Chapter 37 Genevieve
Genevieve
The rage and hurt of my mother’s betrayal is nothing compared to the need burning through me—to take Kieran as mine once again.
Nine years.
Nine years of wanting him, of never letting go of what we once had and what we lost. All for naught.
All because my mother lied to me. She watched me mourn the man I loved and forced me into loveless arrangements with other men, leaving me more broken and lonely than before.
She made me think there was something wrong with me, when all this time it was her—her selfishness, her greed, her betrayal—that caused the heartbreak I’ve carried for nearly a decade.
Kieran presses me back against the cold brick of Huntley House, and I wrap my legs around him, canting my hips to feel the hardness between us, the desire he still has for me evident even through my damp, rumpled skirts trapped between us.
“Kieran, I need you. I need to feel you inside me,” I breathe into the hollow of his neck. His response is part moan, part grunt as he sweeps me off my feet. I wrap my legs around his waist as he pushes open the door to his home.
I don’t care what the staff think. I can’t comprehend anything beyond his touch—his lips on my bare skin—all of it without my curse distorting his reaction to me.
This is nothing but our own pure desire. A need I’ve harbored deep in my heart and spent the last few weeks denying, despite the stolen glances, the way he was drawn to me even in the night. Only he can fulfill the hunger in my body and the ache in my heart.
“Out!” Kieran barks, and a maid scuttles from the doorway. “Don’t worry about them, Gen,” he says softly against the shell of my ear. He knows me well enough to realize that, normally, all I’d be thinking about is propriety and everyone else’s reactions.
“Kieran, for once I don’t even care who sees me. All I want is you—now,” I reply, my voice husky with want. I slide my hands through his thick, wavy hair, and he lets out another moan against my ear.
“Can you make it to the bedroom, Princess, or should I take you in my sitting room?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he bars the door to the well-appointed room off the foyer.
With deliberate, agonizing care, he lowers me onto the plush carpet near the crackling fire.
My breath leaves me in a rush as he braces himself above me, sweeping one hand down the dripping fabric clinging to my body.
“No bedroom then?” I ask, my voice already frayed with need.
I know there’s no waiting for a bedroom.
I would have fucked him in the carriage if he’d let me—long before I realized everything that’s kept us apart.
The well of emotion he showed me yesterday was only the barest edge of what I feel for him.
Nearly a decade of broken hope and heartbreak, and I’ll be damned if I have to climb the stairs for a bed.
He feels the same—his hands are already working at the cold, wet fabric of my dress.
“No time,” he says, voice rough, “not with you trembling in these wet clothes.”
“I’m not trembling from the cold, Kieran.”
He cocks his head, a knowing smile tugging at his lips. “Yes, I know, Princess. You’re trembling for me. And I cannot endure another moment with these clothes between us.”
Kieran looks at me expectantly, as if waiting for permission to ravish me.
It’s endearing—one of the few things that hasn’t changed about him, despite everything else in his life being upended.
He still touches me the same way he always has: in whatever manner keeps me comfortable, always placing my needs above his own.
“May I?” he asks quietly, fingers poised at the first button.
I know exactly what he needs to hear.
“Yes. I want you, Kieran Greenbluff.”
“Yes?” he breathes.
“Yes.” My voice is confident, unwavering, as he holds my gaze.
“There’s no coming back from this, Princess. I’ll hoard you away if I must, but you’ll be mine—only mine.”
I draw my hand up to his cheek, stroking gently as I see the doubt hiding behind his eyes. He still isn’t sure he can trust me. That realization cracks something raw and aching inside me.
“Kieran,” I whisper, “you are all I’ve ever wanted. This is the answer to every dream I’ve ever dared to have.”
As if the last fragments of control he’d been clinging to snap, Kieran kisses me, and I feel myself falling weightless into our shared desires. What I said is true. He is the answer to my dreams. All my fantasies as a young woman were of him, and even after he left, I kept hoping he would return.
Not even his death stopped me from yearning for him. I’ve longed for a dead man for nearly a decade, and now I finally have the proof I always dreamed of—the truth I always carried in my heart. Kieran is here. He is alive. And he still wants only me.
