“Always.” He thrust once more.
It was slow, steady torture of the most depraved and divine sort. She could do nothing but meet him halfway, with her words as well as with her body. “Always.”
He pulled back until he slid from her body entirely, his pulsing cock against her slick entry. “Promise me you trust me enough to always seek me out first. If you are in danger, if you are in trouble, come to me Bridget.”
She closed her eyes, unable to meet his gaze when she made a promise she was bound to break. “I promise.”
His clever fingers found her pearl once more, working the swollen nub as his cock stroked over where she wanted him most, denying her and torturing her at once. “Look me in the eye when you make me your promise, Bridget Carlisle.”
Her eyes opened at his command, at the intensity of his voice. His handsome face was harsh, jaw a grim, tense angle. His eyes seemed to see straight through her. For a moment, she was convinced he knew she would leave him. That he knew no matter how much she loved him, no matter how well he pleasured her, she would always be a Fenian, and he would always be the man bound by his honor, duty, and loyalty to a Crown that sought to keep her homeland beneath its thumb.
“Bridget.” Something in his expression shifted then. Some of the severity faded. He seemed softer somehow. More vulnerable. “I love you.”
His words stole her breath. She stared at him, stricken, feeling as if she had just been hit by a locomotive. But then he moved, flexed his hips, and he was inside her once more, deep, so deep. And she was helpless, so helpless.
“I love you too, Leo,” she confessed.
He stilled for a beat. It was as if time stopped. There was only the two of them, ensnared in each other’s gazes, reveling in the enormity of their shared emotions. He loved her. She loved him. They loved each other.
His mouth was on hers. She kissed him back with the desperation clawing up from within her. He moved again, thrusting in and out, faster, harder, his fingers working their magic. She came apart violently, her body tightening on his, shaking beneath his onslaught, and it was even more beautiful than before. One more surge of his cock inside her, and he stiffened, crying out his release as a burst of warmth rushed inside her.
In the aftermath of their wild joining, he untied her, kissed her wrists, and carried her to the bath. They bathed in the massive tub, Leo at one end and Bridget at the other. He washed her as if she were a child, incapable of taking care of herself. And she let him, trying to erase from her mind all memory of the promise she could never keep. They had each other for now, these stolen, precious moments.
It would have to be enough.
Chapter Eighteen
Leo arrived atthe residence of the Duke of Strathmore obscenely early the next morning. A bleary-eyed butler greeted him and led him to Strathmore’s billiards room. He had not sent word ahead of his visit, but it did not matter. Griffin, a fellow League member and one of Leo’s most trusted men, suffered from a familiar problem—an aversion to sleep. Regardless of the time of day or night Leo called upon him, Griffin was always awake.
With night came the demons lingering in a mind’s darkened shadows.
Leo knew it all too well.
So it was no surprise when he entered the billiards room to find Griffin wearing rumpled white shirtsleeves and black trousers from the night before. He was sprawled in an overstuffed chair, cup of coffee in hand.
“Carlisle,” he greeted, shifting as if to rise.
Leo held up a staying hand as he crossed the threshold. “Do not stand on my account.” He settled into a chair opposite him and waited for the butler to disappear, leaving them alone, before continuing. “Rough evening, Strathmore?”
Griffin’s lip curled. “Rough year would perhaps be more apt. I have not slept in three days, and I am thinking if I go a fourth, I’ll be sticking my spoon in the wall at last.”
“Not as soon as that, I hope,” he said mildly, accustomed to the duke’s grim moods, for they so often mirrored his own. Trauma had a way of tearing a man apart from the inside out. “You are one of the best men the League has.”
“The ranks of your soldiers are declining.” Strathmore raised a brow. “First Trent and Leeds. Now your own brother. Who will be next to go? You?”
It was not out of the question. He held Griffin’s stare, unflinching.
Griffin sat up straighter, sloshing hot coffee over his hand in the process. “Goddamn,” he howled, reaching for a napkin and frantically dabbing at his reddened skin. “A fine morning this is. I’ve burned myself, and you are sitting before me, telling me you are leaving the bloody League.”
There it was, the vocalization of the realizations that had been swirling through him ever since he had married Bridget. Realizations he had been reluctant to acknowledge, for the way they would necessarily rearrange his life as he knew it.
He expected to feel a tremor of uncertainty hearing those words aloud for the first time. Certainly, he had anticipated he would feel the lash of fear, the bitter sting of regret. Some trepidation at the gaping maws of change facing him. The League had been his life for over fifteen years. It had been his albatross and his momentum, his saving grace and his dogged duty.
Instead, where the heaviness in his heart ought to lay, he felt only lightness. He was not the same man he had been when his sense of duty had led him into the League. If he needed to leave now, he was prepared. There had been a time when he had clung to it as if it were his life source because he had been terrified of who and what he would be without its comforting force.
But comfort could so easily turn into a cage. Comfort had a limiting effect on what and who a person could be. And he found he no longer wanted to be Carlisle, the leader of the Special League, the man who was owned by his duty and his toils, the man who had no time for a wife or a family of his own. For little Bridgets and tiny Leos. He wanted those babes, goddamn it. With her.
He just needed to be able to trust her first. To convince her she could trust him.
