Chapter 34
“Your hands are shaking.”
Mary closed the door behind her. Evander’s fingers trembled at his sides. She watched him curl them into fists and uncurl them, and the trembling did not stop.
“I know,” he said.
Mary moved closer to him. The morning light had grown warmer, spilling through the window and softening the room around them.
She took his hands in hers and turned them palm up, feeling the strength in them, the restraint, the faint tension he had not yet let go.
Her thumbs moved slowly over his wrists, gentle circles meant to soothe what words had not yet reached.
“The last time I was in this room,” she said, “I told you I could not do this. Not as an arrangement.”
“I remember.”
“This is not an arrangement.”
“No.” Evander’s voice was rough. “This is not an arrangement.”
Mary lifted his hand and pressed it against her cheek.
His palm was warm, his fingers unsteady, and she turned her face into his touch and closed her eyes and let herself feel the weight of what was finally happening.
His hand against her skin. His breath, shallow and quick.
The tension in his body, not the old tension of control and distance, but something new.
The tension of a man standing at the edge of something he wanted so badly that wanting itself had become a kind of fear.
She opened her eyes. Evander’s face was close, his gaze dark and open, and the rigid composure he wore like armor had dissolved entirely. What remained was the man beneath it. Vulnerable. Present. Hers.
“I am going to kiss you now,” she said. “And I am not going to stop.”
She kissed him. Slowly. Her mouth found his with a tenderness that made him exhale against her lips, a long, shuddering breath that carried the last of his resistance out of his body.
His hands came up and cradled her face, the trembling steadier now, and he kissed her back with a gentleness that ached.
Mary’s fingers found the buttons of his waistcoat.
She worked them open one by one, her knuckles grazing the linen of his shirt beneath, and Evander stood still and let her.
The patience of it. The surrender. This was the man who controlled every aspect of his life, who managed a duchy and a scandal and a household with the precision of a military campaign, and he stood in the golden light and let his wife undress him, button by button, with hands that were steady even when his were not.
The waistcoat fell. Mary pushed it from his shoulders, and it dropped to the carpet behind him. She tugged his shirt free from his trousers and gathered the fabric in her fists and pulled it over his head, and Evander raised his arms to help, and the shirt joined the waistcoat on the floor.
She had seen him shirtless once before. In the kitchen, bleeding, the firelight moving across his skin while she cleaned a knife wound at three in the morning. She had allowed herself one second to look.
Now she took longer.
The scar beneath his collarbone, the one she had wanted to ask about and never had.
The ridge of muscle across his stomach. The breadth of his shoulders, which she had felt through wool and linen but never touched.
She pressed her palms flat against his chest, and his heartbeat kicked against her hands, hard and fast, and the heat of his skin soaked through her fingers and spread up her arms.
“Your turn,” Evander murmured.
His fingers found the ribbon at the neck of her nightgown.
He untied it with a deliberation that made her breath catch, and the neckline loosened, and the cotton slipped an inch down her shoulder.
He traced the exposed skin with his fingertips, feather-light, following the line of her collarbone from her throat to the curve of her shoulder, and Mary’s eyes fluttered closed.
“Look at me,” he said.
She opened her eyes. Evander’s gaze held hers as he eased the nightgown from her shoulders. The fabric slid down her arms, caught briefly at her waist, and fell. Mary stood before him in the morning light, bare and trembling, and the vulnerability of it should have terrified her.
It did not.
Because Evander was looking at her the way he had looked at her in the sapphire gown at the Atherton ball, except there was no ballroom and no audience and no performance. Just his eyes moving across her body with a reverence that made her skin bloom with warmth wherever his gaze touched.
“You are beautiful.” His voice cracked on the word. “I should have told you that every day since the morning you walked into my parlor.”
“You can start now.”
He pulled her against him. The contact of skin against skin sent a shudder through both of them, and Mary gasped at the heat of it, the solid, startling intimacy of her bare chest pressed against his.
His arms encircled her, one hand at the small of her back, the other sliding into her hair, and he kissed her with the full, unguarded hunger he had been holding back since the first night she came to this room.
