His lips took the rest of her words along with her breath.

Oh, yeah. Rene Russo here.

Those sensual lips closed over hers, brushing lightly, tasting. But not taking.

And for an absolutely insane moment, she wanted him to take. Wanted him to crush her mouth in a hard, starving, bruising kiss and help her find that red-hot button of love that had never once hit lukewarm. The man filled a woman’s head with fantasies she would have sworn she didn’t have. Her traitorous lips parted beneath his. Fear, she told herself, it was just that fear could translate swiftly into arousal. She’d heard about people facing certain death suddenly getting a sexual charge that just wouldn’t quit.

So bizarrely, intensely aroused, she didn’t even notice that he was knotting a scarf around her wrist, until he swept it tight, and it was too late and she was tied to his bed. His sinful, decadent bed. Moving with inhuman grace and suddenness, he deftly knotted her other wrist to the far post.

She opened her mouth to scream, but he caught it with one powerful hand. Lying atop her, staring dead into her eyes, he said quietly, carefully, enunciating each word, “If you scream, I will be forced to gag you. I prefer not to, lass. It bears considering that no one can hear you up here anyway. ’Tis your choice. What will it be?” He lifted his hand infinitesimally, just enough that he might hear her reply.

“D-don’t hurt me,” she whispered.

“I have no intention of hurting you, lass.”

But you are, she was about to say, then realized with a flush that that hard thing digging into her hip was not a gun, but a magnum of another sort entirely.

He must have seen something in her eyes, because he raised himself slightly.

Which meant, she concluded with a huge flood of relief, that he wasn’t going to rape her. A rapist would have shifted a few inches to the right, not raised his hips.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to keep you for a time, lass. But you’ll suffer no harm at my hands. Mind you, however, one scream, one loud noise, and you’re gagged.”

There was no mercy in his gaze. She knew he meant it. She could either be bound, or bound and gagged.

She shook her head, then nodded, befuddled by whether she was supposed to say yes or no. “Won’t scream,” she promised stiffly. No one can hear you up here anyway. God, that was probably true. On the penthouse level walls were thick, there was no one above, and the elite were given wide berth unless they requested something. She could probably scream her head off, and no one would come.

“There’s a bonny lass,” he said, lifting her head with a palm and slipping a plump pillow beneath it.

Then, in one swift, graceful move, he pushed away from the bed and stalked from the bedroom, closing the door behind him, leaving her alone, tied by silken scarves to the sinful bed of the Gaulish Ghost.