Chapter Four #3
As she listened for his soft footsteps down the hall toward his own suite, she silently thanked him for holding her as she wept.
Yes, it was the first time she had been capable of confronting the sorrow.
But, truth be told, her tears were more her fear for his fate than for her past traumas.
Her ordeal in the Conciergerie still cost Zeph her strength.
She worried that she would forever be frail. But she did not want to be.
She rang the bell for her maid and hurried her along to help her undress.
*
He caught his bedroom door before he slammed it in its frame. Zeph would hear, and he would not show her his anger at what he’d done.
He cursed baldly as he strode past his sitting room into his bedroom. One fist jabbing into the other, he fought himself. Yelled at himself for what he had told himself for weeks that he could not have. Could not take. Should not want.
And still, you failed!
You held her. For hours. Braced her against you. Dried her tears. Kissed her hair. Fool. Fool! You cannot embrace her like a lover.
Zephora Butler was his responsibility. Had been his charge.
His to save from all harm. She was meant for a younger man, not a grisly creature.
She merited a pleasant man, graceful, honorable, and rich, not a gruff merchant who knew the streets and rough dockhands.
Not a creature who searched out French agents and killed them with impunity.
Yet he saw her awareness of him as a man.
Potentially her man. Oh, he knew the look of a woman’s need.
He understood desire, the urge to mate—and women.
He was no schoolboy, but a man who had had countless women.
Enjoyed them. Needed them. In many cases, paid them, too.
He knew how to seduce a woman, bare her breasts, suck her nipples and lick her navel.
He knew how to stroke her and lure her, entice her with his fingers and his tongue.
He knew how to take a woman against a wall and on his desk.
How to thrill her so that she came once and wanted more again, and then again.
He had thought of new ways to have his beautiful Lady of the Winds, but he would not take her.
And he wanted Zephora Butler. He rubbed a fingertip across his lips, wiping away the raw need of her in his mouth.
He remembered her bruised and starving body.
But now she was no longer that. She was…
heaven help him, perfect for him. Shorter than he, the right height.
Proud as he, a sassy opponent. Smart-mouthed, she would give as she got.
He hung his head, hands on his hips. Why did his body not obey his rejection of this need for her?
She was too much, and yet he fantasized she was his alone! Naked in only her pristine skin, her freckles on her nose and dusted down her cleavage. Her breasts full, pointed mounds. He had felt them swell against his arm and his chest tonight. Had she felt his response?
He swung around, staring at the ceiling.
How he would hold each sweet mound, one by one, lick and suck them.
He would make her so happy, so thrilled, that she would never wish to leave his bed.
And he would make her stay. With all the ways he knew to make a woman groan for him, scream his name, he would delight her as no other man would dare or even know how to take her.
He could have her tonight, tomorrow, always. Walk down to her room and take her in his arms like the swain he wished to be only for her. He could make her wish to fall in love with him, but that would be so unfair. So unkind to her. She thought of him as the best man, the wisest man for her.
But she saw him that way only because he had saved her from the pits of hell.
He knew his worth, who he was. He was no fit lover for a twenty-two-year-old girl who deserved a man who would fall in love with her for her many charms.
Not for her fortitude or her stubbornness or her pride.
No. Zephora Butler was not for him. Not as his lover.
Not as anything other than his friend.
*
Standing in her soft muslin night rail and slippers, Zeph considered the healthy expanse of her bed.
To have a man there—correction, to have Rafe there—would be a challenge to her.
She had promised herself, even as Vaillancourt’s men took her away, that whatever they did to her, she would overcome it.
She was young, but she was no fool. She lived among powerful French men, while many Frenchwomen like Hortense and Caroline Bonaparte had to bow to men’s wishes.
Her friend Cecily, Countess Nugent, had warned her about the possibility of threat from unlawful actors, bullies, men without rules.
Zeph had anticipated, were she alone and apart, that someone might rape her. And they had.
She gulped and strode to her bed to sit on the edge.
Since the days in Bordeaux with Rafe, she had become aware of herself and her physical condition, had noticed she did not have her monthly courses.
Prior to her incarceration, she had always been able to count the exact number of days between them.
They had not returned. The guards in that hellhole of a prison would be proud of themselves.
If Vaillancourt knew, he would sneer with that all-too-charming face of his.
“Come back,” she urged herself as she lay down and punched her pillow. “Defy them.”
She grinned at her resolve and pushed her fears of never having a lover or a child down deep into her guts.
Rafe had taken, today, to calling her endearing names, darling and sweetheart.
She would eat, sleep, take the sun and the sea, and rebuild herself.
She would continue to become healthy, spirited, gay and appealing, as once she had been.
By hell or high water, she vowed, “I will become a luscious sweet creme pastry for myself.”
Then we shall see if one special man will ever again call me his dear.