The plainness of it was what struck her hardest. No self-pity, no performance of suffering. Just the bare fact of it, laid down between them like a stone. Catherine looked at him and saw, very clearly, someone close to the boy she had known. The bright, confident boy with mud on his boots and laughter in his throat, standing at the edge of something vast and dark and utterly undeserved.
“Why?” she said, more a gasp than a word.
“Because my father was a fanatic, obsessed with…” He exhaled, “with his son proving himself worthy of the Dukedom. And when I did not…”
“How old were you?”
His eyes bored into hers. She could not have looked away if the room had been on fire or the King himself had walked inside.
“Fifteen,” he said, finally.
“Just a handful of years after I left.” The words left her in a breath. “I’m sorry. If I had known, I would have—”
“Done nothing. There was nothing to do.”
“My parents would have helped...”
“Against a Duke?” His voice was not unkind. Simply certain, the way a man is certain of gravity. “No one could.”
Catherine said nothing to that.You are right, I don’t think they could have helped. Because I don’t believe you are Aaron Tarnley.
And still.
His fingers threaded lazily through her hair, each slow stroke a spark striking tinder. She felt it in her spine, in her breath, in the warmth coiling low in her belly like honey left out in the sun. Her lower lip caught between her teeth. Something in her that had been wound tight for weeks loosened, and what rushed in to fill the space was not fear.
It wasappetite.
She lifted her face and pressed her lips to the line of his jaw. Held them there. Felt the sharp intake of breath move through him like a shiver.
He tilted his head, and his mouth found hers. Softly at first. A question she had no intention of leaving unanswered.
She opened her mouth to him, and the question burned.
His tongue slid against hers, and the sound that left her was embarrassingly easy to draw out. A low, wet moan that she felt in the soles of her feet. Her fingers curled into his hair, and she pulled, not gently. The groan that came from him in response was so rough and so pleased that it set her nerves alight.
“They were good people,” she murmured against his mouth, because she was not quite ready to surrender the conversation, because there was something intoxicating about talking and kissing at the same time, about feeling his breath catch against her lips mid-sentence.
“I was beyond it,” he managed.
She pulled back just enough to look at him. His eyes were frost blue, yet there was something unguarded in them that made her stomach turn over.
“I will help you now.”
“Catherine…” Low. Husky. A little desperate. His arms closed around her, and she felt the hard ridge of him against her belly, as her body hummed with it like a plucked string.
The kiss that followed was nothing like the one before. It was deep and slow and devastating, his mouth roving against hers with a patience that bordered on cruelty. He tasted of maleness and want, and she wound herself tighter against him, chasing the sensations.Allof the sensations. Hands caressing her spine, tracing her shoulders, tangling in her hair, trapping at the curve of her waist. The thin cotton of her nightdress felt like less than nothing between them.
“This is… tremendously inconvenient,” she rasped against his mouth.
A laugh, low and surprised, vibrated against her lips. “Which part?”
“All of it. The clothes. The floor. The fact that you are still being unbearably patient when I would very much like you to stop being so...”
Something shifted in his expression. The amusement darkened into something hungrier, and his hands stilled on her hips, fingers pressing in just hard enough to make her heart pound.
“You are certain of that?”
“Are youofferingme a chance to renege?”
