“I was in awe of him, I suppose,” she continued, staring into the floor at a memory only she could see. “I allowed him to persuade me to do things I would not have otherwise done. Not long after I discovered I was going to have Pearl, he left in the night. He moved on to a rival company, and I never saw him again.”
“The bastard should be hung from the gallows for what he did to you,” he growled, unable to hold his tongue a second more. The vitriol inside him was at high tide, spewing forth. “You were a child, Johanna. He was a man grown.”
She glanced back at him. “I do not regret it, for it gave me Pearl, and those months with her, being her mother…they were the best months of my life.”
Unshed tears glittered in her eyes, and he felt an answering prickle in his own, and then his vision blurred. His cheeks were wet. He was crying. Crying for the woman he held so securely to his side. Crying for the girl she had once been. Crying for Pearl, the baby she had lost.
“I am sorry,” he told her again, finding his voice, knowing it was trite, but unable to find other words to match the way he felt.
“What is this?” she asked, her tone awed as she reached up and skimmed the soft pads of her fingertips over his cheeks, collecting his tears the same way he had once stolen hers. “Do not cry for me, Felix. I do not deserve it.”
He caught her wrist in a gentle grasp, holding her hand still when she would have removed it, and pressed a kiss to her fingers. The wetness of his own sorrow painted his lips. And then he kissed the center of her palm before lifting his head and meeting her gaze.
“You, Johanna McKenna, are the strongest, bravest woman I know,” he said, meaning every word. “I admire your resilience, your determination, the ferocity of the love in your heart.”
“Oh, Felix,” she whispered, her hand going to his cheek in a soft caress. “You should not say such things to me.”
“Why not?” he asked, pushing her.
This moment between them was a bridge. They could cross over it together, or they could retreat to their separate sides. He sensed it, and he knew what he wanted. He had only ever felt this depth of emotion and passion once before in his life, and it had been with Hattie.
It seemed the greatest irony of all that he should find it again now with a woman who was the epitome of everything he should not want. She was an actress with a scandalous past and undeniable ties to one of the most volatile Fenian plotters in America.
“Because it makes me want to kiss you,” she said then, disrupting his every thought.
Sending his ability to think or act rationally fleeing.
She had just taken his hand and started halfway across the bridge. And damn it all, he was going to lead them the rest of the way.
“Then perhaps you should,” he dared.
Felix’s words landedin Johanna’s heart.
He wanted her to kiss him.
Her past had not chased him away. He did not now look upon her as if she must pin a scarlet letter to her breast and hang her head in shame. He wanted her in spite of who she was, what she had done, and all the danger surrounding her.
And he had wept for her. For Pearl.
For that alone, she could fall in love with him.
Perhaps she already had.
She knew that kissing him now would mean more than it had before. The hour was late. She was spending the evening at his home. Everything between them had changed. Though she had not lain with a man since she had been sixteen, she had spent all the years since deflecting the overtures of men. She was not an innocent. She was wise and weary.
But she was also longing. Longing for this man. For the taste of his lips. For his arms around her. Longing for the way he could replace old memories with new. Now was her chance, she reminded herself as she stared at him, helplessly in his thrall. She would have to leave tomorrow so that he and Verity would be safe and Drummond’s men would divert their dangerous attacks elsewhere.
Indeed, now was heronlychance.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and drew his head toward her, stopping when there was a scant inch separating their lips. “Are you sure you want a woman like me? You are a nobleman, and I am anything but noble.”
The arm banded about her waist tightened, and his other hand cupped her cheek as his verdant gaze seemed to devour her. “You are the noblest woman I know.”
What could she do then, but kiss him? There was no other response she could possibly fathom. The Duke of Winchelsea, so handsome and austere, so elegant and poised, thought her noble. And he was looking at her in a way that made her melt.
She was not certain which of them was the first to move.
All she knew was that in the next breath, their lips were fused. And this kiss, it was different from the others they had shared. It was infused with emotion that had been absent before. She moved her mouth slowly over his, suddenly acutely aware of her every sense: the decadent scent of him, the abrasion of his whiskers beneath her palms, the supple smoothness of his lips, the way he tasted of sweet wine and the raspberry fool that had been their dessert at dinner, the low sound in his throat.
