Struggling to catch his breath, he leaned against her back, holding both of them upright against the wall of the temple. One of the tapers on the candelabra burned itself out. Then another.
He withdrew from her body at last, using a handkerchief to clean first her, and then himself. The sight of her pale, rounded arse and legs in the moonlight were unbearably erotic. She said nothing as he tended to her. With a muttered curse, he flipped her gown back down, then restored his breeches to proper order.
Artemis mocked him from across the chamber.
El deber, he reminded himself pointedly.
“The hour grows late,” he told Catriona as yet another candle burned itself down to a nub. An omen, perhaps. “We should return.”
She spun around to face him at last, and even in the dim light, he could see the faint rose in her cheeks. “Alessandro?”
“Sí, querida?” he bit out, angry with himself for his lack of control.
“Gracias,” she told him with a tender smile, and then she threaded her fingers through his once more.
And with that lone word and gesture, the anger burning inside him sputtered out just like the next candle.
Mierda.
*
Hours after hehad taken his wife, Alessandro was prowling the dark halls of Marchmont. He had escorted Catriona back to the main house, seeing her to her chamber before doing the cowardly thing and leaving her to settle for the evening alone.
Though he was beyond weary, exhausted from travel and the trials of finding his home pillaged and abandoned, and sated from the heights of pleasure he had reached with his wife, sleep eluded him. His mind was a jumbled confusion of past and present, of regret and guilt, of need and desire. His chest was heavy with the weight of knowledge.
Tonight, he had crossed boundaries with Catriona he could not uncross.
Biting back a curse, Alessandro stalked to the study that had belonged to his father. Like every other part of Marchmont, he recognized each creaky floorboard, every last stick of furniture, even though it had been years since he had last been within these walls. This chamber was no different as he settled the brace of candles he had been carrying with him upon his father’s desk.
He skirted the mahogany, Grecian-inspired monstrosity. The heads of the gods were carved on each of the four legs supporting it. His father had requested his own likeness carved into the chair. Alessandro slid his fingers over the familiar dips and planes, the fleshy pad of his forefinger finding the almost indiscernible crack in his father’s prominent nose.
Once, when he had been angry at the former earl as a child, he had lopped the nose right off with one of his knives. In a fit of panic, he had later returned and glued the nose into place without his sire ever being the wiser. Indeed, his father had died without ever knowing the nose upon his prized chair had once been savaged by his only son.
Alessandro lowered himself to the chair, staring into the flickering play of light and shadow before him. The art in this room remained hung upon the walls, he noted now. There had not been time to investigate earlier, pressed as he had been to attempt to find some suitable staff to work Marchmont back into its former state of elegance and grace.
But how ironic it was that his thieving steward had only stolen the portraits from the gallery, where he had clearly presumed the most valuable paintings hung. The last Earl of Rayne had kept his most treasured paintings within this very chamber, and thankDiosthey had not been the victim of water damage, flame, or outright thievery. The Titian and Caravaggio still ornamented the wall in the same place of honor he remembered from his youth.
Sitting in his sire’s chair felt damned odd.
Wrong.
As wrong as kissing Catriona on the mouth should have felt. But kissing her had not felt wrong at all. Rather, it had felt necessary. It had felt like the beginning and the end, all at once. It had felt as if he had always been meant to feel her lips move beneath his, as if he would perish of hunger without the chance.
Hell.
He stood as if the chair had been fashioned of flame, and in a sense, it was. The burning pain of his past. The boy he had once been confronting the man he was. If he recalled correctly, his father had always kept brandy on his sideboard. Years had passed, but it was possible, he reasoned, his bastardo of a steward had not stolen the liquor stores as well.
Raking his fingers through his hair, he reached the sideboard and plucked up a decanter.
“I would not, were I you.”
The voice, unexpected and small, coming from somewhere within the shadows at the opposite end of the room, had a sudden and intense effect upon him.
“Cristo!” he bit out, slamming the decanter back atop the sideboard with so much force he was surprised it had not shattered. “Who is there?”
“Bramwell was fond of blue ruin,” added the voice, unrepentant. “But his swill is sure enough to make you ill. I drank some of it myself one night, and I spent the evening casting up my accounts in the gardens.”
Gritting his teeth, he searched through the darkness for the source of the voice, for he already instinctively knew its owner.
