Page 59 of Misadventures with a Time Traveler

By plunging his head and kissing me with the same whoosh of passionate violence.

At once, all the reason in my head is destroyed. All the resistance in my body is dissolved. My blood erupts into a forest fire as he molds his hands around my ass. My careful boundaries with him are nonexistent. Or maybe they never existed at all.

I want to—I need to—be pissed, but I’m not. Damn it, this man has spiraled me too high. If this feeling could be bottled, it’d be the only drug in demand across the globe. I don’t ever want to come down…

Even as a greater realization strikes me.

Was this what Dad did for Mom?

Was this the feeling she tried to recreate, with such hideous failure, with all the men who came after him?

Was this the feeling she kept chasing…instead of raising me?

So much for never coming down.

At once, buckets of tears brim in my head. Yeah, the kind that start as a throat vise and then make their way up, already causing a throbbing headache. I hate them. I hate the thoughts that have caused them, at a time like this. And I really hate the pain they cause on Max’s face, as he dips his forehead against mine and hauls in a bunch of fierce breaths.

“My name is Maximillian George Jean Valence De Leon,” he whispers. “I swear it to you, Alessandra, on the graves of my parents. On the very hand of the Almighty who brought me to you. On my own life, which is just a pittance now, but…”

I stop him by smashing three fingers across his mouth. But attaching words to the action is impossible. How do I tell him that I’m one synaptic connection away from believing him now? Or that it doesn’t even matter? That he could be King freaking Tut, yanked right out of his pyramid and transported here, and it wouldn’t make a difference?

That I’ll never be able to give him what he so clearly wants. What I now see he clearly craves. A woman without a messed-up mind and scarred heart. Who has no idea how to give him the passion and devotion he deserves. The affection and joy he so freely gives from his own heart.

Damn it.

Fast train. Short track. This situation. In blazing spades.

How have we gotten here? This was all supposed to be fun. A seductive game. A rush for the moment. A commitment of the only body parts I could give him.

Which, of course, are firing on every cylinder once more.

As this man takes my lips—and kidnaps my breath—with another kiss.

A kiss?

Horridly wrong description of the year.

This is an obliteration. A carnal, sexual takeover. A full-throttle tongue tango. After three seconds, my psyche has melted in the same blaze as my body. There’s no turning down the heat now.

I slide my hands down from his hair and dig them into the thick cords of his nape. I pull on him with needy demand. A rough sound bursts up Max’s throat. He forces his tongue past the seam of my lips and lunges in, stretching me with brutal desire and invasive heat. We stab at each other with our tongues. Bite at each other with our teeth. We suck and roll and lick and crash like lovers who really have been apart for hundreds of years.

Holy shit, what he does to me.

Will it ever be any different? Do I want it to be?

The answers don’t really matter.

All there is, all there can be between us, is this potent arc of attraction, this unstoppable torrent of lust. And though it’s only temporary, it’s perfect. Potent. Powerful. There’s nothing to do now but concede to beautiful force. To let it drag me under and knock me senseless. To surrender until all that’s left to breathe, to feel, to swim in, is the fierce, wild flood of Maximillian.

His hands, moving under my shirt to spread across my bare waist.

His thighs, sinewy and sure, spreading mine out by important inches.

His torso, pressing and mashing against mine…

Until his cock, thick and throbbing, pushes at the middle of my stomach.

My sighs become high-pitched whimpers. I grab his hair again. I’m not gentle. But Max is so intent on bending over me, biting my breasts through my T-shirt, that he barely grunts in return.