“Defending me!” she snapped, but there was something in her tone that told him she knew the truth.
He barked out an ugly sound. “No, Lydia. I was the monster tonight. I was my father.”
She sucked in her breath between her teeth and now she charged forward again, beautiful and light and completely unafraid despite what she’d heard and seen. He found himself leaning toward her, incapable of drawing back one more time.
She caught his arm, holding tight as she stared up into his face. “You werenothinglike your father. Not tonight, not ever,” she insisted.
“You who have known me, what, a fortnight?” he said, but he still didn’t pull away from the comfort Lydia offered. Now that he’d spilled all he was to her, he had no strength to fight anymore.
He would be selfish, because that was what his father had put in his blood.
Her face twisted at his question, and for a moment he saw something in her gaze. Something…guilty. But then it was gone.
“Perhaps I haven’t known you,trulyknown you, for very long,” she said softly. “But Idoknow you, Graham. What you did tonight, what you did when you struck Simon, those things don’t make you your father.”
She moved even closer, brushing his hair back from his face. The air began to leave the room as she locked eyes with him. And his need to have her close began to transform into something with more purpose and heat.
“Ewan said I needed your secrets,” he confessed as she brushed her thumb over his lower lip. “And here I gave you mine, didn’t I?”
Adelaide froze, her finger still heavy on his full lips as she stared up into his eyes. Secrets. He’d been on a mission to find her secrets when his own painful past had fallen from those same lips she touched now.
And her own secrets felt so damned heavy right now. So painful.
She stepped back a little. “You—you spoke to a friend about me?” she asked, pretending that she didn’t know that Ewan was Ewan Hoffstead, the infamous Silent Duke of Donburrow.
Graham nodded slowly. “I did. And—”
He cut himself off, and she fought the urge to groan out her frustration. That he would speak to a friend about Lydia Ford was meaningful. He wanted to be closer to this character she had created.
She was thrilled and horrified by that fact in equal measure.
“And?” she pushed, needing to know what he would say next.
He caught her wrist and smoothed a thumb across the delicate bones there. “I did, that’s all,” he said.
Her heart had begun to throb already, but as he drew her a little closer it pounded like a wild stallion set free. She was in dangerous waters beyond her wildest imaginings now. The wrong move and she might very well drown.
A fate that didn’t seem all so terrible when he lowered his lips to hers and she tasted the sweetness of his kiss and the pulsing heat of his desire behind it. But there was something more there tonight. He needed her. Not just physically, as had existed between them in the past.
He needed her comfort. Her presence. Her touch. Only he needed all that in the guise of Lydia Ford. She pushed aside the pain of that fact once more and sank into his kiss, winding her arms around his neck and gently stroking her tongue into his mouth.
He sighed, the sound shuddering from his lips as his arms came around her waist and he held there, almost sagging from what she knew was emotional exhaustion. She knew it all too well.
Gently, she guided him backward, toward his bed. When they reached it, she broke the kiss and looked up at him. “Will you let me take care of you tonight?” she whispered.
Emotion flashed over his face once more, and he said, “Do I deserve such pleasure?”
She nodded. “In my mind you do. And mine is the only opinion that matters, isn’t it?”
A tiny smile tilted his lips. A shadow of his normal knowing, wicked grin, which he only seemed to gift Lydia. But the fact that there was any pleasure to be had for him buoyed her determination to offer him this comfort.
“Who am I to argue with a lady?” he asked.
She stiffened slightly. A lady? Oh, he didn’t know the half of it. She stepped back. “Remove the rest then and up onto the pillows you go.”
He stared at her. “And what will you do, Lydia?”
She put her back to him and drew a deep breath before she began to unfasten her torn costume. She was pleased to be in it at present, for it was easy to remove on her own, designed so she could quickly alter her look in the wings of the stage between acts or scenes.
