Read Online Raven's Prey by Jayne Ann Krentz - Free Book Online Page A

of her body.
    “Last night,” he said deliberately, watching her face intently, “you tried to involve me in another kind of warfare. You practically dared me to take you. If I did that… if I put you down on the floor and stripped you naked and took you until you no longer had the strength or the will to go on fighting me, would that solve the problem? Would I still be obliged to knock you senseless or tie you hand and foot in order to control you?”
    “You bastard!” she breathed. She was beginning to think he could do exactly as he said: throw her on the floor and force himself on her physically with no outward sign of emotion. That kind of dispassionate savagery was terrifying.
    “I’m sure that in your eyes I probably am a bastard, Honor. But that’s because you can’t manipulate me. Or at least, not completely,” he amended with a wry twist of his mouth. “The fact that I find myself spending two extra days in Mexico is evidence that you have some ability in that direction, isn’t it?”
    “That was a cold, hard cash deal, remember? Not manipulation. I’m paying you a thousand dollars a day to stay here!” She was beginning to hate the way he constantly accused her of manipulating people. “It’s your own mercenary greed that is keeping you here in Mexico, Judd Raven!”
    He considered that. “Not quite. I’d call it curiosity. I’ve been growing increasingly curious about you for a week, Honor. Now that I’ve found you I seem to be stuck with more questions than answers. And last night I went to sleep with one particularly large question on my mind. I found myself wondering what would have happened if I’d gone ahead and accepted your challenge.”
    “You mean what would have happened if you’d raped me?” she flung back.
    “Are you sure it would have been rape, Honor?” he queried, as if only academically interested in the answer.
    “What else could it be when a robot makes love to a woman?” she asked unwisely. “Go back to your airplane if you want someone who understands and appreciates what you’re offering!”
    He shook his head in disbelief. “Hell, lady, you just don’t know when to stop pushing, do you?”
    Then, before she quite realized his intent, he used his arm around her waist to draw her firmly against him. His other hand went to the back of her head, tangling in her unbound hair and holding her very still. For an instant longer he held her like that, reading the beginnings of pure, feminine fear in her eyes and watching the tiny tremor in her lips.
    Quite lazily, as if he were only conducting some sort of experiment, Judd lowered his head and took her mouth.
    This time there was none of the wild, enraged male lust she had endured the night before. This time there was absolute control, a kind of questing, searching quality in his kiss. Honor stood stock-still, partly because he was holding her immobile and partly because she couldn’t have moved if she’d tried.
    The sensation being generated in her was not easily defined. The initial fear hovered still in the back of her mind but it was rapidly metamorphosing into mere wariness. The dominant feeling she was experiencing was a strange, budding excitement, a new kind of hunger, and there was no way to explain it.
    His lips moved languidly on hers, beginning to deliberately tease and tantalize until her mouth flowered open in a response Honor was helpless to control. She moaned softly at the moment his tongue slipped into the intimate warmth of her, and her fingers fluttered upward to rest against his chest, half in protest, half in desire. What on earth was happening to her?
    “Judd, please, don’t…” she breathed huskily when he slowly lifted his mouth from hers.
    “You want rape instead?” he taunted softly. He lifted the hair off the back of her neck and pushed her face gently against his shoulder so that he could nibble at the delicate skin of her nape.
    “No! Don’t tease me like this,” she wailed, her