else. This way she was left with nothing but awareness of herself, who she was, and how out of the norm for her all of this was. Then again, wouldn’t it be out of the norm for anyone? After all, how many hot, sexy Gargoyles were there in the world?