Rhiannon blinked her eyes open, regarding him in silence for a moment, their gazes locked.
“Good morning.” She stirred, taking in her surroundings. “Heavens, why did you not wake me? I’m lying on your poor arm.”
He retrieved his right limb at last, flexing his fingers with a wince as invisible pins and needles poked unmercifully at his skin from within and the feeling slowly returned. “I didn’t mind. You were sleeping soundly, and I hated to disturb you.”
Rhiannon gave him a small smile, looking suddenly shy. “I was having a wonderful dream.”
He wanted to kiss her. To roll her onto her back and make love to her again, and again, and again until neither of them could move. But he wasn’t a complete beast when it came to her, so he tamped down those unworthy yearnings.
“What were you dreaming?” he asked, curious.
Her pink lips parted as if she were about to answer, but then she rolled the bottom lip inward, catching it in her teeth. “I don’t remember.”
He chuckled. She was bloody adorable.
“Then how did you know it was wonderful, minx?”
“It was a feeling I had.” She was at his side now, the bedclothes pulled nearly to her chin.
He tugged at the counterpane lightly. “Nonsense. It had to have been more than a mere feeling.”
“Why should you call a feelingmere, with the implication being that it is insufficient and ought not to be taken seriously?”
Poor lamb. What must it be like to be so utterly unspoiled by life and all its ugliness? He’d been little more than a child when he had first realized the damage and destruction wreaked by feelings. From then until the bitter end of his parents’ miserable union, he had vowed to never allow himself to fall prey to such weaknesses.
“Because a feeling is an illusion,” he told her. “Just as emotions are lies we tell ourselves so that we can attribute meaning to our paltry lives.”
She cocked her head at him, frowning. “That is a rather cynical view of the world.”
He had good reason for it, but he didn’t want to discuss the hideous past. Doing so wouldn’t change the outcome. In the aftermath of that wretched day, he had learned to live with whatwas. Death had a finality that superseded all else. He would not repeat the sins of his father.
Unbidden, an image of his hands, red with blood, rose in his mind before he ruthlessly banished it. The blood had been everywhere that day, the metallic scent of it filling his nose, the slipperiness of it on his hands, the red seeping into clothing and carpets. There was a good reason he had ordered the room where it happened dismantled and resurrected as something new.
It was the same reason he avoided supposed love.
He shook himself from his thoughts.
“I am older than you are,” he pointed out to Rhiannon. “I’ve experienced a great deal more of life’s inevitable disappointments. That does tend to make one jaded.”
Her brow furrowed. “Did someone break your heart?”
“Sweet girl, I’d have to own a heart in order for anyone to break it.” He winked at her, trying to lighten the moment, because if there was anything he didn’t wish to discuss when he was naked and in bed with a woman, for Chrissakes, it was tender emotions and the bitter horrors of murder and death. “I can assure you that there is nothing more than a desiccated husk where that organ ought to live.”
Rhiannon gave him a searching look. “I don’t think you are as unfeeling as you would have me believe.”
Not with the knight errant nonsense again. What did he have to do to disabuse her of the notion that he was redeemable?
“And I can assure you that I am. Heed my warnings if you know what is best for you.”
Her stubborn chin went up. “No. I don’t think that I shall.”
He wanted to kiss her, to fuck her, to wallow in her innocence and remember what it was like to believe in the goodness of others. Damn her for being so bloody wonderful. It struck him with sudden, awful clarity that if he had been the kind of manwho believed in marriage and love and such maudlin twaddle, he would have asked Rhiannon to marry him in a heartbeat.
How horrifying. He banished all such ridiculous thoughts at once.
“Then you’ll only have yourself to blame,” he warned her.
“Youdohave a heart,” the obstinate woman insisted.
