Chapter 7
An animal.
Eli stood at the bedroom door not allowing himself to reach for the latch.
Goddamn right, an animal. His lust was a fucking beast with teeth and claws intent on tearing into his flesh and ripping him open.
The tragedy of it all, was that he was everything those women said about him in the bedroom.
Just a creature, generally in search of a good pounding.
A hard and dirty fuck, one without shame or scruples.
Though pride wouldn’t allow him to leave a woman unsatisfied, he’d sometimes leave them marked a little, too.
His hands were rough and strong, often pressing fingerprints into feminine flesh while they fucked. He loved to put his mouth on a woman, and sometimes his teeth, too.
If she returned the favor, even better.
God. He couldn’t think like that right now. Not about his tiny, doe-eyed wife.
Instead of teeth and claws, she used guileless resourcefulness to get what she wanted today, and it had impressed the hell out of him.
Right before she broke his fucking heart.
What a selfish bastard he’d been, to kiss a lady like that and then avoid her like a coward. Like a dangerous, insatiable coward who could think about nothing but the flavor of innocence he’d tasted in her kiss. Of the lithe body she’d pressed against his.
Kissing her was the first time since he planted boots on this fucking island that he’d been warm. Her touch had set his blood on fire, and damned if he couldn’t wait for it to happen again.
What stopped him from wrenching the latch and kicking the door open was the quiet desperation of her pleas on the balcony. Her fear of his ire. Her frantic need to do what it took to please him and her assumption that she’d repulsed him in the first place.
The bruises behind her eyes had been put there. Her skin was peach and perfect in every regard, but she’d been wounded by someone. She carried the kind of scars no one could see.
If he ever found out who it was, he’d put a bullet between their fucking eyes. But not before making them beg for the release death would provide.
The door swung open, and Eli found himself face-to-face with a strange woman burdened with a veritable metric ton of cream fabrics of every conceivable texture. He recognized the hem of the wedding dress as he stooped to gather a silk stocking she’d dropped in her surprise.
“Och, ye’re an eager husband,” she said in a lyrical Scottish accent before giggling and shouldering past him out the door.
Eager. The word wasn’t strong enough.
His wife sat at a dressing table smoothing a brush down hair that already crackled from being tended to. It’d been a riot of intricate coils and curls earlier but had relaxed into sleek waves that fell down to her waist.
Eli stood in the doorway reminding himself to breathe.
He had to do this often around her. Like when she’d floated down the church aisle looking some kind of fairy princess, complete with a goddamn crown and everything.
Women like her weren’t real…and they certainly weren’t his.
She belonged in a story born of fantastical mythology, rather than this harsh and filthy world full of guile and greed.
He’d been so painfully aware that she should have been walking toward a charming prince, not a miserly Midas.
Swathed in acres of froth and cream, she’d been so ethereally beautiful, it had physically hurt to look at her. She shone like the desert sun, her light reflecting off everyone and everything it touched.
And she didn’t even know it. She didn’t see the masculine eyes that followed her every step. Didn’t hear the envy other men portrayed when congratulating him. Didn’t mark the jealousy of women who might outrank her but were far beneath her in every respect.
Beautiful blueberry eyes met his in the mirror of the dressing table, and they stayed like that for a time.
Every hair on his body lifted as a strange voltage forked through the space between them.
Women had greeted him naked before, and hadn’t had the effect she did in her modest, high-necked nightgown that shimmered in the lanternlight and did enchanting things to the luster of her hair.
Eli had chosen this room in Hespera House because he’d enjoyed the dark, masculine blues and coppers, the air eternally seasoned with scents of Moroccan leather, wood polish, and freshly laundered linens.
Looking around it now, he was surprised not to find it drenched in honeysuckle vines, so pleasant was the feminine florals that seemed to drift with her everywhere. She was so out of place here, so pale and unabashedly female among all the dark wood and heavy leather.
She rotated her shoulders to welcome him with a genuine smile that made him a bit light-headed. “Do come in, Mr. Wolfe.”
His body obeyed her edict before he’d made the decision to, all but stumbling forward until he stood in the middle of the room like a supplicant summoned before a goddess.
“I feel like you should call me Eli, as we’re married and all.”
