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.
He pulled back. Not far, but enough to pull his shirt over his head. She saw him in the firelight. The body she had imagined. Broader than his clothes suggested. Hard muscle under scarred skin. A history written in flesh.
She ran her fingertips along a scar that curved from his shoulder to his collarbone, and he shivered. The Hound, the man who did not flinch, shivered under her touch.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Nothing hurts when ye touch me.” His voice cracked on the last word, which undid her.
She pulled him down. Kissed his mouth. Tasted salt and warmth and roughness. She kissed the scar on his collarbone. The one on his ribs. She kissed every mark she could find because each one was a door that had stayed shut, and she was opening them one by one.
He made a sound against her hair. Low. Almost a word. She felt it vibrate through his chest and into hers. The intimacy of it, the shared breath, the shared warmth, the bodies pressed together in the firelight, was more devastating than anything he could have done with his hands.
But then he did something with his hands. His palm slowly slid down her belly, fingers spread, mapping the terrain of her body as though he intended to memorize it. She felt the calluses on his fingers against the soft skin below her navel. Rough against smooth.
The contrast made her shiver.
He looked at her. Slower this time than in the drawing room. Deliberate. His eyes roved over her in the firelight. Her breasts. The curve of her belly. Her pale skin.
He was looking at her the way a man looked at something he had been thinking about for days and had finally been permitted to see.
“You are staring,” she pointed out.
“Aye,” he said. “I am.”
He kissed her mouth. The hollow below her ear.
She turned her head to bare her throat, and he took it, his lips pressing where her pulse hammered.
His hand moved down her side, over her ribs, her hip, the inside of her thigh.
His fingers traced the crease where her leg met her hip, and she stopped breathing.
“Edward,” she whispered.
“I got ye,” he murmured against her throat.
His fingers found her center. He touched her gently at first, remembering what made her breath catch and what made her hips move. He found the sensitive bundle of nerves and rubbed it slowly, steadily, and she let out a loud moan.
She closed her eyes. She could feel everywhere his body touched hers. His chest against her side. His breath on her neck. His fingers moving with almost unbearable patience, as though he had all the time in the world and intended to use every second.
The novels she had read in Gordon’s library, hidden behind the Bible, described passion in terms of fire and storms. This was no storm, no flame.
This was precise. Deliberate. He was paying attention to her body the way he paid attention to everything, with the focused intensity of a man trained to notice details.
And the details he was noticing were making her lose her mind.
“That is the sound I have been thinking about,” he murmured. “Every minute. Every mile between London and ye.”
His fingers slid lower, before one pressed inside her, slow and careful. The fullness made her gasp. He curled his finger against the spot that sent white heat through her, and she cried out.
A second finger. Slow. Stretching gently. His mouth trailed down her body, kissing her collarbone, the swell of her breasts. His tongue circled her nipple and then licked it, and the twin sensations met in the center of her body and twisted like a rope being pulled taut.
She was making sounds. She heard them as though from a distance, as though they belonged to someone else. Sounds that came from the base of her spine and rushed through her body and escaped through her lips without permission.
She had spent three years being silent. Careful. Measuring every breath, every step, and every word. This was the opposite of that. This was noise and heat and his mouth on her skin and his fingers inside her and the complete, terrifying absence of control.
She loved it. She loved every second of it.
The loss of control was not frightening. It was freedom. It was the opposite of everything that had ever been demanded from her. Silence and stillness and the careful, measured existence of a woman who was not allowed to take up space.
Edward was giving her back the space. With his hands and his mouth, and the way he looked at her, and the sounds he coaxed from her body that were loud and raw and hers.
His thumb found her pearl again, pressing and rubbing it while his fingers moved inside her. The rhythm was steady and relentless.
The wave gathered low in her belly.
“Look at me,” he said.
She opened her eyes. His face was above hers, green eyes dark and unguarded. Not only lust, but something that looked like reverence.
