She had come from seemingly nowhere, appearing in his life and in his library, then in his arms, and now he could not fathom his life without her in it. He wanted her. Hell, who was he trying to fool? Heneededher.
But he was not accustomed to emotions, having spent the better part of the last six years attempting to drown them out however he could so that he was able to survive. And so he did not tell Boadicea any of the things she likely would have wanted to hear.
He did not tell her that kissing her brought parts of him he had thought long dead back to life. He did not say that she could undo him with a mere look. He did not divulge that her scent made him weak, or that her curvy thighs and the sweet pink skin between them made him want to spend all day discovering her. He didn’t share that she was the best, the most wondrous gift life had ever bestowed upon him. No, he said none of those things. He did not warm her with his soft words, with whispered seduction, with cajoling or kisses or seduction.
Because he could not.
Instead, he watched her.
If he had thought her pale before, he had been wrong. Every bit of color leached from her countenance. She went white as the fine china on the table, standing with such abrupt force that her chair toppled backwards to the carpet with a dull thud.
“I am no longer hungry, Your Grace,” she hissed. “If you will excuse me?”
He leapt to his feet as well, stalking toward her, catching her when she would have retreated. His hands landed on her waist as if finding their natural home. This was not how he had envisioned their breakfast unfolding, and he did not like being the cause of her distress.
He studied her, noting that she refused to meet his eye. It was all he could do not to drag her against him, bury his face in the fiery luster of her hair. Drop to his knees and worship her the way she deserved. “Do not go.” It was the closest he would come to begging.
She gripped his wrists, attempting to remove his touch, her lips compressed in the same frown she had been wearing ever since entering the room. “Release me.”
“Boadicea, look at me,” he demanded, ignoring her request. “I will not let you go until you do.”
Her eyes snapped to his at last, glittering with anger and something else he could not define. “Here you are, Duke. Are you satisfied now? The wife you did not want is gazing upon your regal countenance.”
Hell. He was perverse, and that was why her defiance made his cock twitch. It was the beast, the uncontrollable part of him that he had worked so hard to cage, breaking free. He slid one of his hands up the curve of her back, skimming over the laces of her corset, the silk covering them, feeling her heat. He knew how soft she was there, over her spine, between the blades of her shoulders, and he longed for the barriers to be gone. Hated the fabric and boning that kept his skin from hers.
His fingers trailed over her nape, sinking into her coiffure, gripping with a gentle tug designed to master rather than hurt. “I have always wanted you. From the moment I first saw you in my library wearing that red dress covered in roses, you were all that I could think of. The need to touch you, kiss you.” His eyes fastened on hers, he lowered his head, pressing a kiss to the beauty mark that drove him mad. “To make you mine. That is all I have wanted.” He kissed her cheek, her ear, nuzzled her hair and felt her shiver. “You.”
And it was true. All of it. He had wanted her—wanted her still—with a ferocity that stripped him bare and left him raw and aching. He had not wanted a wife, no. But there was nothing and no one he had ever wanted more than Boadicea Harrington, and that was a bloody fact.
“You speak of desire,” she said.
He kissed down her throat, finding her racing pulse that belied her calm tone. “Yes.” Another kiss, a drag of his teeth. He wanted to mark her, to see the evidence of his mouth on her creamy neck. His need for her was almost vicious, pounding inside him, beating like a heart.
“I want your respect as well as your lust, Spencer.” She caught his face in her hands then, and he allowed her to urge his head back so that they stared at each other once more. “We may not have wished it, but we are husband and wife now. Treat me as your equal. Do not make decisions for me.”
She was a peculiar creature, the woman he had wed, and though she clearly did not think it, he had never met a woman he respected more. But that did not mean he would unbend from his position on children. There would be none.
“I will treat you as my equal in all matters,” he said solemnly, “as you are. But I remain firm on one matter. There will be no issue from this union. I am sorry I did not make my wishes in this regard clear prior to our vows, but I will not waver.”
For some reason, the notion of planting his seed in her filled him with a brief sense of awe. Worse, it made him more desperate to be inside her than he already was. But that was instinct. He would not be ruled by his base nature. The depths to which he had sunk at Millicent’s side was ample reason to keep him from ever making such a grievous error again. He would sooner hold a pistol to his own head and pull the trigger.
The thought made him cold, sent ice through his veins, chased away the fire licking through him. He released Boadicea abruptly, stepping back, something seizing in his chest, like a band closing around him, a vise. His ears hummed.
Suddenly, he was back in his study on that long-ago day, Millicent’s wild eyes and tear-stained face confronting him. She pointed the pistol at him, and he recalled looking down its dark barrel, thinking it would be the end of him. In that odd space of time, the eerie silence, the awful prescience of knowing he was about to die, he had taken in every detail, the sound of birds singing outside, the color of her gown, the ribbon trim on her hem, the way her brown hair had been greasy and flat, running down her back unbound.
She had once been beautiful, but the further she had slipped into madness, the more the disease had stolen her. Or perhaps that had been the asylum. He remembered thinking that it was the best place for her, that she would be healed and return to her former self, and they could live again. But instead she had emerged gaunt and bruised, talking to herself, preoccupied with angels and demons. His mother had warned him that she saw Millicent screaming into the rosebushes, raving about the devil and redemption, and he had not wanted to believe it. He had wanted, with a desperation born of his own futility, for his wife to be whole once more.
But then she stood before him, about to commit murder.
“Say it,” she had demanded. “You killed our baby.”
He had not been able to say the words, for they weren’t the truth, and it hadn’t mattered if it was the last thing she wanted to hear him say before sending him to oblivion. “No,” he had said slowly. “No one killed our baby, Millicent. He was stillborn.”
But she had raged, insisting that he confess. That he was the devil. Until finally, he had given in, thinking that he could somehow save himself, dissuade her from her path. He had gone closer, had told her what she wanted to hear.
And before he could reach her, take the gun from her hands, she had screamed, pressed the pistol to her own head, and pulled the trigger.
The report echoed in his brain, and now he was somewhere lost between the past and the present, a sheen of sweat over his skin, a sickness in his gut, and he could scarcely breathe.