Her smile flexed with amused chagrin. “And you should call me Rosaline, then. Or Ros if you’d rather, as my family often does.”
“Rosaline…” The name felt nice on his tongue.
She giggled. “I like how you say it in your accent. Long instead of crisp.”
“That right?” He felt a smile tugging at the corner of his own tight expression, as she charmed him into a more comfortable stance. He liked her accent too.
And she’d say his name often, if he had anything to do with it.
“It’s been a long day,” she sighed. “You look tired.”
And she looked fresh as a fucking spring daffodil.
“You’ll have to get used to that, a husband old as me,” he teased, rubbing at eyes that felt gritty as sandpaper and twice as heavy. “These lines never disappear no matter how much sleep I get.”
“I don’t mind, you know,” she said.
“Mind what?”
“Your lines. I noticed the crow’s feet branching from your eyes, and the brackets around your mouth that deepen when you’re angry or amused.
I think they’re dignified.” She set her brush on the dressing tabletop.
“I find I enjoy the character they lend your features more than the smooth faces of boys. You’re more striking to look at. ”
Striking to look at. He’d been called worse things. Almost sounded like a compliment. He was at least glad he didn’t disgust her.
“And you look…” Every word that crowded in his mouth refused to be released. He’d not the most impressive vocabulary in the world, but damned if every word for pretty he ever learned didn’t occur to him all at once. “You look too fancy for sleeping.”
Shit, had he really just said that out loud?
Eli’d been a wealthy man for eight years, and filthy rich for just longer than four. He was more or less used to luxury now. He sometimes spent his money on accommodating women or expensive accommodations. On food and travel, et cetera. But his wife…she was something else.
Refinement, sophistication, and intellect. That old bastard Crompton had been right; money couldn’t purchase what she possessed, the innate elegance that dripped from every smooth, soft, graceful inch of her.
She was an extravagance for a man like him. An unobtainable dream.
And he was nothing but a stone-skinned ogre who’d never learned what to do in the moments he wasn’t working.
Looking down, he catalogued the calluses on every crease of his thick fingers, on the pads of his palms. The scars on his knuckles.
Was he really going to put these hands on her?
Rosaline stood and turned to face him, allowing her wrapper to slide from her shoulders.
His heartbeat stumbled, causing the subsequent ones to collide into each other, abandoning all semblance of rhythm.
The high neck of the nightgown was diabolically deceptive, as the filmy fabric flowed down over her body in a gossamer whisp of nothing.
He’d planned to undress her slowly tonight, to get used to one part before discovering the next.
But that fucking thing revealed it all. The pucker of her pert, peach nipples in the November chill, the long line of her tiny waist, the little dark shadow between her legs.
Every scruple he ever had immediately disintegrated in the inferno that scored through his blood and landed in his loins.
Retreating to the bed to put it between them, he steadied himself on the post until the wave of vertigo abated.
There was no denying it now. Goddammit, neither of them would sleep tonight until his hands had corrupted every innocent inch of her.
“Where the fuck did you get that gown?” he croaked.
“The seamstress asked if I wanted anything alluring for the wedding night, and when she found this, I couldn’t seem to help myself.” She plucked at where it draped against her hip, fluffing it like a new ballgown. “Do you like it?”
“Honey. I like it so much I need to stay over here a while.”
She tilted her head. “Why?”
Because that godforsaken garment was little thicker than a moonbeam, and illuminated everything that drove him out of his goddamned mind. “I’m reminding certain parts of myself that they need to behave.”
“Which parts?” She took a step toward him.
“Oh, you’ll know which parts here in a bit.”
“You are not required to behave with your wife,” she reminded him, an unholy mischief glimmering in her eyes.
His hand tightened so hard on the wooden bedpost, he feared it might snap off in his grip. “Don’t go saying shit like that to me, woman,” he warned. “Not right now.”
Regarding him quizzically, she gave him a thorough examination. “You’ve come to bed without visiting your valet first. You’re still fully dressed?”
“Good thing, too, or I’d have frightened that maid of yours.”
Tilting her head back, she gave a little giggle that jostled her breasts in a way that emptied his mouth of all moisture. “Hildie doesn’t frighten easily, but I’ll admit I appreciate that she hasn’t seen more of you.”
His eyes snapped back up to her face, searching it. “That almost sounds possessive.”