Thirty Nights. JoAnn Ross

had no way of knowing exactly how badly those words stung. A distinctly feminine part of her bridled at the unflattering remark.

      “Well, no one could accuse you of trying to get a woman into bed by boosting her ego.”

      “Would you rather I lie and tell you that I’d found you incredibly desirable back then? That thinking about you made me hot? That I laid awake nights, getting hard as I fantasized what it would feel like to strip that ugly schoolgirl uniform off your body and touch your soft, white, virginal, adolescent flesh all over?”

      “Of course I wouldn’t have wanted you to notice me in that way,” she said, surprising herself by her ability to speak so calmly after his sarcastic words had slapped her as badly as if he’d struck her. Her fantasies, which may have admittedly been heightened by a bit of sexual desire she hadn’t understood at the time had always been of a gilded romantic nature, as if filmed with a soft-focus lens. “The very idea is disgusting.”

      “On that we can agree. Believe me, sweetheart, the only females who have ever turned me on are well past the age of consent.”

      “Like my mother.” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. Horrified, Gillian would have done anything to be able to call them back.

      Hunter didn’t immediately respond. Instead, he treated her to another examination, this one longer, more intimate, starting at the top of her head, moving with tantalizing slowness over her body, down to her boots, then back up again to her face.

      He was measuring her, in a flagrantly masculine way that made her vividly aware of every inch of skin his gaze touched.

      “Irene was a very appealing woman, in her way. But you, Gillian, have surpassed her.”

      The compliment, offered without an iota of warmth from a man capable of making her feel hot and icy all at the same time, should not have given her any pleasure, Gillian told herself. It shouldn’t. But, dammit, it did.

      “Men have always found my mother sexually appealing.”

      Which was why, Gillian knew, she’d been sent away to boarding school before her fourteenth birthday. It was, after all, difficult to appear endlessly young with a teenager in the house.

      “To tell the truth,” Hunter said with a thoughtful frown, “Irene was always too obvious for my taste. She reminded me a lot of the moonshine we used to make in the lab in my undergraduate days—cheap, potent and capable of leaving a man with one helluva hangover afterward….

      “Over the years I’ve come to prefer a smooth, complex cognac. The type that lingers on the tongue.”

      When his gaze drifted wickedly back down to her breasts, the butterflies that had been flapping their wings in Gillian’s stomach turned to giant condors.

      She decided the time had come to change the subject. To bring it back to her reason for having come to Castle Mountain island in the first place.

      “My father told me about your threat to destroy him.”

      “I assumed as much. Since you’re here.”

      He pulled the silk through the delicate prongs of the hook, absently stroking it with his good hand in a way that suggested he was already envisioning her wearing it. And taking it off her.

      “What a loyal daughter you are, Gillian. And what a shame that George Cassidy doesn’t deserve such a sacrifice.”