Chapter 7
West stumbled back into his room and collapsed on the bed. His heart had seized with the first “Get out!” and hadn’t unclenched, leaving him shaken and dizzy.
He forced air through his lungs in slow, measured inhales.
Over the years, he’d broken more than a few ribs, and that pain was nothing compared to this. Every damn time he forgot himself, he wounded her.
Why could he never learn from his mistakes?
This dance between them… It was as old and familiar as breathing. Every time he got too close, he burned himself. Their situation wouldn’t have been so wretched if it were just him—if he were the only one scorched. But Bella…
Life in the Sinclair house had never been easy for her, or Ben.
Ambrose Sinclair was a special kind of cruel.
With Ben, he chose an active brutality—molding him into a dutiful soldier with pain and intimidation, until the boy would willingly sacrifice his very soul to please his father.
But Bella received a different, more callous harshness.
Not the heir, she merely existed as a pawn in whatever game he was playing.
He was free to torment Ben with threats to her. Or sell her to the highest bidder.
Bella had always been beautiful. A pretty bauble to be hauled out to distract other men at the card table. Ambrose had started it when she was painfully young.
After West’s first win in the ring, he had used every shilling to purchase that decorative silver hairpin off a cutler in Cheapside.
Her dark eyes had grown round and wide when he’d presented it to her with a sheepish shuffle of his feet.
He hadn’t anticipated the intimacy that came with teaching her and helping her practice with the weapon.
Though he’d prayed she would never have to use it, some part of him had known Ambrose wouldn’t hesitate to let those men do more than look. But nothing could have prepared him for the night that had ruined them both.
He looked up from the heavy bag to see Bella, barefoot and out of breath and wearing only her nightdress, fear blazing in her eyes.
She’d run across the mucky yard to the stables, hairpin clasped in her white-knuckled fingers—its silver tip glinting red.
Devastation filled him. Devastation but not surprise.
“Bella?” He was too startled by her frightened state to be overcome by her undress. “Belle, are you—” He caught her wrist and urged her into the safety of the stables.
Her eyes were wild, her hair, half escaped from her ribbon, whipping around her shoulders in the breeze.
“He— I...” she trailed off with a whimper and allowed West to fold her into his arms, hands still wrapped from his session with the heavy bag.
“Are you hurt?”
“I— no.” She shuddered against his half-bare chest, though. “But I— he—”
“Who?”
He felt her head shake against his frame as she pushed in closer. “It doesn’t— I stopped him. But, Father… he—”
West’s heart stopped. “Your father?”
“No, he offered… me. I am to serve as repayment for the debt.” West’s blood froze. Each individual word made sense, but how could a father, even one so poor as Ambrose, offer his daughter up for—
Bile rose in his throat.
He tugged her away from his chest, his cloth-covered hands catching her freckled cheeks. “I don’t even— Are you— Will he come after—”
“I don’t think so. I caught his cheek with the blade. He’s occupied with that.” Elegant, trembling fingers held the hairpin aloft between them.
West released a shuddering breath. “Well done.” He took the tiny dagger and set it atop the ledge of a stall behind him without releasing her.
“You’re safe now. I won’t let him— What do you need?
Tea?” He felt a fool then, offering the traumatized woman before him a hot beverage as if that would make it all well.
“Don’t, um… I— Don’t leave me.”
“Never.”
“I— It’s never going to stop, is it?” she asked after a moment of silence, her gaze trapping his, her willing captive.
“What?”
“Father. He’ll— There will be someone else. He may insist… Or perhaps a husband who wants a pretty, titled wife for breeding, or just another man who wants to— who wants to claim my body like a prize.”
“I’ll not see you hurt. I won’t allow it.”
“Miles.” The way she said his name, the intimacy of it, never failed to stun him. “Don’t be cruel. Do not give me that kind of hope.”
West stumbled back, chest burning. “I’m not. I won’t—”
“You don’t have that kind of power.” She said it as though it were a fact, a fundamental truth. And worse still, she was right. He was no one. Nothing. What could he do against an earl?
“Bella…” he whispered through his knotted throat.
“I could bear it—a husband, anyway. I could— I just… I want one thing that’s mine.” Her eyes found his again, something unidentifiable swirling in their dark depths.
“Yours?” he repeated dully, hands finding the curve of her waist.
