Page 71 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin
The words hit him hard. She saw it. His whole body absorbed them the way a fighter absorbed a blow, leaning into it, letting it land, feeling it through every muscle.
She had compared him to Gordon. She knew it was unfair, even as she said it. He was nothing like Gordon. But the comparison was necessary because it was the only language she had for what was happening. A man pulling away. A man choosing distance. A man deciding, without consulting her, what she could and could not handle.
His arms unfolded. His hands dropped to his sides. He looked at her with no wall, no mask, and no caution. His eyes were raw and green and full of a feeling that did not have a name but that she recognized because she was feeling it, too.
CHAPTER 26
She had no idea what she was doing to him.
Standing in the middle of his room with her bare feet and her loose hair and her shaking hands, calling him cruel. Comparing him to the man who had starved her. Looking at him with those blue eyes that saw through every wall he had ever built as though they were made of paper.
She was right. She was right about all of it. He had been leaving. Every morning. Every meal. Every time she walked into a room and the air changed and his chest tightened and he wanted to cross the distance between them and seal his mouth over hers and never stop.
He kept his arms folded because if he unfolded them, he would touch her. If he touched her, he would not stop. He had known that since the drawing room. Since the paint on her fingers and the sound of her laughter and the way she had looked at Gordon’s ruined portrait with joy so fierce it burned.
“I leave because staying is dangerous.”
He had meant it, but not the way she had heard it.
It was not dangerous for her. Rather, it was dangerous for him. Because the moment he stopped leaving, the moment he stayed, he would have to admit what he already knew—that he loved her. That he had started loving her in the gazebo and never stopped.
He did not know how to be a man who loved someone. He knew how to track a target through three countries. He knew how to kill quietly. He did not know how to stand in a room with a woman who was shaking with fury and tell her that she was the bravest person he had ever met and that he would burn the world down if she asked him to and that he was terrified, not of her, but of becoming the man she deserved.
But when she said,Then prove it,something inside him snapped. Not broke, but snapped. Like a rope pulled past its limit, clean and final.
She said,You have been leaving,and he thought,Aye, I have, and I am done.
She said,I can survive you,and he looked at her, shaking and barefoot and blazing, and thought,Ye could survive anything, but I am done making ye prove it.
His arms unfolded. His hands dropped. The wall came down.
So be it.
Neither of them moved for a full second. Then he was across the room.
His hands found her face. Both hands. His thumbs trailed along her jaw, and his fingers slid into her hair.
He kissed her, and it was not gentle. It was the kiss of a man who had been holding himself back for days and had just been told to stop. His mouth was hot and certain and hungry, and she opened for him without thinking, her hands finding his shirt and pulling him down.
He lifted her. One arm under her buttocks, the other around her back. She wrapped her legs around his waist, before he carried her to the bed and laid her down. The softness of the mattress against her back was a shock after the hardness of his body.
She could feel his heartbeat. Fast, not steady.
For the first time since she had known him, he was not in full control. His arms were taut. His breathing was ragged. She could feel the effort it was costing him to be gentle, when every muscle in his body was telling him to be something else.
She did not want gentle. She had been handled gently for three years. Handled carefully. Managed. Controlled.
She wanted to be touched by a man who was not careful. Who was not measured. Who was holding himself back with visible effort and who would stop the instant she asked, but who, until she asked, would touch her as though she were the only thing he wanted in the world.
He was above her. Braced on one arm. Looking down. The firelight danced across his face, the scars on his neck, his open collar. His eyes were dark, and his breathing was ragged.
“Do not stop,” she said. “Don’t you dare stop.”
His restraint broke. She could feel it go, the way one felt a rope snap. The tension that had been holding him back for days, the careful distance, the measured control, all of it released at once, and what was left was just him. Just Edward, raw and wanting and hers.
He kissed her throat. Her collarbone. He pulled her nightrobe open, and his mouth found her nipple through the thin cotton of her shift. His teeth grazed it, and she arched off the bed. His hands gathered the shift and pulled it up over her hips, her ribs. She lifted her arms, and he pulled it over her head and tossed it.
She pulled at his shirt, tugged it free from his trousers. Her hands found the skin of his back, warm and smooth over hard muscle, and the sound he made when she touched him was low and rough and slid through her like whisky. She spread her fingers across his spine. Felt the ridges of old scars. Thin lines that crisscrossed his back like a map of a life she was still learning to read.