She held his gaze. It was the hardest thing she had ever done and the most intimate.
Harder than letting him touch her. Harder than being bare beneath him.
Looking into his eyes while his fingers brought her to the edge, and watching him watch her come apart.
Seeing herself reflected in his gaze. Not the Duchess.
Not the widow. Not the woman who had survived.
Just Valeria. Just a woman being seen by a man who thought she was worth looking at.
The wave broke.
She climaxed with his name on her lips and his eyes on hers. Her orgasm pulsed through her thighs, her belly, her chest. Her walls clenched around his fingers, and he held her through it, forehead pressed against hers, hand slowing but not stopping, easing her down.
She lay on his bed, breathing raggedly. His hand was still between her thighs, petting her. He kissed her temple. Her cheek.
She could hear her own heartbeat, loud and gradually slowing. The room smelled of woodsmoke, sweat, and something warm that was uniquely them. She felt boneless, as though three years of tension had been wrung out and left her soft and open.
I want this for the rest of my life. Not just the pleasure, but the trust. The vulnerability. The act of letting someone close enough to break you and finding that they hold you together instead.
“Stay,” she breathed.
He slowly withdrew his hand and brought his fingers to his mouth. He tasted her while holding her gaze.
“Ye taste like a promise I intend to keep, Duchess,” he said, his Scottish accent thick.
She laughed, bright and surprised.
He stared at her with an expression of such naked wonder that her laughter turned into something warmer.
“That sound,” he said. “That is the sound I want to hear for the rest of my life.”
He stared at her. She was lying in his bed with the blanket pooled around her waist and her hair spread across his pillow, and she was laughing. The sound filled the room the way the music had filled the ballroom, warm and bright and entirely uncontrolled.
He had made her laugh. Not with a joke or a story or a clever turn of phrase. But with his mouth and hands and the raw, unpolished truth of what he felt for her. That was what made her laugh. The honesty of it. The surprise of finding honesty in a man who had spent twelve years lying for the Crown.
She stopped laughing. He stopped breathing. The words sat between them, heavier than any vow. He had not meant to say them, she could see that. They had come out of him the way her laughter had come out of her—unbidden, uncontrolled, the truth escaping through a crack in the wall.
“Don’t,” she pleaded. “Don’t take it back.”
He looked at her. The wall stayed down. Just barely. Just enough.
“I won’t,” he assured.
He pulled the blanket up. Tucked it around her shoulders. She caught his hand and pressed a kiss to his scarred knuckles.
“I am not finished with you,” she murmured against his skin.
“Aye, I know.”
But he did not get into bed. Rather, he pulled the chair to the bed, sat, and took her hand.
“We’re getting married tomorrow.”
“Aye.”
“Promise me you will not run.”
“I promise.”
“Promise me you will not shut me out again.”
A pause. His thumb brushed her knuckles.
“I will try,” he said. “That is the most honest answer I can give ye.”
She looked at his hand holding hers and thought about knots. The ones that held ships to docks. The ones that held climbers to mountains. The ones that held people to each other, invisible and strong and impossible to cut with anything less than a blade.
He was the tightest knot, wound around himself so hard that the rope had cut into his skin and left marks.
But he was loosening. She could feel it in the way his thumb brushed over her knuckles.
In the way his voice had cracked when he said he would try.
He was loosening, and the loosening was painful.
But she could not do it for him. She could only be there when the rope gave way.
She looked at him. He was sitting in the chair in his shirtsleeves, her hand cradled in his. Not the wall. Not the mask. Just a man, tired and afraid, sitting beside a woman he did not think he deserved and holding her hand because letting go was the one thing he could not do.
“That is enough,” she relented. “For now.”
She closed her eyes.
His hand tightened around hers. Sleep came slowly. The last thing she heard was his voice.
“Thank ye for marrying me, Duchess.”
She smiled without opening her eyes. “No. Thank you.”