“Something that no one can take or corrupt—no matter who he—”
“I don’t understand.”
She caught his braces in both hands, snaring him in place—an unnecessary gesture. “I want you.”
Apparently, it was a necessary gesture because he stumbled back half a step. “What?”
“I want you. It will be someone, sometime. But it doesn’t have to be— I want to choose.
My first time, I want to choose.” She nodded, sizing him up.
Those deft fingers slid up the lines of his braces until they found his shoulders.
“And you’re— If the world were different, you would be my choice. I’d choose you.”
West’s body understood implicitly that earth-shattering revelation. His fingers tightened, one curling into the white cotton of her shift while the other pulled her closer to him.
“Bella, I…”
Loose waves brushed her cheeks as she shook her head. “Don’t, Miles. It’s a simple question. Do you want me or not?”
“What sort of question is that? Do I want you? I’ve never wanted anything more! But, Bella, I can’t—”
“Kiss me,” she demanded, a soft flush blooming beneath her freckles. “Just kiss me until I forget him.”
West complied with an obscene groan. The kiss should have been soft, sweet. Perhaps it would have been if she hadn’t closed the distance before he could capture her mouth. But there was a desperation in Bella’s lips that he couldn’t resist—had no desire to try.
What she lacked in experience, she more than made up for in enthusiasm. She opened for him so beautifully, meeting his tongue with her own. She tasted of the cheap gin she favored and something spicy.
Her hands dragged along the worn leather of his braces, fingers tracing the divots of his chest underneath. And then she shoved one off his shoulder and caressed the line of his arm. The other soon followed.
Without permission from his head, he deepened this kiss. His hands betrayed him too, bumping along her rib cage—the familiar urge to see her fed, safe, and warm nearly overtook him—
Thought abandoned him entirely as she pressed herself in snugger. The tight buds of her nipples brushed against his chest through two too-thin layers of fabric.
Tiny fists rucked up his threadbare shirt until it caught beneath his arms.
“Miles… Off…” she moaned when his lips moved to trace the skin on her throat. It tasted of spice and salt.
His response was little more than a groan, primarily at the prospect of removing his hands from her person, but also at the sensual gravel of her voice.
“Off,” she repeated. Reluctantly, he pulled away long enough to untangle himself from the braces and yank the shirt over his head, then toss it away. His lips crashed back onto hers, grabbing her close.
Bella seemed to revel in the newly revealed flesh. Her silken fingers worked over his chest. There was nothing tentative in her touch—this was a woman who’d mapped a path across his skin with her eyes and was determined to chart it with her palms.
Each path she traced served as an implicit permission for his own.
His worn hand caught her cheek and jaw and tilted her precisely as he wished.
He allowed himself the luxury of tugging her ribbon free before running his fingers through her lustrous waves—finally recognizing the wraps still on his hands.
He yanked them off without removing his lips from the hollow of her throat—a tiny bit saltier there.
“Miles,” she whined. The word, the tone shot straight to his cock—already too excited.
The sound that escaped him couldn’t have been called anything more masculine than a whimper.
“Miles,” she repeated, then stepped back. He ripped his hands away.
“Bella?”
Pupils blown wide and lips swollen with his attentions, she’d never been more stunning.
And then she tucked a singular finger into the waistband of his breeches. She took another step back, and another, tugging him after her—her steadfast hound on a leash.
After a third and fourth step, his mind finally understood her destination.
The empty stall where he kept a pallet for the nights he was too exhausted to return to the house—a relic from when the manor supported enough horses that he—and before him, his father—might need to be present for foaling. His feet moved of their own accord.
“Bella…” His warning was an empty one; he hadn’t so much as stumbled as he trailed after her.
She didn’t respond, merely backed up to the pallet and released her hold on his breeches.
He was going to put a stop to this, truly he was.
But then her inky lashes flicked down, and her long, elegant fingers found the little bow nestled just above her breasts. She pulled one end and then, catching his gaze, drew the other one down.
West watched, slack jawed, as, with one final tug on the remaining knot, the inner swells of her breasts were revealed—straight down to her sternum.
All the blood in his body rushed to pool in his prick. “Bella—”
She shrugged one shoulder, and the flimsy fabric slipped off, exposing one perfect breast to his eager gaze. Air escaped him. It wasn’t fair—how beautiful she was. And the dusting of freckles that danced along that swell... He was finished.