“If you say so. It happens to be news to me.”
“As if I believed that, as if you believed it yourself,” she scoffed.
Her pretty pouting lips, the long supple unbroken lines of the soft sinuous body, were an invitation to forget all charms but hers. He understood that she was throwing out her wiles, consciously or unconsciously, to strike out from him a denial that would convince her. His mounting vanity drove away his anger. He forgot everything but her sheathed loveliness, the enticement of this lovely creature whose smoldering eyes invited. Crossing the room, he stood behind her divan and looked down at her with his hands on the back of it.
“Can a man care much for two women at the same time?” he asked in a low voice.
Her faint perfume was wafted to his brain. He knew a besieging of the blood. Slowly he leaned forward, holding her eyes till the mockery faded from them. Then, very deliberately, he kissed her.
“How dare you!” she voiced softly in a kind of wonder not free from resentment. For with all her sensuous appeal the daughter of Joe Powers was not a woman with whom men took liberties.
“By the gods, why shouldn't I dare? We played a game and both of us have lost. You were to beckon and coolly flit, while I followed safely at a distance. Do you think me a marble statue? Do you think me too wooden for the strings of my heart to pulsate? By heaven, my royal Hebe, you have blown the fire in me to life. You must pay forfeit.”
“Yes. I'm your servant no longer, but your lover and your master--and I intend to marry you.”
“How ridiculous,” she derided. “Have you forgotten Alice?”
“I have forgotten everything but you--and that I'm going to marry you.”
She laughed a little tremulously. “You had better forget that too. I'm like Alice. My answer is, 'No, thank you, kind sir.'”
“And my answer, royal Hebe, is this.” His hot lips met hers again in abandonment to the racing passion in him.
“You--barbarian,” she gasped, pushing him away.
“Perhaps. But the man who is going to marry you.”
She looked at him with a flash of almost shy curiosity that had the charm of an untasted sensation. “Would you beat me?”
“I don't know.” He still breathed unevenly. “I'd teach you how to live.”
“And love?” She was beginning to recover her lightness of tone, though the warm color still dabbed her cheeks.