Chapter 10 #2
"Books are my shield," she found herself confessing, the intimacy of the moment and the pain in her wrist somehow loosening her tongue.
"They never laugh at me for being too clever, never betray my trust, never make me feel like I should be less than I am.
They've been my only true companions for so long that I'd forgotten what it felt like to want something more. "
His eyes opened, fixing on hers with an intensity that stole her breath. "And now?"
"Now I can't concentrate on ancient Greek because I'm wondering what you're thinking. Now I catalogue love poetry and imagine your voice reading it. Now I lie awake at night remembering that kiss and wondering if I imagined how it made me feel."
"You didn't imagine it," he said roughly, rising from his kneeling position but only to lean over her, his hands braced on the arms of her chair, caging her in.
"I've relived that moment a thousand times.
I've tried to convince myself it was temporary madness, that it meant nothing, but then I see you bent over some ancient text with ink on your fingers and that little furrow between your brows when you're concentrating, and all I can think about is. .."
Thunder crashed directly overhead, making them both jump, and then laugh shakily at their reaction.
But the shared laughter died quickly, replaced by something far more dangerous as they realized how close they were, how his face was mere inches from hers, how the firelight was dancing in his eyes and making them look more gold than grey.
"You said this couldn't happen again," she reminded him, though her resolve was weakening with every second that passed.
"I say a lot of things," he replied, his gaze dropping to her mouth. "I said I'd maintain professional boundaries. I said I'd stay away from the library when you were working. I said I'd forget how you tasted, how you felt pressed against me, how you made those little sounds when I..."
"Adrian," she interrupted, her cheeks burning. "You can't say such things."
"Why not? We're alone, trapped by a storm that shows no sign of abating, in a library that might as well be on another continent for how isolated it is from the rest of the house.
The servants have retired, no one knows you're still here, and I.
.." He paused, seeming to wrestle with himself.
"I'm tired of pretending I don't want you. "
"You don't want me," she corrected, though her heart was racing. "You want the idea of me, the distraction I provide from your orderly life. But when the storm passes and daylight returns, you'll remember all the reasons this is impossible."
"You're right," he said, surprising her.
"In the morning, I'll remember that you deserve better than a bitter duke still wounded from his last romantic disaster.
I'll remember that pursuing this would ruin your reputation and destroy any chance you have at a respectable future.
I'll remember my duty, my position, my responsibilities. "
He started to pull back, and Eveline felt something like panic rise in her chest. Without thinking, she grabbed his jacket with her good hand, holding him in place.
"But it's not morning," she whispered.
He went perfectly still. "Eveline..."
"It's not morning," she repeated more firmly.
"It's night, there's a storm, we're alone, and I.
.. I'm tired of being sensible. I've been sensible my entire life—choosing appropriate books, saying appropriate things, living an appropriate half-life that's slowly suffocating me.
Just once, just tonight, I don't want to be appropriate. "
"You don't know what you're asking."
"Don't I?" She tilted her chin up defiantly. "I've read those books you tried to hide from me. I know what happens between men and women when they stop being appropriate."
"Reading about it and experiencing it are vastly different things," he said, but his voice had roughened, and his eyes had darkened to the color of storm clouds.
"Then show me the difference."
The words hung between them for a moment, bold and dangerous and irretrievable. Then Adrian made a sound that was part groan, part surrender, and his mouth crashed down on hers with none of the tentative gentleness of their first kiss.
This was fire and desperation, weeks of denied want pouring into the contact.
His tongue swept into her mouth with devastating skill, and Eveline heard herself make a sound she'd never made before—needy and eager and completely improper.
Her good hand grabbed in his jacket, pulling him closer, while her injured one throbbed in time with her racing pulse.
He kissed her like he was trying to consume her, like he could pour all his frustration and desire and confused emotions into this one perfect-terrible moment. She met him passion for passion, her inexperience more than compensated for by enthusiasm and the weeks of pent-up longing.
