“For now.” She laughed despondently and threw his injured hand back into his lap. She clutched her arms around herself and cried. “And the moment this marriage is annulled, everyone will think I was ruined twice, when no man has even touched me once.”
She hated how pathetic she sounded, knew he would never understand the shame and rejection she felt.
“Do not ask me to apologize,” he said quietly, coldly.
“What good would that do?” she shouted. “Paul de Rees would not accept—”
“I did not mean that I would apologize to De Rees!” Nicholas turned suddenly, fixing her with a white-hot stare. He took her by the arms and shook her. “I meant you! Do you believe I attacked him to satisfy myself? It isyou, Amelia. It has always been because of you. To know that he saw you that night, and… To think that he could have…”
He grit his teeth, hands tightening around her arms. She knew there would be bruises in the morning, but she did not care.
“I wouldkillhim if you ordered me to,” he growled. “And never would I apologize for it…”
A soft, surprised gasp left her in the quiet of the carriage.
It made no sense. Nicholas had refused to duel the husband of his lover in London—but for her, he would commit murder? It was an insane thought—terrifying. She trembled in his hold.
But beyond her fear, there was that same maddening yearning for him, present even now when she hated part of him for what he had done.
The air between them stilled. A tear ran into her mouth, and she watched his eyes follow the path of it over her lips.
She could not say who inched forward first. Him or her. Their mouths crashed into each other so fast it was impossible to tell.
She moaned into the kiss, her body arcing toward him like a flame bending in wind. Heat flooded her from scalp to sole. Satisfaction, at last, after weeks of denial, ofalmost, ofnot yet.
His kiss, the taste of him, the feeling of him pressing into her.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and dragged him closer, a cry of pleasure escaping her that the rain outside could not drown. One of his hands found her leg beneath the layers of her gown, gripping her behind the knee, hauling her thigh againsthis hip. The carriage swayed with their shifting weight, and neither of them cared.
“Devil, I have wanted thisso bad,” he whispered, angling their bodies on the bench so she lay beneath him. He licked and kissed her neck, driving her mad.
She nodded against his face. She did not know what she was agreeing to. She knew only that she wanted his hands on her, his mouth on her, wanted him to do whatever he pleased and never stop.
He shrugged off his coat and flung it into the footwell. Braced above her on one arm, he paused. Looked down at her. His eyes were blown dark with desire, his chest heaving, his hair falling across his forehead in a way that made him look younger. Wilder. Less like a duke and more like a man on the edge of something he could not take back.
He had never looked so gorgeous to her as in that moment.
His fingers found the hem of her skirts. He pushed the fabric up slowly, his knuckles dragging against the bare skin of her calf, her knee, the inside of her thigh. Each inch of contact left a trail of fire in its wake, and by the time the cool air of the carriage met the heated skin between her legs, she was trembling.
“Do you have any idea what you have done to me?” he growled, digging his thumb into the hollow of her hip. “This hunger for you… I have known nothing like it in all my life.”
“I know,” she murmured, and before her courage could desert her, she took his hand and guided it between her thighs. She had no idea what had possessed her. Knew only that the ache there had become unbearable, and he was the only remedy. “How could I not know. I…”
The rest died in her throat as his palm cupped her.
The sound she made was not ladylike. It was not quiet. His hand was warm and sure against her slick heat, and when he ground the heel of his palm against her, she squeezed her eyes shut and saw white.
“Nicholas, yes...” she moaned, bucking into his hand, shameless, desperate, chasing the pressure. He gave it to her. His thumb found the swollen bud at the crest of her sex and circled it. Lazy. Deliberate. As though they had all the time in the world and he intended to use every second of it driving her out of her mind.
She clawed into his forearm, her nails biting through the linen of his shirt, holding his hand exactly where she needed it. Stars flickered at the edges of her vision. Her head knocked painfully against the carriage door behind her, and she did not feel it. Nothing existed beyond his hand, his breath hot against her throat, the slow maddening rhythm of his thumb.
“Ask me,” he snarled against her ear. “Ask me to grant you what you need.”
“Please.” The word came out broken, begging. “Please, Nicholas. I need...Ah!”
He slid a finger inside her. Slick and foreign and so achingly good that she had to clamp her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. He curled that finger, pressing against a place within her that sent a bolt of pleasure so sharp it was almost pain, and her spine arched clean off the bench.
When she dared look up through her fingers, he was watching her. Smiling. Biting his lower lip as he worked her body with a focus that bordered on devotion. The sight of him like that, controlled and intent while she fell apart beneath him, was its own form of torment.