Kieran’s hand curves around my neck, a light pressure that sends my pulse skittering. His thumb strokes the hollow of my throat before he moves to my drenched garments and begins the slow, steady task of unbuttoning my frock.
“I’ve dreamed of seeing you naked since that night in the ballroom. I’ve wanted to map every change in your body, to feel you writhe beneath my touch.”
I feel a tumult of emotions as his warm hands glide down the row of buttons, slowly revealing my corset and the shift underneath. Once he’s undone the dress, he lifts me with a reverence I’m not sure I deserve, then tosses the wet garment aside, where it lands with a soft slap against the carpet.
He shifts to his knees and offers me a hand, guiding me upright before turning me so he has better access to the corset strings. “Yesterday I was far too tempted to strip you of your corset, just so I could properly admire your breasts.”
I give him a small smile. “Are they that changed?”
His eyebrow arches as he loosens my stays, letting the corset fall to the floor and exposing my shift. I lift my arms silently as he pulls it over my head with a kind of awed hunger that leaves me breathless.
“You’re perfect, Gen. I thought you were then, but now? There is no equal to your beauty.”
I ease back, letting him take in my nearly naked body.
All that remains are the stockings that reach just above my knees.
Kieran lifts my foot, drawing the stocking off in slow, reverent kisses along my inner leg before repeating the action on the other until I’m fully bared to him.
He leans in, taking one of my full breasts in his hand and giving it a teasing squeeze.
“I should have known, I should have fought for you.”
I meet his eyes and reach out, touching his wet chest. “No, I should have known my mother was involved somehow. She was against our relationship—even against our friendship. But that never stopped us, did it? She must have been irate when I still chose you over all the other boys at her ball.”
He grunts and shakes his head. “We can talk about her later. I have far more important things to do than discuss Penelope Ashcroft’s venomous disposition.”
He’s right, of course. Despite everything that’s happened between us, I don’t want my mother’s role to tarnish this moment.
I let my nails trail down the wet fabric of his shirt, finding the place where it bunches at his waist, and lift it up.
He doesn’t resist as I tug it over his head and let it fall beside my discarded dress.
He’s nothing like the boy he was all those years ago.
Once a tall, skinny gardener’s son, Kieran is now solid with muscle—muscles earned through backbreaking labor.
And that labor is my fault. He suffered because I didn’t fight for him, and the truth of that lances through me.
I trace my fingers across raised scars and rigid cords of muscle until I reach the fastenings of his trousers.
My breath catches before I begin to undo them.
His gaze never wavers as I remove the final remaining vestiges between us.
There’s something so vulnerable in the way he looks at me, as though I’m seeing a part of him he’s kept hidden for so, so long.
I don’t think he’s ever looked at me with such vulnerability, such softness—and certainly not since he’s returned to my life. It comforts me and unnerves me at the same time. There’s so much to read in his gaze: so much history, so much hurt, and yet beneath it all, there’s hope.
That’s what I choose to cling to as our bodies press together again, chest to chest for the first time in nine years.
Kieran lets out a low groan as my hands sweep down to his heavily muscled thighs, the textures of his masculine form so deliciously enticing.
“Gen, you don’t know what you do to me,” he murmurs, his lips brushing my ear.
I want to tease him, to point to his obvious erection. I want to quip that I know exactly what I do to him, to keep fighting this cataclysmic revelation that neither of us ever stopped desiring the other.
Maybe we’ve never stopped loving each other either—and that is the most frightening, the most vulnerable truth. Knowing there’s always been love between us, a yearning that never truly ceased for either of us.
I don’t give in to the temptation to cut into him anymore, because the truth is that I want to let go of the walls I’ve built around myself.
Kieran is the only person I could ever set aside that hardness for—the only one I trust to see what lies beneath.
So I choose to leap. I choose to accept that whatever this is between us, it’s a lasting river of desire, of love, and I want nothing more than to submerge myself in it and never come up again.
“You do the same to me, Kieran.” His heart beats like a butterfly’s wings against my chest, all desperate energy as he begins to explore my body, his hands kneading and pressing into my flesh.
I trace the changes in his own body in return—mapping every hard-earned line and ridge, all the ways he’s no longer the same man I once gave my heart and body to.