“Love is as much a myth as the story of Tithonus and Eos.”
“Surely you don’t believe that.”
“I do. Have you never noticed that in so many of the old legends, it is love that ultimately leads to death and unhappiness? One must fancy the Greeks and Romans were attempting to tell us something.”
She wanted to argue with him. Aubrey could read it in the mulish set of her jaw, in the fire sparkling in her eyes. He had been like her once, filled with conviction and fire. But he was thirty years old, and he had buried his mother and father, knowing the damage that supposed love could do. He had neither the time nor the inclination for convictions, and the last of them had been thoroughly dashed into jaded cynicism. He was a man of the moment, chasing whatever pleased him until it no longer did, and then he flitted elsewhere.
Which was what he would do tomorrow.
“I think the Greeks and Romans were telling us that love is always worth the risk and the cost,” Rhiannon told him firmly.
“Yet hold me not for ever in thine East,” he recited a verse from the Tennyson poem that had always struck him as being particularly meaningful. “How can my nature longer mix with thine?”
“If not forever, then perhaps just a few nights more,” she said, her gaze plumbing the depths of his, searching.
He wondered what she saw when she looked at him. What she truly saw. He was aware of his looks; they had been all he had to recommend himself, aside from his title and reasonable wealth. But what did she find behind the rakish polish he wore like a shield? She must have fooled herself a great deal when it came to him. He tried to summon a modicum of regret and could not.
More proof of his villainy.
He would not change a single moment of what had come to pass this last week. He would kiss her, know her passion, her body. He would take her, make her his again and again if given the chance. Because Lady Rhiannon Northwick was worth the hell of an eternity as a grasshopper or any fate worse.
Buthewasn’t worthy of her.
Not worthy of so much as the water droplet clinging to the ends of her hair.
“Just a few nights more,” he said to her, lowering his head and taking her lips with his.
He kissed her slowly, deliberately.
He kissed her even knowing that he was lying.
Because when dawn painted the sky tomorrow morning, he would be gone, and his goddess would be better off without him.
Aubrey carriedher to the bed.
They were both naked, for the towels from their bath had fallen away. Her hair was dripping. She didn’t care. His lips were on hers as he gently laid her on the bedclothes. She couldn’t get enough of him, coasting her hands over every part of his body, committing him to memory. The protrusion of his clavicle, the blades of his shoulders, the sinew of his upper arms, the rigid slab of his abdomen, the sculpted muscles of his chest. She wanted to know him in her fingertips and her heart, to never forget what these charmed nights of passion in the cottage had been like.
Because she couldn’t quite shake the fear that these stolen moments would be all they could ever have. His words this evening had been laden with caution. He was warning her away from him.
It hadn’t worked, of course.
Like Eos, she would do anything for the man she loved. She would face her brother’s wrath. She would battle the demons of Aubrey’s past that he kept locked away from her. She would end her understanding with the Earl of Carnis when she returned toLondon. When she was no longer bound to another, then, surely then, Aubrey would be free to ask her to be his wife.
Nothing could come between them.
Aubrey made love to her with a quiet fervor that was new, raining kisses on her breasts, sucking her nipples until she begged for him to take her. She was awash in sensation, so very alive for the first time, renewed in her lover’s lips and tongue and clever hands.
He circled her wrists with a tender grasp, bringing her arms above her and pinning them to the bed as he kissed her deeply, giving her his tongue. She arched into him, feeling utterly at his mercy and loving every second of it. The movement arched her back and forced her breasts into his chest as he fed her wild kisses that went on and on until she was breathless and dazed as he raised his head.
His emerald gaze glittered down at her. “You are more beautiful than any goddess could ever hope to be.”
“I am only all too mortal,” she said, smiling up at him. “For you, I would gladly be a grasshopper.”
He kissed her again. “You are too good for me. Too pure. Too lovely. Too much heart. I want to keep you here forever so that no other man can ever have you.”
She knew the feeling. She was intensely jealous of all the women who had known him before her. Who had shared intimacies with him like bathing and sleeping, who had kissed him and listened to him breathe in the night. Not because she feared he had given a part of himself to those women, but because it was less time she’d had with him.
He gazed down at her seriously. “There is something I want to do, and if you don’t wish it, you have only to say the word.”