When he finally tore his mouth from hers, they were both breathing hard. But instead of pulling away, he trailed his lips along her jaw, finding that sensitive spot below her ear that made her gasp.
"Tell me to stop," he murmured against her skin, though his hands had settled on her waist, pulling her forward in the chair until she was pressed against him. "Tell me this is madness and we should maintain our distance."
"This is madness," she agreed breathlessly, tilting her head to give him better access as he explored the column of her throat. "We should absolutely maintain our distance."
"You're not very convincing," he observed, his mouth finding the hollow of her collarbone and doing something with his tongue that made her entire body arch toward him.
"Neither are you," she managed, though coherent thought was becoming increasingly difficult. "You keep telling me to make you stop, but you haven't actually stopped."
"I've got you," he murmured when another crash of thunder made her flinch, his arms tightening around her protectively. The gesture, tender amidst the passion, made something in her chest crack open.
"I once trusted too deeply," he said suddenly, pulling back to look at her with eyes that held old pain beneath fresh desire.
"My previous betrothed made me believe I was worthy of love, then proved publicly and humiliatingly that I wasn't. She took my ability to trust, to hope, to believe that anyone could want me for more than my title and wealth. "
"Then she was a fool," Eveline said fiercely, her good hand coming up to cup his face. "You're worth more than her betrayal, more than society's whispers, more than all the cold walls you've built around yourself."
"You don't know..."
"I know that you kept me on despite the gossip it would cause.
I know that you laugh at my terrible jests about Roman breakfast foods.
I know that you treat your servants with kindness when you think no one's watching.
I know that you're brilliant and infuriating and wounded and wonderful, and any woman who couldn't see that didn't deserve you. "
He stared at her for a long moment, something shifting in his expression from guarded to wondering. "How do you do that?"
"Do what?"
"See through every defence I've built, every wall I've constructed, straight to parts of me I'd forgotten existed?"
"The same way you see through mine," she replied softly. "Maybe that's why we're so dangerous to each other."
"You're dangerous to me," he agreed, then kissed her again with a thoroughness that made her forget her own name.
The storm raged outside, wind howling and rain lashing the windows, but inside the library, there was only heat and need and the crackle of the fire mixing with the sound of increasingly desperate kisses.
Adrian's hands were everywhere; her waist, her back, tangling in her hair and sending pins scattering across the carpet.
When he lifted her from the chair, her arms went around his neck automatically, her injured wrist protesting but the pain distant compared to the feel of his body against hers.
He backed her against the library table, the same one where they'd shared their first kiss, but this time there was no hesitation, no second-guessing.
Papers scattered to the floor as he lifted her onto the table's surface, stepping between her legs in a move that would have shocked her if she'd been capable of any emotion beyond desperate wanting.
His mouth found her throat again, and she let her head fall back, surrendering to the sensations he was creating with lips and tongue and the occasional gentle scrape of teeth.
"You undo me," he murmured against her skin, his hands bracketing her waist. "Completely, utterly undo me."
"And yet you still hold me together," she whispered back, pulling his mouth back to hers.
The kiss deepened, became something almost frantic, and Eveline felt herself trembling, not from fear but from the overwhelming intensity of it all.
She'd never understood before how desire could consume someone, how it could make all rational thought disappear, but now she was drowning in it, burning with it, and she never wanted it to end.
Adrian's mouth traced a path down her throat, across her collarbones, to the neckline of her dress, and she continued making sounds she didn't know she was capable of making. His hands were firm but gentle on her waist, holding her steady as the world spun around them.
"Tell me to stop, Eveline," he said again, though his actions suggested stopping was the last thing he wanted. "Tell me to remember propriety and position and all the reasons..."
"Do not stop," she interrupted, her voice barely recognizable. "Please, Adrian, do not stop."
The table beneath her was hard and uncomfortable, but she barely noticed, too lost in the feel of Adrian's hands and mouth and the things he was doing that those forbidden books had only hinted at.