“To the devil with your guests,” he returned as he joined her at the window. “I’m staying.”
Her lips tightened with disapproval, but she didn’t retreat this time. “What would be the point of doing so when I do not want you here?”
“I’m staying at Sherborne Manor. In your library. At your side.”In your bed, he thought with grim, reawakened possession, but he kept the words to himself. For it was a primitive emotion, one of which he should be ashamed and wasn’t sure he deserved. But the time had come. He had waited a year in deference to Percy’s memory, a period of somber mourning. He had returned to claim his wife as his at last. “You cannot dismiss me like some recalcitrant servant, Vivi. I’m your husband. I belong here.”
Not, perhaps, at this rambling country estate that had never felt like a true home to him. But certainly with her. They were inextricably bound.
“Why have you returned?” she snapped. “Why did you not continue to stay away? Why come now, after so long?”
“Because I am your husband, and you are my wife,” he returned evenly, before uttering the words he had been practicing in his mind for the duration of the journey from New York City. “And because I have missed you.”
In truth, his reasons were infinitely more. His true needs supplanted something so simplistic as words. He had been fighting against his own demons this past year, afraid of the man they made him, chased by guilt and regret. Telling her the inevitable, however, that their marriage would need to carry on despite past promises he had made, was easiest for now.
She stiffened. “Pretty words from the man who left me.”
“Vivi, sweetheart.” He settled his hand on her forearm gently. So gently. Fearing he would spook her, and yet needing to touch her.
But Vivi wrested her elbow from his grasp, whirling away from him, calling angrily over her shoulder as she went, “Donotcall me your sweetheart. And do not think for one moment that I will simply fall into your bed because you have deigned to remember my existence. Everything has changed.I’vechanged. I’m no longer the foolish girl who fancied you a hero.”
He stalked after her, frustrated with himself, with the decisions he had made, with the guilt that was never far, with the longing that was making his hands tremble. “I may have been gone, but I never forgot you. I thought of you every day. You never strayed from my mind. I wrote you letters whenever I had the opportunity.”
She spun about, her gold silk swirling. “Letters! Do you think I wanted letters from you? Do you think I wanted a husband who ran away from me the second we were wed? Do you think I wished to be pitied and scorned whilst everyone laughed behind my back as the papers reported your exploits?”
Christ. He wondered just how bad the gossip had been. Mother had hinted at it in one of her many diatribes, but she had never explicitly detailed the reports. He would own that he had lost himself in many vices during the early weeks of his self-imposed exile. Women, however, had not been one of them.
“Vivi,” he began, trying to dredge up a suitable explanation.
“No,” she interrupted sharply. “You needn’t try to fashion excuses for my benefit. Pray spare me the insult. I already know you didn’t think about what I wanted all this time. Do you know how I know that, Bradford?” She paused, the damning silence only interrupted by the ticking of a distant antique ormolu clock. “Because you never asked me. But I am telling you now, rather than naively believing you might take it upon yourself to think of me. I want you to go, and I never want to see you again.”
Her words were like a blow, knocking the air from him. And for a wild moment, he saw himself through Vivi’s eyes. She was right. He never had asked her what she wanted. He had been too consumed by his grief, guilt, and self-loathing.
“I’m sorry,” he told her when he could find his voice again.
It was an apology he had owed her for a year. An apology he owed to Percy, too. Court had failed the both of them, the two people he had cared for most.
Vivi shook her head. “It’s too little, too late. If you truly want my forgiveness, you’ll leave me in peace.”
If he were a better man, perhaps he would heed her. But he was selfish and destructive, traits that ran in the Sherborne blood. So, he reached for her instead, his hands settling on her waist as if it were where they belonged.
“I’m not leaving you again, Vivi,” he said, feeling the rightness of it.
A new vow, born from the ashes of the man he’d once been. A vow he intended to keep if it was the last thing he did on earth.
And then he did what he had been dreaming of doing this interminable year they had spent apart. He lowered his head and took his wife’s mouth with his.
* * *
Shock renderedVivi immobile as Court pressed his lips to hers.
Followed immediately by sensation, almost violent in its potency. A thrilling sense of homecoming. It had been so long since he had last kissed her. Since she had watched him getting into a carriage and driving away from her.
His possessive hold on her waist seemed to sear her through her layers of silk, linen, and boning. His scent wrapped around her, familiar and yet new. Clean soap with a hint of citrus and musk. The soft brush of his beard over her tender skin was foreign. Court had never, in all the years she had known him, possessed whiskers. They rendered him more masculine, less polished. Like a marauding pirate.
His mouth slanted over hers, firm and hot, and there was no denying her body’s reaction—sheer jubilation. A reminder that, regardless of her anger and bitterness toward him, despite the year he had been gone, and regardless of her attempts to extinguish the feelings for him that had followed her for over a dozen years, she still loved him.
And worse, she still wanted him. Desire coiled in her belly, as dangerous as a snake because she knew the destruction he had left in his wake before. But even as she told herself she couldn’t surrender, she was softening, her hands finding purchase in his coat, and she grasped his lapels, holding him tightly.
But she was at war with her body, her mind and heart struggling against each other. Somehow, she managed to hold her mouth perfectly still and refrain from returning his kiss as she so desperately longed to do. He may as well have been kissing a wall for as stubbornly as she refused to show him any hint of a reaction.