Mary’s hands explored him. The muscles of his back, taut beneath her fingers.
The scar beneath his collarbone, smooth and raised.
The ridge of his spine, the dip at the base of his neck where his pulse hammered.
She memorized him, learnt him like she’d learnt how to be a mother, one detail at a time, mapping the landscape of the man she loved.
Because she finally, finally had permission.
Evander lifted her. Mary’s legs wrapped around his waist, and he carried her to the bed and laid her down, and the mattress dipped beneath their weight, and his body covered hers. He braced himself on his forearms and looked down at her, his hair falling across his forehead, his breathing ragged.
“Tell me if you want me to stop.”
“I will never want you to stop.”
He kissed her throat. Slowly, tracing a path from beneath her ear to the hollow at the base of her neck.
Mary’s back arched, and her fingers gripped the sheet.
His mouth moved lower, across her collarbone, down the center of her chest, and every press of his lips sent heat spiraling through her body in waves that built and crested and built again.
“Evander.” His name left her lips as a breath, half prayer, half plea, and the sound of it made his grip on the sheet beside her head tighten.
“I love you,” he whispered against her skin. “I love you, and I am here, and I am not going anywhere.”
His hands traveled the length of her body, slow and deliberate, learning every curve and hollow.
He touched her as though she were something he had been given permission to hold after a lifetime of looking through glass, and the reverence in his hands undid Mary more completely than any urgency could have.
This was not a man satisfying a need. This was a man worshipping.
Every touch said what his mouth had refused to, what his pride had locked away, what his walls had been built to prevent. The feeling he couldn’t name before was written in his hands, in his mouth, in the way his fingers lingered as though leaving her skin was a loss he was not prepared to accept.
Love.
His mouth found hers again, and Mary pulled him closer, and the last remaining distance between them dissolved.
She felt him trembling, the whole length of his body shaking against hers, and she understood that the trembling was not nervousness.
It was the sensation of a man letting go.
Every locked door, every corridor retreat, every breakfast eaten alone, falling away until nothing remained but skin and breath and the two of them, together, with nothing between them at all.
“I am so desperate for you,” he muttered. His forehead rested against hers. “Ever since I tasted you… Heavens, Mary, it has been torture not to burst into your room and bury my head between your thighs until I’ve consumed every sweet drop of you. I am starving for you. Again and again.”
His breath mingled with hers. His eyes, dark and open and full of everything he had spent his life refusing to feel, searched her face.
“Please Evander… I want you, too. Please.”
“God, you’re so beautiful when you beg, darling.”
With that, Evander kissed her. Not her mouth. The corner of her jaw. The spot beneath her ear where her pulse fluttered. The curve of her neck, where he lingered, his breath warm and unsteady against her skin, and Mary felt the trembling in his lips as much as in his hands.
He kissed her shoulder. His mouth pressed against the bare skin, and his teeth grazed the curve of it, gentle, barely there, and the sensation traveled down Mary’s spine and settled low in her body. She gasped. Evander paused, his mouth still against her shoulder, checking.
“Yes,” she whispered.
His mouth moved lower, tracing the line of her collarbone, then the hollow between, then the soft skin below.
He kissed her there with a reverence that made her back arch off the mattress, and his hands braced on either side of her, and the trembling had not stopped, and the trembling made everything more real, because this was not a man performing.
This was a man overwhelmed by what he had been given permission to touch.
Mary’s hands found his shoulders. She pulled him closer, and the contact of his chest against hers made them both inhale, sharp and sudden.
She explored him in return, her fingers tracing the muscles of his back, the ridge of his spine, the scar beneath his collarbone that she had wanted to know the story of since the night in the kitchen.
She pressed her lips against it. Evander shuddered.
“Mary.” Her name came out ragged.
She kissed the center of his chest. The flat plane of his stomach. The place where his ribs met his waist, and his breath caught above her, and his hand found her hair, not gripping, just resting, as though he needed to hold something to stay anchored to the earth.