I smile slightly. But my amusement is short lived. “I should be worried.”
“That I’m sick?”
“That you’re sick a day after your friend visited you.”
Now Emma smiles, a sweet, small thing. She gathers her skirt and sits on the sofa, folding her bare feet beneath her. “We need to talk, Malcom. Don’t we?”
I grit my teeth. “Yes. We do.”
Her smile fades, and she looks forlornly out the window. “You don’t want me anymore,” she finally murmurs. “And how could you?”
I cross the room, unable to stop myself, and kneel before her. Her eyes widen, but I resist the desperate urge to touch her. “Don’t,” I order her, my voice raw. “Don’t say that. Don’t think that.”
She looks down at me in shock. “But—”
“But nothing.” If I ever want Emma to be free of me, she can’t know my feelings for her. It’s why I’ve put distance between us. But when she’s this close, when she talks like this, I can barely control myself. I stand up and turn away. “Want has nothing to do with this.”
“So you do want me to go.”
No. Never.I clench my jaw, composing myself. “Emma. I took you for one reason. But if you can’t satisfy that reason, why should you have to stay here? Isolated? Alone?”
“But I’m not alone.”
She touches my hand, standing and coming around to face me. She gazes up at me, brow furrowed and eyes full of something I can’t name.
“I have no right,” I say, voice breaking. “I have no right to claim you as my own.”
She blinks, and her eyes fill with a soft sheen of tears. “Is that all I am to you?”
I take her by the waist, guiding her back until her shoulders touch the wall. Her eyes go to my mouth, the want in her face open and clear. “Impossible.”
“You say I’m not enough.”
I touch my fingers to her lips, silencing her. “It ismewho’s not enough.”
A tear runs down her cheek. I bend down and kiss it away.
“Malcom,” she whispers, taking my face in her hands. She rises on her toes and kisses me, her fingers running through my hair. I wrap an arm around her, pulling her hard against my chest, sliding my tongue into her mouth. She’s supple and pliant in my arms, delicate and deceptively stoic as a rose. “Tell me you don’t want me, and I’ll go.”
I halt, my lips an inch from hers. “I can’t.”
“Tell me you don’t want me.”
I slide my hands so they’re braced on either side of her against the wall. I can’t meet her eyes. I’m weak. I should tell her I hate her, that I can’t stand the sight of her. I should save her from me.
“I can’t.”
“Tell me,” she whispers, kissing me again. “That you aren’t falling in love with me.”
My heart hitches. I kiss her again, and this time, I don’t stop.
17
Emma
He lifts me easily, sliding me onto the desk beneath the window. A storm has been building over the sea all day, and as Malcom kisses me, fury and passion and mindless want, thunder rattles the landscape.
He hitches my skirt to my thighs, laying me flat on my back as he kneels. What I said to him—I meant it. But I shouldn’t have. Malcom and I shouldn’t work. We should be impossible, and we have every reason to run from each other.
