“Say my name,” he said against her skin.
“Giles.”
“Again,” he said.
“Giles.” His neck muffled her voice.
“I cannot wait. Marry me. Marry me as fast as I can procure a special license.”
Immediately, she stilled.
He stroked her hair as tension snaked through her limbs. Then, she began to tremble—not with desire, but with bone-deep fear.
A wave of self-contempt, cold and acute, swept through his body.
Hell. No gentleman would grind himself against a lady. Out of doors, as well! He clenched his jaw—a reflexive steeling of his own.
Devil take him, hehadgone mad.
Carefully, he moved his hands to her waist. “I am sorry,” he forced, “I shouldn’t have—”
“No.” She clung to him. “I—I wanted you to kiss me.”
Of course, she would say so, now. He’d practically savaged her. He’d treated all that burgeoning, beautiful passion like mud beneath his boots.
No gentleman indeed. He was an animal. A brute. A bastard.
“I am sorry.” He touched his forehead to hers. “You deserve better.”
Her trembling grew worse, but he held tight.
“Shh, hellion,” he whispered against her hair’s soft tickle. “The fault is mine.”
“You don’t understand…”
“I do,” he assured. “I may be a brute, but even a brute knows a lady would never—” He paused because Katherine was visibly quaking now—a full body shake that would have shattered him had he not already felt the weight of his wrong. “Shh,” he encouraged again, “I’ll just hold you, I promise. You have nothing to fear.”
“Stop.” She lifted her face and her hollow eyes met his. “You really do not understand. You’ve no need—” She hiccupped and then wiped her cheeks. “There is something I must tell you.”
“Anything.” Her look of misery made him want to retch. “You can tell me anything.”
She was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, it was barely above a whisper. “I was in love.”
“Yes,” he said around a glass shard in his throat. “I know.”
“No.” She shook her head back and forth. “You don’t know. I—” Her voice dropped even further. “I…I anticipated my vows.”
“But, of course, you—” He ceased speaking abruptly. A strange sense of unreality weighted the air. “You don’t mean you were looking forward to your vows, do you?”
She swallowed. “No.”
Lady Katherine hadanticipatedher marriage vows. He’d half expected such a revelation. The expectation did not ease his response. Hidden behind a solid mask of indifference, his thoughts turned lurid.
Which man had led her to ruin? Had her lover—or lovers—satisfied?
And then, the most chilling question of all, had there been a consequence to her actions? Another bastard like himself, this one cruelly abandoned?
He’d experienced this very same chill once before. The encore performance had different players, true, but the stage directions remained the same—eyes, pleading for understanding, a silence so loud he thought he might have gone deaf, and, at the center, crystallized hopes frozen in the moment of their death.
