As he had walked away, he had been beset by the thought of what could have been. He could have been her husband. He could have made her happy. He would have always been the man who loved her above all else. And her tentative, tender kisses had struck him like a blade to the gut. So very dangerous.
They had not been the kisses of a woman who had been repulsed by him. This he knew.
“Tell me, Ara,” he said again, using her name this time, her true name. Stripping the barriers of rank and class. Bringing them back to when they were a simple man and woman, beneath the enchanted branches of a centuries-old forest.
“You must not call me that,” she said weakly.
“Why?” He searched her expression, searched her gaze, for an answer. “Why, damn you? Does it make you remember?”
Her eyes glistened now, so blue and vibrant they looked as if they had come from the brush of a master artist. “What would you have me remember?”
Everything. Every. Damned. Thing.
He would have her remember laughter and kisses, holding each other beneath a blanket of stars. The firelight bathing their bodies in a glow. The way he had felt inside her. He could not parse it in mere words, and if she needed to ask, any traces of the Ara he had once known were forever gone.
“Nothing. I would have you recall nothing, for that is what we were to each other then, and that is what we must be to each other now.” He released her, setting her away from him and turning on his heel. Disappointment opened like a broken dam to release its torrent and flood him. He could not get far enough away from her fast enough.
His body returned to him then. His jaw ached. His scar burned. His skin itched.Fucking hell, why had he been forced to accept this godforsaken assignment? He should have known he could never remain impervious to her. That the bitterness haunting him would taint all he saw, thought, and touched. That remaining at Burghly House with her would be his ruin.
Ara watched hisbroad back as he stalked away from her. There was precious little resemblance to the young man she’d known in the rippling muscles and barely leashed power she could not seem to stop admiring. Beneath the fine trappings of a gentleman, he hid the body of a warrior. He was somehow even larger without his clothes to detract from his magnificent presence. There was nothing to hinder her view of him now.
When she had first come upon him sparring, bare-chested and graceful, she had momentarily forgotten her ire with him for using her ballroom as if it were a pugilist’s paradise. But then she had forced herself to recall how insignificant he had made her feel that morning. How small and foolish and unwanted.
How he was still the same man who had made her burn for him only to abandon her all those years ago. Not a blessed thing had changed. Anger, pure and raw and sudden, struck her.
“Do not turn your back on me,” she seethed. How dare he? How dare he return and disrupt her life, hold her in his arms when she was vulnerable, and make her long for him once more? And then to strip half-nude and engage in a pummeling match with one of his men in her ballroom?
He ignored her, stalking to his discarded shirt and waistcoat, no doubt to belatedly make himself decent. If only the notion did not cause a swift spear of regret to course through her. Her heart beat a rapid staccato, a molten bolt of heat sliding through her body and settling between her thighs. Old aches returned. Needs she had not revisited in all the time that had fallen between them.
Calm down, you fool. This man is not for you, and he never was.
“Mr. Ludlow,” she called after him, holding fast to her anger lest she allow other, far more dangerous feelings to rule her. “I am speaking to you.”
“You are berating me, madam.” His motions jerky with his own wrath, he stabbed his arms into his shirt. “I have told you once, and I shall tell you again. I am not your bloody servant to be ordered about. If you wish to play the tyrant, do so with your butler or your housekeeper or a goddamn footman.”
Something inside her broke.
Perhaps it was her sanity.
Perhaps her patience.
Perhaps it was simply her, fragile as a porcelain teacup that had been thrown against a stone floor. She was in thousands of shards. Her husband had been murdered. Her life was in chaos. She was in danger. The man she had once loved had returned a cold and angry stranger.
And she was running. Her skirts were clenched in her fists, lifted high. Her feet were moving. Connecting with the polished parquet, hurling her through the air. With an animalistic cry torn from the very deepest, darkest recesses of her being, she launched herself onto his back.
Her abdomen collided with his rigid spine, knocking the air from her lungs in a rush. She looped her arms around his neck, holding on. He grunted, barely flinching beneath the weight of her assault. Of course he didn’t. The man was a mountain. But she did not care.
“I hate you!” she shouted at him, wrapping her legs about his waist when her arms threatened to give way in spite of the impediment of her heavy skirts. “I hate you, Clayton Ludlow. Do you hear me?”
He said nothing, remaining still and stiff as the trunk of a tree. His only reaction was the bob of his Adam’s apple against her arm as he swallowed and the thump of his pulse. This was not what she wanted. She wanted him angry. She wanted him to say something. To hurt the way she did.
She wantedhimto break.
“I hate you,” she whispered again, pressing her face between his shoulder blades and inhaling his scent, laundered fabric and the tang of male sweat and the musky deliciousness of his soap. His shirt was wet. Her cheeks were wet. Her own shoulders were shaking. Tears, she realized.
She was crying again. Shaking. Sobbing into his back, holding on to his neck as though releasing him would send her careening over a cliff. And maybe it would. Never had a more hopeless jumble of confused emotions crashed through her.
His large hands landed on her stocking-clad knees, gently forcing her to release him from her hold. Next, he grasped her arms and pried them from his neck, bending until her feet touched the floor once more.
