Chapter 16 #2
A pained smile played over his lips. “Ah, darling. I am not supposed to want you.”
“You want me?”
“You don’t know that?” He wandered to the table; once scrubbed daily, with sand and soap to keep it clean, now cracked. “How could you? How when I failed to tell you?”
She followed his fixed eyes to the AMS etched within the fir surface. Edgar raised his eyebrows in an unspoken question. She nodded. They were her initials carved as a child. With a faraway smile, he traced each initial and the heart surrounding them.
No words were needed between she and Edgar. She had longed for what her siblings had— to know such harmony of thought with another soul. And she found it with, and in, Edgar.
“I was an utter stunned idiot in the grotto,” he said. “You make me crave the forbidden.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Forbidden makes me sound like I’m some sort of prize or object. I’m not. I’m my own woman.”
“I am well aware,” he said, with such tenderness that a new trembling took hold. He quit his spot at the table, and came closer. “But that does not change that you are Culross’s sister-in-law.”
She opened her mouth to tell him precisely her thoughts on that stuff and rot, but Edgar drew her into his arms, and she went, as she always did, on a sigh.
“Do you know how Culross and I became friends?”
That came out of nowhere: not an ‘explanation’ about why they couldn’t be together, rather, another piece of his past he shared with her. What he proffered instead was a different intimacy. The one she craved most from him.
He let her in all over again; just as deeply as before. What he shared was the tragedy of his childhood. He spoke matter-of-factly, as if it were some other boy, and not himself, who had suffered so.
With every horror he shared, the cruel things done and said, she focused on breathing. She drew in each breath slowly through her nose and out. He had suffered so. She would not add her tears.
Edgar finished on a shrug. “When I was beat up and bullied as a scrawny lad with a publicly known family, Culross saved me. I owe him my life.”
Poor, poor Edgar. But proud Edgar would hate that response.
As it turned out, he hated her next words with similar passion. “You do not owe him anything, Edgar”
“Of course, I do.” He scoffed with all the arrogance of a man who knew absolutely nothing, but believed he knew everything. “He saved me.”
By that logic, if she prevented him from harm, he’d feel indebted. She didn’t want that, and felt confident neither did her brother-in-law.
She brought her palms up. He stiffened; the moment she rested her hands on his chest and stroked the place where his heart was, the tension eased, some.
“If you think that you are indebted to the earl, or if he made you feel that way, then he hasn’t been a very good friend to you, or you don’t truly understand friendship, or both.”
A dark lock tumbled across his brow, completing his look of confused-boy.
Biting the inside of her lower lip to keep back the smile she knew he would hate and become defensive about, Andromena pushed back that curl.
“All this to say, Andromena. Loyalty and friendship Culross has driven my every action and decision. It’s why I…”
“Abducted me?” she drawled.
Adorable color suffused his cheeks. “I won’t bother to point out again that no abduction actually occurred.”
How unfortunate.
“That day I acted for Culross.” Passion blazed in his eyes.
“If I were an honorable man, I would tell you I regret it. I would tell you I would have chosen differently. But I am not a better man, and I would do it all again, because it brought me to you.” He caught her wrist and drew it to his mouth, his lips brushing the sensitive inseam as he held her gaze.
She shivered; her body stirred as it always was by even his slightest touch.
It was why she was slow to register what he said…
“You are all I want, Andromena,” he placed another kiss. “I will consecrate myself to you. Your happiness. Your every wish.”
Her breath caught. She waited. Waited for the three words she craved with her soul.
“You are my captain. My queen.” With each word, he glided a path of them along her forearm. Until he at last reached her lips. “I love you,” he whispered.
At long last, everything she had dreamed and believed impossible. I love you.
Edgar fell to the floor.
She gasped.
No. He knelt before her. “You have fixed me. Healed me. You who never even raised an eyebrow at my parentage. That I might be tainted. You gave me reason to hope and believe and dream—to put my ghosts to rest. Now, I beg you, give me your forever. Together, we will slay every dragon.”
We will slay every dragon
We. She and Edgar together.
And the squeeze about her lungs; the vise that had held her in a punishing grip, eased, and lightened, and was no more.
“What say you, love?”
“Yes!” A sob left her. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she caught it too late.
A sheen glazed Edgar’s eyes. “I’ll allow you only the one,” he said thickly.
But tenderness failed them both.
Andromena and Edgar met mouths with a violence borne of their denial—of one another, of this moment, of how long they had fought what stood between them. He tightened his hold at her nape, angling her the way he wanted her, deepening his plundering.
She opened her mouth and welcomed him inside.
They surged as one.
“God, Andromena, you are all I never knew I wanted, what I needed,” he rasped against her mouth.
With the kitchen around them, the sounds of their breathing and the restless shift of their bodies filled the space.
Edgar drew her farther from the doorway. As they passed through the doorway and into the adjoining hall, his mouth never left hers.
As they went, they frantically shed garments.
They tossed their gloves first.
Their cloaks came off next—with difficulty.
When her fingers shook too badly, Edgar effortlessly slipped her clasp free which allowed her cloak to fall at their feet, and then joined his in the pile.
Not breaking stride, she and Edgar scrambled over a tangle of wool.