The doubts had returned a hundredfold. He wanted to believe in her. Wanted to believe he could be whole again. Adrian was at war with himself. He threw his arm back over his eyes, willing her to go away.
The sounds that reached him suggested she had not. Water pouring. A cloth being wrung of excess liquid. The undeniable whisper of cloth over skin. He supposed she was cleaning herself.
Could she not have done that in her own chamber? Did she not understand that what had happened between them just now had been animalistic? Their bodies hungered for each other. But that was all.
His heart was still pounding, and a roaring began in his ears. Not the proper time to have another of his attacks.By God, he’d not had one since that day in the blue sitting room, which was now neither a sitting room nor blue.
She had done that.
She had seen it changed.
For him.
Why?
His senses prickled with awareness. She was moving toward him. The bed dipped lightly as she presumably seated herself upon it once more. And then there was a cool cloth on his cock. A shock at first.
His swift inhalation hissed. He jerked.
“Too cold?”
“Get on with it,” he gritted, refusing to show weakness, unwilling to look at her.
A few passes of the damp cloth, and he was humiliated anew by his inability to control himself. His cockstand was rising, stiff and ready once more, and all because her hand had been upon him. She had not even been stroking him. Merely gently tending to him. Making soft passes with the cloth.
He clenched his jaw and peeked from beneath his forearm once more. “You may go.”
“Not just yet.” Her calm determination irked him.
So, too, the realization that the fit which had seemed poised to strike had abated. How? Had she been the cause? The moment she turned her back to him and retraced her steps to return the cloth to the basin, rinsing it, he grappled with the bedclothes.
They were twisted from the haste with which he had shed them and the frenzy of their lovemaking. But finally he managed to catch a handful and yank it over his waist, shielding his straining prick from her view.
She turned back to him, still naked. At home in her skin in a way he could not help but admire. This, too, irritated him.
“Will you not have some decorum?” he snapped. “Your dressing gown. Where has it gone?”
She stopped at the edge of his bed, watching him with a raised brow and an inscrutable expression. “The one you tore from me, do you mean? Do you suppose it has any buttons remaining? I believe I stepped on at least half a dozen of them on my way across the chamber.”
Damnation.
Yes, he had done that, had he not? He had been a ravenous beast, pawing at her, removing her from her fine garment with desperation instead of finesse.
“Surely there are enough remaining for your modesty and a return trip to your chamber where you belong,” he suggested unkindly.
“I would not know because I cannot find it.” She seated herself on the edge of his bed.
Still naked.
And he could not stop himself from looking at her breasts. The pinkness on the pale skin.Hell.He had apparently rubbed his face everywhere. Her nipples were hard. The faint sheen of marks on her belly showed the evidence of the baby she had carried. Despite his anger at her, he had worried himself sick in Dunsworth, fretting as the time of her lying in had arrived. Wondering if his child would kill her the way it had done to Amelia.
But she was here. She was here and lovely and nude. He gripped the counterpane, determined to keep himself from touching her again. Doing so would prove the greatest folly, he knew.
She needed to don that bloody robe, and she needed to do it now. He cast a glance about the room, expecting to make a liar of her, but to his dismay, he did not see the garment either. Not a damned thing lying upon the rug anywhere his gaze fell.
“Take one of my shirts then, and wear that,” he suggested, desperate. “I’ve trousers too, though I scarcely suppose they would fit you since you are so damned short and petite.”
“I am not going to wander through the halls wearing your trousers and shirt,” she informed him, sounding like the duchess she was.
