Not that she intended to do so. When she had left Lark House with him, she had felt the finality of her decision in her heart. There would be no going back.
“Excellent observation,” he said grimly, almost as if he had been privy to her tumultuous thoughts. “Just remember you asked the question, lest you decide you do not like the answer. I want to marry you for several reasons, all of which are selfish and thoroughly wrong, and I know it.”
His admission startled her in its candor. She wanted to know more. “And they are?”
His expression darkened, his eyes the deep blue of a sky after a summer thunderstorm. “Because I want to bed you. Because I want to strip you of every layer of silk, lace, and linen until you are bare before me. Until you are lying in my bed beneath me, and I am kissing you and…Christ. Do you want more? I can assure you that you do not, Violet.”
She wanted more. Of course she did. But she could not admit it aloud. Only Wicked Violet could admit such sinful feelings. Except, the evening seemed to burn and sizzle with possibility. She felt alive, truly alive.
And so she said the only two words that would roll off her lips. “More, please.”
“More tartlet?” he teased, his expression growing less strained.
“You know,” she countered, breathless. “Give me more.Tellme more. More details.”
His nostrils flared, the only sign her request affected him, but it was enough. “I want to marry you because I want to fuck you, Violet. There. Do you like that word? Are you happy now? I want to fuck you so deep and so hard and so well that you never again think of anyone named Charles, or any other faceless, nameless man for the rest of your life. I want you to be mine alone, now and always. Forever. Does that make you happy? Have I thoroughly shocked and horrified you yet?”
Dear God, his words—his wicked, bad, altogether naughty words—took her next breath and the one after that.
Was it how he truly felt about her? Did he want her with such ferocity? Did he want her every bit as badly as she wanted him?
She met his stare, refusing to retreat. “That depends.”
A dark brow rose, questioning. “Upon what?”
Upon everything. Upon nothing. She did not know. All shedidknow was she had run away with the Duke of Strathmore. She had feigned her own abduction. She was now alone with a man who had said…Lord in heaven, she could not even repeat his words in her mind, for they were so sinful and carnal.
For the years of her life following her mother’s death, she had always been so careful. Her every action had been made with great deliberation, taken to please her brother, to prove she was not cut from the same cloth as Mama.
But the time had come to rebel. She felt it now, here, with the sweet taste of a custard tart on her tongue and the most handsome man she’d ever met staring at her across the table, close enough to touch.
She straightened in her chair, her gaze never wavering from his. “Upon whether or not you mean what you just said.”
He met her gaze, his burning into hers with an intensity she could not shake. “Of course I mean it. I mean all of it, and I have from the moment you felled me with your knitting.”
“Crocheting.” She corrected him as if it mattered, staring at him hard, reading his gaze, inspecting his posture and bearing, the muscle ticking in his jaw.
“Crocheting,” he repeated with a devastating smile. He held out his hand to her, palm up, stretched across the table like an offering.
For a few beats, she considered him, studying his hand, his smile.
It was a smile she felt, not just in her heart, but in her soul, that part of herself which could not be caged. Violet stared at the man opposite her—Griffin, she reminded herself—and something strange happened. A shift, a feeling, an instinct…whatever it was, it settled upon her, and she could not shake it.
When she had been a girl, before her mother’s death, she had delighted in taking off her shoes and stockings and splashing in spring puddles when no one else was about to reprimand her. There had been something freeing about mud between her toes, about acting without the burden of being Lady Violet, about simply being one with the earth, her skin absorbing the fresh, cool rain water.
Her mother had caught her one day in the gardens at Hawksleigh, the bloodless Tudor affair that served as the seat for the Duke of Arden. Violet had been so certain she would receive a scold, but instead, her mother had taken off her own shoes and stockings, and she had taken Violet’s hands in hers, and they had laughed together, laughed with the sun shining down on them after the rain, laughed as if nothing mattered beyond the moment.
It was one of her happiest memories of Mama, her smile, upturned face, the mud puddles splashing their fine silk gowns, their feet dirty and cold, the freeing sensation of rebellion. Of refusing to do as they ought to, as they were told.
Here in the kitchen of this small, inelegant home, seated across from Strathmore, Violet felt that same, charmed sense of the weights holding her down being removed. She was once more the carefree girl who dared to splash in puddles.
She placed her hand in Griffin’s, and when his fingers tightened over hers, that same, freeing sensation buoyed up within her, lifting her like an ascension balloon. And she was the girl who had dared. He was the person in her life who witnessed that daring, and applauded it, rather than trying to stifle it.
“I like those wicked words,” she told him. “I am not at all shocked or horrified, for I want all those things too.”
Chapter Eleven
Griffin had intendedto be a gentleman.
