The sight struck him with alarming force.
She looked younger in slumber. Unburdened for once by the lines that tension had carved around her mouth. Her lashes cast pale crescents on her cheeks. The faintest shadow of last night’s flush still lingered along her throat.
His first clear thought was not,This is dangerous, as it should have been. It was,I quite like this.
The realization hit him like a blow.
He went very still, his arm reflexively tightening around her for a heartbeat before he forced it to relax. The urge to pull her closer, to bury his face in her hair, to remain exactly as they were until the world ceased to exist, clawed at him with terrifying strength.
He crushed it.
You are a fool.A sentimental, reckless fool.
He stared at the low ceiling. The inn woke slowly. Somewhere below, a door banged. Boots thudded along the passage. A woman laughed with the bright, tired note of someone who had been up too late.
Gwen did not stir.
He grew acutely aware of everywhere their bodies touched. Her hip aligned with his. Her knees drawn up, one brushing his thigh. The weight of her hand beneath his shirt, her fingers sleeping trust into his skin.
His chest tightened.
He should not have stayed in bed.
He should have slept on the floor. Or taken a separate room. Or left her in London instead of trailing her carriage like a man bewitched.
He had rules. They had served him well.
Seven nights. No more.
Seven nights to satisfy his curiosity, to exert control over his own inclinations, to avoid becoming entangled in anyone’s life beyond a series of contained moments.
Seven nights, then distance.
He had never deviated. It was a line he did not cross.
Yet here he lay, on what would have been their fifth night if he kept count, holding her as if she already belonged to him.
She did not.
Shecould not.
He was a duke. She was a viscount’s stepdaughter with a tarnished reputation and a future as a governess if she was lucky. That was what the world saw.
He saw far more, but it did not change the fact that the match would be madness in every ledger that mattered.
He had no business wanting to marry anyone. Perhaps not ever. Marriage invited intimacy he had never been taught to wield kindly.
What if he became his father in some insidious way he could not predict? What if his temper resembled that cold cruelty he so despised?
He would not risk it. Not with anyone. Certainly not with Gwen.
The idea of setting expectations where he could not safely follow made his stomach twist. The notion that she might, even unconsciously, begin to hope for something his circumstances and nature made impossible terrified him far more than the thought of gossip ever had.
He had seen what false hope did to women. He had watched his mother wait for tenderness that never came. He would not be the man who offered crumbs and called it a feast.
Gwen murmured in her sleep, as if feeling the tension in him. Her fingers flexed against his ribs, then relaxed.
His throat worked.
