Chapter Twenty One #2
Recall it? He would never forget it as long as he lived.
He could still feel the touch of her lips to his, the needling of her nails upon his shoulders.
It had been the most incredible few minutes of his life.
He took a step toward her as if some invisible thread that stretched between them had been plucked taut, and she—she did the same, easing out into the careless spill of moonlight from the depths of the shadows she had sheltered herself within. “Yes,” he breathed. “Yes, I recall it.”
The moonlight draped itself across her, limning her hair in silver and washing her skin in a pale milky glow. She gave a shy little shrug of her shoulders and swiped her pink tongue across her lower lip as she ducked her head. “Once more,” she said, more to her toes than to him. “Like that.”
∞∞∞
Just once more. Just once more, and—and she would live on it forever.
Just once more and she would do her damnedest to see him married with a smile on her face.
Just once more, and she would somehow make her peace with losing him a piece at a time to another woman who would hold the whole of his heart.
A soft, rusty chuckle rippled the edges of the silence which surrounded them.
“Do you know,” Elliot mused, his voice deep and low, “I could not even begin to count the number of illicit assignations I helped to arrange between Richard and Rebecca. And yet despite that, there was not one single moment this evening where I had even the slightest suspicion that I was arranging one of my own.”
Embarrassment crashed down upon Kate in a smothering wave. “It’s not an assignation!”
“Shh. You really do have to be quiet. We are too damned close to the retiring room.” His low, warm voice trickled over her ears like honey, thick and sweet.
The chill of the library air vanished as he stepped closer, guiding her back into her quiet corner.
“For future reference,” he said, “when a woman lures a man to a private location for such purposes, that is an assignation.”
“Well—well—” A gasp crept out of her throat as her back touched the shelf behind her, and his hand slipped around her to cup the nape of her neck, fingers hot on her bare skin. Hot and gloveless. When had he removed them? “How was I to know that?” she asked.
“You might have asked.”
She drew in a sharp breath as his cheek touched hers, the faint stubble that had shadowed his jaw since his last shave grazing her tender skin.
Her heart beat out a rapid tattoo against her ribs.
Could he hear it racing, as close as he was?
Kate slicked her tongue across her dry lips, struggling to hold any one single thought in her head.
“Is it the sort of thing one is meant to ask?”
“It’s the sort of thing you can ask me. But it would not be the best of ideas to ask anyone else,” he allowed with a chuckle. “You can ask me anything, you know. Tell me anything.”
Could she? Once, she would not have hesitated. Once, she had known exactly who she was, known her place in the world. She had been so certain of herself, so certain of the course her life was meant to take. She had never allowed herself to want more than that for which she had been destined.
She simply had not realized how fragile that constructed version of herself had been.
How dependent it had been upon the familiar, reliant upon the patterns in which she had entrenched herself.
Only weeks in London, and that facade she had built around herself had crumbled utterly.
Not the sturdy foundation she had thought it to be at all; only a listing tower of blocks which had so swiftly been knocked askew.
Somehow, she had become someone else entirely in these last few weeks.
Someone who had learned not only to want more for herself, but have dared to want the impossible.
The whole of her body flushed with heat and pleasure at the brush of Elliot’s lips against her jaw.
He’d drawn her into a world she’d never dared to dream of, revealing a side of himself that she had never had occasion to see.
And in the doing of it, he had revealed to her facets of herself she had never imagined existed.
At her sides, her fingers curled, itching with a sudden sharp longing.
Furtively, she wrenched off her gloves and stuffed them into her reticule. “Could I—touch you?”
He sucked in a breath, the fingers of his left hand clasping her nape. “Yes,” he said in that low, nearly guttural voice. His lips brushed hers at last as he seized her hand in his right and brought it to his chest, pressing her palm over his heart.
It wasn’t only her heart that pounded, and it was strangely comforting to know that even if he would marry someone else, for these few minutes she could make his heart race. Her searching fingers climbed up his chest and past his shoulders—slid into the crisp hair at his nape.
A rumble of a groan vibrated in his chest, and his mouth opened over hers.
Yes. This was what she had wanted; this sweet feeling of falling into something, of the whole world spinning off and away into inconsequentiality.
As if, kiss by kiss, they were building a new one together that contained only the two of them.