And even through humiliation, there it remained—want.
The first timehe’d touched her had been at her debut ball.
From the moment she’d met him in Rake’s stables at Somerton—for the entire, interminable month until the ball—she’d anticipated the touch of Lord Branwell Mallory.
Sometimes, she went breathless from the mere idea of touching him and of him touching her, an obsession that caught her in its grip like nothing she’d experienced in her nineteen years.
Dancing was the obvious solution.
Until it wasn’t.
Until it wasn’t enough.
How swiftly after their first touch—him bringing her hand to his mouth for a kiss—had she needed to be touched in other ways, too. Slipping into midnight gardens to touch lips to lips … lips to tender earlobes … lips to necks … sliding hands from gloves to touch with bare skin.
Then that hadn’t been enough.
“I want to know you better,” she’d whispered against his neck in one midnight garden or another. “Away from all the society nonsense.” Her gaze had lifted and caught his. “Just you and I.”
He’d searched her gaze for the three longest seconds of her life. “It wouldn’t be proper,” he said, at last.
“I don’t care about that.”
She’d been a young, reckless woman speaking those words. But it wouldn’t be until years later that she saw herself thusly.
His eyes narrowed on hers for such a long time, panic stirred within her.
He could sayno.
And she would die.
“I have a flat of rooms that I keep.”
Snatched from the brink of certain death, Artemis exhaled a trembly breath. How incredibly alive she’d felt in that moment.
“Give me the address,” she said, “and I’ll meet you?—”
“I’ll escort you,” he said, firm.
Oh, the warm shiver that had purled down her spine at the velvet command within his voice.
“I won’t have you alone on the streets of London.”
They’d arranged a night and a time.
And in that little flat on Barlow Street, for two blissful months, Artemis had all the permission in the world to touch him between the morning hours of two and four. They’d left no part of each other unexperienced in those exquisite stolen hours.
And now, that craving to touch him, so long repressed, had returned.
After everything.
Improbably.
How readily the body would betray its inhabitant.
Except he’d refused to touch her just now.
It stung, but also it was a boundary drawn.
