Chapter Six #3
He had been taught that tears were unacceptable for a man of his station.
He had learned the lesson so thoroughly that it had become instinct—an automatic response to any display of emotion, his own or anyone else's.
He hadn't meant to hurt Henry. He had only wanted to prepare him for a world that would not be kind to vulnerability.
But Eliza had looked at him with those blazing green eyes and torn his justifications to shreds.
Your love is conditional. You will only accept him when he's perfect and controlled and exactly what you want him to be.
The words echoed in his mind, sharp as knives.
Because she was right. He had spent years keeping Henry at arm's length, telling himself it was for the boy's own good, when really it had been for his.
He had been protecting himself from the pain of attachment, and in doing so, he had taught his brother that love was something to be earned, not given freely.
Just as their father's death had taught him.
He moved to the window, staring out at the gardens without seeing them. His hands were shaking, and his heart was pounding. But beneath the shame and the self-recrimination, something else was burning through his veins.
He had wanted to kiss her.
He ought to do anything other than stand at this window, replaying the way she had looked in that garden. Her chest heaving against her bodice with every accusation. Her cheeks pink from the force of her own conviction.
Instead, his treacherous mind circled back to the same wretched moment: when his gaze had fallen to her mouth.
That insolent, soft, impossibly distracting mouth, which had just laid bare each of his failings.
He had wanted to kiss her. He could confess that much to himself, here in the privacy of his study where no one could witness the full extent of his disgrace. He had wanted to cross those two remaining steps, seize her by the arms, and silence that devastating mouth with his own.
The fantasy unspooled before he could arrest it.
He imagined closing the distance. His fingers threading into that copper hair, pulling until her head tipped back, until the pale column of her throat was bare to him. She would look up at him with those blazing green eyes, and she would say something sharp, because she always said something sharp.
“You think this will silence me, Your Grace?”
“I think nothing silences you, Miss Harrow.” His mouth would hover over hers. “But I confess I am running out of civilised methods to attempt it.”
“Then perhaps you ought to try an uncivilised one.”
That would undo him. That quiet, breathless challenge would shatter every shred of restraint he possessed.
He would crush his mouth to hers, and she would open for him immediately, because she wanted this every bit as fiercely as he did.
He had seen it in the way her breath caught when he stood near her.
He had felt it in the charge that crackled between them whenever they occupied the same room.
In his mind, she tasted of defiance and warm tea and something sweeter beneath, and the first slide of her tongue against his drew a groan from somewhere so deep inside him he had not known the place existed.
He would press her back against the tree, his hands gripping her waist, pulling her body flush against his until she could feel every hard inch of his arousal straining against her skirts.
“You have been driving me to madness,” he would growl against her lips. “From the very first moment you walked into my study. Do you know what it has cost me to keep my hands from you?”
“Then stop keeping them from me.”
Her fingers would pull at his coat, shoving it from his shoulders.
His hands would find the buttons down her back and work them free with a desperation that bore no resemblance to competence.
The dress would fall, and beneath it, the thin white cotton of her chemise, the shadow of warm skin, the swell of her breasts rising with each ragged breath.
He would drag his mouth down her throat, tasting the flutter of her pulse beneath his lips, and she would arch into him with a gasp that sent fire racing to his groin.
“Tell me to stop,” he would say, his voice barely recognisable to his own ears. “In the name of everything decent, tell me to stop.”
“I will do nothing of the sort.” Her voice would be wrecked, breathless, and her fingers would twist into his hair to hold his mouth against her skin. “I have waited too long already.”
He would bare her breasts to the open air, and the sight of them would leave him speechless. Full and soft and tipped with dusky pink, the nipples tightening under his gaze. He would cup them in his hands, feel the weight of her, run his thumbs over those stiff peaks until she whimpered.
“Is this what you imagined?” she would whisper, her body warm and yielding in his hands. “When you watched me from your windows? When you thought I could not see?”
“This is only the beginning of what I imagined.”
He would take one nipple into his mouth, and she would cry out, her hips bucking against him, her fingers twisting in his hair with a force that sent sparks down his spine. He would lavish the same attention on the other, teeth grazing, tongue circling, until she was panting and trembling.
Then his hand would slide beneath her skirts. Up over the silk of her stockings, to the soft, bare skin of her inner thigh. She would part her legs for him without being asked, and when his fingers found her through the opening in her drawers, she would be slick and swollen and burning with want.
“You are soaking, Miss Harrow.” He would breathe the words against her breast, half reverent, half ruined.
“And whose fault is that, Your Grace?” Even now, even with his hand between her thighs, she would find the will to challenge him. “You have been tormenting me for weeks with those wretched grey eyes and that insufferable composure. I should think this is the very least you owe me.”
He would stroke through her folds with deliberate slowness, spreading the slickness upward, circling the swollen pearl at her centre until her legs shook.
She would grip his shoulders, her nails biting through the linen of his shirt, and the wet sounds of his ministrations would fill the quiet garden.
“More,” she would demand. “I need more of you.”
He would sink two fingers inside her, and the hot, tight grip of her body would make his vision blur. She would clench around him at once, her hips rocking, taking him deeper, and he would curl his fingers to stroke that place inside her that made her keen.
“Is this what you need?” he would ask, his thumb pressing firm circles against the bud of her pleasure while his fingers worked inside her. “Tell me. I want to hear you say it.”
“Yes.” Her voice would break on the word. “Yes, there, please do not stop, I am so very close.”
He would give her what she begged for, his fingers driving into her, his thumb relentless, and he would watch her face as the pleasure crested.
He would hold her through every aftershock.
And then he would free himself from his trousers, already aching, already impossibly hard, and lift her against the tree with her legs wrapped around his waist. He would bury himself inside her in one deep, devastating stroke, and the sound she would make would be the most exquisite thing he had ever heard in all his wretched, frozen life.
Alistair’s eyes snapped open.
He was standing at the window. His hands were braced against the glass so hard his knuckles had gone white. His breath came in harsh, uneven gasps, and his body was rigid with an arousal so acute it bordered on agony.
He had not touched himself. He had come undone from the fantasy alone, standing fully clothed in his own study like a boy with his first indecent thought.
He pressed his forehead against the cold glass and breathed through his teeth until the shaking subsided.
“This,” he informed the empty room, his voice wrecked beyond all dignity, “is an unmitigated catastrophe.”
The room offered no consolation whatsoever.
He did not emerge from his study for the remainder of the evening. And when sleep finally took him, it was with the phantom taste of copper hair and green-eyed fury still burning on his lips, and the shameful evidence of his weakness drying against his skin.