One Night Is Never Enough by Anne Mallory

of her fingernails against the table. Obviously trying to figure out how to slow the pace of the game, for they were barreling through.
    He’d let her slow it down, and the game in front of them would play until dawn, all while he was coaxing secret after secret from her.
    The games she should really be worried about were just beginning.
    He smiled, patiently waiting.
    Everything in Charlotte responded to that smile—excitement and alarm.
    He seemed far from a patient, strategic type, so why then was he acting like one? She had thought at first that he would be reckless, making moves with little regard. And indeed his moves seemed that way. Quick and without thought. But the way the play was progressing spoke to something else entirely. It wasn’t patience. He was playing a game that was far deeper than simple chess.
    And he was talented enough to know his moves—and hers—far in advance. That he could guess at her strategy—strategy she rarely employed, for she was usually a safe, rote player—terrified something deep inside of her.
    Excited something far deeper. The volatile mixture seizing her.
    Knowing eyes pinned her, lips curved. Knowing that she was out of sorts. “You do not seek the intimacy that love might gain you?” he asked, silk and gravel in his voice. “Above and beyond the consequences of your actions? Is it the thought of true intimacy that frightens you?” He asked it nonchalantly, moving a pawn.
    She moved her remaining bishop in retaliation. “Frightened of intimacy? Something which can be so easily bartered and exchanged?”
    “Can it?” He looked amused, but there was a hardness to his eyes. “If I were to take you to bed now—throw you upon the covers and steal your virginity, do you think that would connote intimacy?”
    She stared at him.
    He leaned forward, stroking his queen, drawing her along the boxed edges of the square she currently owned. “Or do you think that sitting here, across from me, sharing your thoughts freely and giving away your dreams . . . could be a true type of intimacy instead?”
    “I suppose the act of—of copulation—” She swallowed, trying to push away the feelings—that strange mix of fear, anxiety, and want—his latter words provoked. “Isn’t a reflection of intimacy. Perhaps I should have stated it an intimate pursuit. But, we are not being intimate.” No matter what her suddenly sweaty palms stated.
    “No? I have a feeling though that there are very few people you truly speak to outside of talk of the weather and the latest on dits or even your charity work. That few people truly know you.”
    His smile grew lazier. “And yet, here I sit, quite sure in the fact that the Charlotte I see before me is the one who bleeds away in the deep of the night. Painted expectations dripping from her, naked and free.”
    “You are unbalanced.”
    “Perhaps. Or perhaps I’ve simply tricked you into thinking you are safe for the night, here in this game. Still safe inside your stiff boudoir made of white. All the while I subtly remove the starch, bathing the white in shadow, turning it to cream.”
    She stared at him, unable to move. Unable to look away from his eyes, the shadows of the queen he drew along the boxed square the only thing in her peripheral vision.
    “Like those whites and dark blues you wear—the darkness never bleeding into the crisp, clean, untouchable color. Purely surrounding it or using it as accent.”
    She had to clear her throat to remove the block but refused to look away. “And you think this is intimacy we are exchanging? That you are pulling my secrets from me?”
    “Perhaps. Or perhaps you are pulling mine from me.”
    “You’ve given me nothing but taunting words and seductive phrases. I hardly think right now that you are the Roman who ‘bleeds away in the deep of the night.’ ”
    He leaned forward. “That you even admit as much . . . But I have given you such details should you seek to unwrap and use them.”