Chapter 33
The townhouse had a blue door.
That was the first thing Valeria noticed. Not the stone walls or the overgrown garden or the smoke rising from the chimney. But the door. Bright blue, the color of a summer sky, the color of a door that had been painted by someone who wanted to see it from a distance and know he was home.
“It’s lovely,” she breathed.
“It’s a ruin.”
“I like ruins. Ruins have character. Ruins have been through something and survived.” She looked at him. “I have a fondness for things that survive.”
He unlocked the blue door.
The hallway was narrow and smelled of woodsmoke, dust, and the particular silence of a house that had been empty for too long. The wallpaper was faded. The floorboards creaked. There was a mirror in the hallway with a crack in the corner that caught the light and split it into fragments.
“Nathaniel found it,” Edward revealed. “When the Queen gave me the title. He said a duke needed a house, and I said I didn’t need anything, and he said that was exactly the problem and bought it anyway.”
“I like Nathaniel already.”
“Everyone likes Nathaniel. It’s infuriating.”
He lit a fire in the sitting room. The furniture was simple.
A settee with worn cushions. Two chairs.
A desk with nothing on it except dust. Bookshelves, half empty.
A window that faced the garden, which was a generous word for the tangle of overgrown roses and weeds, and one determined foxglove that had somehow survived neglect and was blooming against the wall like a small act of defiance.
Valeria walked through the rooms. Touched the walls.
Opened the curtains. Let the light in. She was doing the thing he had watched her do at Thornhill, the quiet claiming.
Making a space hers with her presence. With her hands on the surfaces, her eyes on the windows, and the way she stood in the center of a room and breathed it in as though she could taste the history of the walls.
“There are four bedrooms,” he explained. “The kitchen is small but sound. The garden needs work. Everything needs work.”
“Four bedrooms,” she repeated.
She looked at him. He looked at her. They both understood what four bedrooms meant. Room for more than two. Room for the family she had asked for and he had promised.
“We could make it ours,” she said. “Thornhill was always Gordon’s. Even after he died, his portrait watched from the wall. His ghost sat in every chair. But this…” She looked around the sitting room. The worn settee. The dusty desk. The foxglove in the window. “This could be ours. A fresh start.”
“Aye.” His voice was quiet. “A fresh start.”
She crossed the room and stopped in front of him. Close. Her hands found his shirt. She gripped the linen the way she had at the altar, the way she had in his bedroom, the way she always gripped him when she was about to say something that mattered.
“No more running. No more chairs. No more closed doors. No more kissing my palm and walking away.”
“No more running,” he agreed.
“Swear it.”
“I swear it.”
“On what?”
He thought about it. “On the beetle in my pocket.”
She laughed.
God, her laugh. The sound of it in this empty house, filling the rooms, bouncing off the bare walls, seeping into the faded wallpaper and the creaking floorboards and the cracked mirror in the hallway.
Edward would fill this house with that sound. He would tear down walls and build new ones, plant roses and fix the garden path, learn to cook something other than camp rations, and do whatever it took to hear that laugh every day for the rest of his life.
She kissed him. Her hands on his face. Her mouth on his. And this time, neither of them pulled away.
He carried her up the stairs.
The bedroom was simple. A bed with white sheets. A window that overlooked the garden. The late afternoon sun filtered through the glass and painted everything gold.
He set her down on the edge of the bed and knelt in front of her.
He is kneeling. He is kneeling. The most dangerous man in England is on his knees in front of me, and his eyes are full of something that looks like reverence. If I do not touch him in the next three seconds, I will lose my mind.
“Tell me what ye want.” His voice was low and raspy. The voice he used in the dark, in the firelight, in the moments between them that belonged to no one else.
“You,” she replied. “All of you. No walls. No distance. Just you.”
He reached for the laces of her dress with steady fingers. He had undressed her before, in the drawing room, in his bedroom on the eve of their wedding. But those times had been urgent, half-frantic, driven by the desperation of almost.
This was different. This was slow. This was deliberate. This was a man unwrapping something precious, taking his time, learning the shape of it with his hands.
The dress fell. The chemise beneath it was thin white cotton, and the sunlight turned it transparent. She heard his breath catch. A sound she would never tire of. The sharp intake of breath of a man undone by the sight of her.
“Valeria.” Her name in his mouth sounded like a prayer.
She pulled her chemise over her head, baring herself to him. No corset. No layers. No armor. She sat on the edge of the bed in the golden light, with her hair falling over her shoulders and her skin warm and her heart hammering, and she let him look.
He did. His eyes trailed over her. Not assessing, but worshipping. The hollow at the base of her throat. The slope of her collarbone. The swell of her breasts. The soft curve of her belly. The curve of her hip.
He looked at her the way he looked at everything, with focus and attention and the devastating thoroughness of a man who missed nothing.
But this was different from the way he read rooms and counted exits. This was the way a man looked at something beautiful that he had been given and did not quite believe he deserved.
“Ye’re shaking,” he said softly.
“I’m not afraid.”
“I know ye’re not. Ye’ve never been afraid of me. Not once.”
“Then stop looking at me like I might break.”
“I’m not looking at ye like ye might break.” He stood and pulled his shirt over his head.
She saw the scars. She had seen them before, glimpses in the gazebo, in the firelight. Now, she saw them all. A web of white lines across his chest and shoulders. A long, curved scar across his ribs. A jagged mark on his left shoulder that looked like a poorly healed knife wound.
