“The image of her keeps returning,” I said, my voice quieter now. “The girl on the slab. I close my eyes, and I see her again. I wake in the dark with my heart racing as though I am the one lying there, cold and helpless, and I cannot...make it stop.”
Steele’s jaw flexed, fury flashing across his features, not at me but at the cruelty of it, at the world that demanded women be brave and then punished them for it.
“How can I help?” he asked.
I tried for levity because the alternative was unbearable. “You can’t.”
He frowned.
Heat rose in my cheeks. “Unless you intend to sit beside my bed and keep watch like a nursemaid. You cannot be there to drag me out of a nightmare.”
His gaze sharpened, intent and unblinking. “No,” he said. “I cannot be there every time you wake.”
A pause.
“But perhaps I can give you something else.”
“What do you mean?”
He stepped closer, close enough that the heat of him seeped through every layer of propriety.
His voice dropped, intimate as a confession.
“A memory,” he said. “Something you can hold in your mind so firmly it will not let the fear take you. Something you can summon when the darkness comes for you.”
My breath caught.
He watched me for a moment, as though weighing the risk of what he was about to say.
“At the boathouse,” he murmured, “you wondered about a man’s desire. About proof of it.”
The words struck like flint, sparking something low and dangerous in me.
“I can give you that,” he said softly, his gaze steady and unflinching, as though he meant to make certain I understood exactly what he was saying.
“If you want it,” he added, quiet, controlled.
I ought to have bristled at his suggestion. I ought to have been affronted, scandalized.
Instead, I stood there trembling like a girl in her first season.
“We cannot cross that line, Steele.”
“We won’t,” he promised at once, as if the assurance cost him.
I should have said no. Should have turned down his offer. But everything in me whispered, “Yes.”
Something flickered in his eyes. Before I could decipher what it was, he reached for me, not with haste, but with intention. His hand slid to the nape of my neck, his thumb brushing the line of my jaw as though he were memorizing it.
Then his mouth moved against mine again, disciplined heat sharpening into something that made my knees weaken.
He tasted of restraint and danger, of everything he had held back for too long. My hands clutched his coat, dragging him closer, needing more, and he answered with a low sound that vibrated through his chest.
When we broke, it was only because I had forgotten how to breathe.
His own was uneven, but his hands remained steady, almost maddeningly so.
“I want you to remember,” he murmured, voice rough with control. “Remember how it feels when you are here with me. When nothing can touch you.”
