“An experience seared into my memory, I can assure you.”
“I wanted you to be nothing more than a too curious, too pretty girl—the sort of girl I’d met a thousand times over. I thought to shock you.” She hazarded a stealthy sideways glance and detected an involuntary smile tipping up the side of his mouth. “I thought you would run for your life. Instead, you picked up my clothes, and I knew I had to have you.” The smile fell from his lips. “It was instant.”
Mariana rolled onto her side and propped herself up onto an elbow. She would see his face as he spoke the truth she yearned to hear.
“I wanted to understand this girl and her effect on me, as if it was quantifiable. Yet I knew on some elemental level that you were already mine and always would be”—His eyes found hers. He was at once so very close and so very far away—“You and I simplywere. What we shared was inevitable . . . biological.” He paused as if weighing how much to reveal. “Elemental,inevitable,biological. Those were the words I used to describe our bond. They were necessary words. Words intended to create distance. And never once did I allow myself to consider, much less admit, the one word that most accurately described my feeling.”
Within his eyes she saw the ghosts from their past swirling. They were the same ghosts, she suspected, that had haunted her for the last decade.
Suddenly, he, too, rolled onto his side and propped himself up, his body a perfect mirror of hers with one exception: he remained fully clothed.
She sensed the breath hitch in his chest at the sight of her, his gaze unable to resist a roving scan of her naked form. A heady feeling of sensual power coursed through her, one she must suppress. She and he were on the verge of a truth that must reach the surface if there was to be a future for them.
“It was easy to tell myself,” he continued at last, his voice a husky rasp, “that I had to keep my distance because of my connection to the Foreign Office. But the truth was I feared your effect on me. Our bond had come on so fast and so strong. It wasn’t the sort of marriage I wanted. I wanted a Society match. It was my greatest fear that I would have a marriage like—”
“Your parents,” she finished for him, feeling the confirmation of her words resonate deep within her gut.
“They began as a love match. And after the love curdled, they spent the majority of my childhood privately and publicly tearing one another apart. My understanding of love was that it inevitably collapsed, and that pure love eventually transformed into pure hate. From the very beginning, I knew our happy marriage was a mirage.”
“Nick—” she began, but stopped herself. How she ached to ease his torment.
“Yet with each passing day my feeling for you increased.”
“Only increasing your fear that we would repeat the mistakes of your father and mother,” she ventured.
“You were my worst nightmare come to life.”
Infused with a burst of nerves worthy of a green schoolgirl, she pushed herself up to a seated position, reached for the discarded overcoat, and draped it across her shoulders, reflexively inhaling the residue of his fading warmth.
He followed her up, his gaze never once releasing her. Again, they were mirrors of one another, yet he didn’t seem nervous at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. It was this quality that had first drawn her in—his ability to remain ever calm and collected.
“I understood on a fundamental level that if I ever loved someone, I would have to let her go. I never had enough faith in myself, but mostly I never had enough faith in you. You are formidable, funny, intelligent, beautiful, loving, kind, brave . . . You are everything, Mariana. Even when my travels took me to distant lands and across oceans—”
“We still need to discuss the Mississippi riverboat,” she inserted, unable to resist the pull toward humor, long dormant joy releasing within her and bubbling up. She wasn’t nervous at all. In fact, she was ecstatically, effervescently happy.
“—You weremyeverything. I should have trusted you.”
“No, Nick, you should have trustedus.”
“Can you forgive me?” he asked, his gray gaze at once vulnerable and penetrating.
“I forgive you. After all”—Her buoyant heart threatened to lift out of her chest—“you did give me a Woolly Mammoth.”
She tucked her hands into silk-lined pockets, and the slink of warm, supple metal wrapped around her fingers. Instantly, she knew what lay within her grasp. She pulled it from the pocket’s depths.
“You’ve had it all this time?”
She held up the locket, its pendulous weight gently swaying from side to side, catching the transient shimmer of a moonbeam.
“Yes,” he said without an ounce of apology.
“Why?”
“Because if I couldn’t have you, I could, at least, have a piece of you. It was selfish, but I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t let you go. Do you remember the words inscribed on the back?”
“You are forever in my blood.”
“A coward’s words.”