The body of a man who had been hurt many times and had healed every time and kept going because stopping was not something he did.
“I’m looking at ye like ye’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he murmured. “And I have seen a great deal of the world.”
She reached for him and pressed her hands against his chest. Her fingers traced the scar on his ribs, the one that curved like a question mark. He shivered under her touch. She felt the muscles tense and release.
He was letting her. Letting her hands map the damage. Letting her see what he had hidden from everyone. Every scar was a story he had never told. Every mark was a night in a foreign city when he had nearly died and come back because dying was not in his nature.
She would learn them all. She would trace them in the dark and ask him for the stories, and he would tell her because he was done hiding.
“Lie down,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “Are ye giving the Hound orders, Duchess?”
“Yes. Lie down.”
He did. He lay back on the white sheets and looked up at her.
She climbed over him and kissed his mouth and then his jaw and then his throat and then the scar on his neck, the one she had wanted to trace since the masquerade, the one she had spent weeks imagining under her fingertips.
He groaned. A low, rough sound that vibrated through her chest and settled in her belly.
She kissed down his body. Every scar. Every mark. The knife wound on his shoulder. The long line across his ribs. The faded mark above his hip that looked like a burn.
She kissed him with her whole mouth, lips, and tongue, tasting salt and skin and the warm, clean scent that was just him.
She was claiming him the way she claimed rooms. With her hands.
With her presence. With the quiet, determined certainty of a woman who had decided that this man was hers and she was never letting go.
“Valeria.” His voice was strained. His hands found her hair. “If ye keep doing that, I won’t be able to…”
“Good.”
He made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a groan. And then his hands were on her waist, and he was flipping her onto her back.
He held himself above her, braced on one arm. The sunlight caught his face. His green eyes. His tight jaw. The expression of a man whose self-control was hanging by a thread and who was not entirely sorry about it.
“My turn,” he purred.
He kissed her deeply, thoroughly. The kind of kiss that erased everything—every thought, every fear, every memory of every other man who had ever looked at her or touched her or tried to claim her.
There was only Edward. Only his mouth, his hands, the weight of him above her, and the heat of his skin against hers.
His mouth trailed down her throat. Her collarbone. He cupped her breast in his hand, and his thumb traced her nipple. She arched into his touch, moaning.
He replaced his thumb with his mouth, and she gasped. The sensation was sharp and sweet, and it radiated through her belly, warm and aching.
“Edward.” His name came out broken.
“I’m here.”
His mouth moved lower. Her stomach. Her hip. The inside of her thigh. He kissed the tender skin there, and she trembled. Not from fear, but from want. From the desperate, overwhelming need to be touched by this man in the place where she was most vulnerable.
She had spent three years protecting that vulnerability. Guarding it. Building walls around it. And now she was opening the gates and letting him in because he had earned it. Because he had waited. Because he had never once tried to force them open.
His hand slid between her thighs. She was wet. She had been wet since the garden, since he said I love ye with his eyes closed and his face open and his heart in his mouth.
His fingers found her. Gentle at first, remembering what she liked, the rhythm he had learned in the drawing room, in his bedroom, in the small hours when they had explored each other with the desperate tenderness of two people who had both been starved of touch and were only now learning what it meant to be fed.
She opened for him completely. No hesitation.
No fear. She opened her body, her heart, and the last locked door inside her that Gordon had tried to seal shut forever, and she gave it all to the man who had never once tried to force it open.
Who had waited. Who had sat in a chair and watched her sleep, painted flowers on portraits, carried beetles in his pocket, and who had done all of this without asking for anything in return.
He entered her slowly. She felt the stretch, the fullness, the intimate closeness of his body joined with hers.
She had never felt this before. She had spent three years convincing a man that she was barren to avoid this exact moment.
And now she was here, in a house with a blue door and overgrown roses, and the man inside her was looking at her with green eyes full of wonder and love and the careful, trembling restraint of a man who would stop the instant she asked.
She did not ask.
“More,” she whispered.
He moved, slowly at first, watching her face. She watched him back. His jaw was clenched. The muscles in his arms were taut. He was holding back, she could feel it. The leashed power. The discipline. Twelve years of control straining against the need to let go.
“Don’t hold back,” she urged.
Something broke in his expression. The restraint snapped.
He slid deeper into her. She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him closer.
The sound she made was not quiet or polite or proper, but she did not care.
She did not care about being proper. She cared about this.
About him. About the heat and the weight and the rhythm and his mouth on her neck and his hands in her hair and the sound of his breathing, ragged and desperate and beautiful.
The pleasure built. His fingers found her pearl, and she came apart. Climax crashed through her in waves, and she cried out his name. He held her through it, steady and sure, and then he followed her with a groan that she felt in her bones.
He collapsed beside her. His arm across her waist. His face buried in her hair. Their breathing filled the room, fast and uneven, and the sunlight moved across the white sheets and turned their tangled bodies gold.
She lay still. She could feel his heartbeat against her back, fast but slowing. His hand spread across her stomach. Warm. Protective. The hand of a man who was already imagining what might grow there.
They lay there until the sun went down, the room went dark, and the only light was the fire he had built while she dozed. She watched the shadows on the ceiling and felt, for the first time in four years, completely and utterly safe.
Not the absence of danger, but the presence of someone who would stand between her and the dark and never, ever leave.