“You followed me in here demanding we talk,” she said. “Is there anything else?”
“Yes, the most important topic of all,” he said, and he moved toward her again.
The way he closed the distance between them, his eyes locked on hers, brought her to mind of how he’d crowded her into the bed at the club and she shivered with anticipation she ought not have. Not when he kept walking away from her just as easily.
“What is that?” she asked, and wished her hands weren’t shaking.
“You say that I don’t want you,” he said. “But I do.” Her breath caught, but he didn’t allow her to interrupt. “I wanted you when we kissed yesterday. I wanted you at the Donville Masquerade.” He hesitated and cleared his throat. “And I…I want you now, Etta.”
Her heart was beating so loudly now that she was sure he could hear it as he loomed over her, too close and somehow still too far away. He was offering her something and yet she didn’t fully believe it based on what had happened between them recently.
“Then why did you run away after we kissed?” she asked. “Why didn’t you have me in that back room in the hell?”
She saw him struggle with the answer, shifting and moving, his hands smoothing along the front of his jacket. But at last he said, “Because I don’t want to hurt you. I never want to hurt you.”
* * *
It felt like a lifetime that Etta just stared at him, but at last her expression softened. She closed the little space he’d left between them and gently took his hand. As her fingers threaded through his own, he shivered. It was such a simple touch, and yet it moved him so much. More than he should allow.
“You aren’t going to hurt me, Theo,” she said, staring up into his face with those beautiful dark eyes. “I know ladies often tie what I’m asking for to their hearts, to their futures, but I have none of those expectations.”
Those words should have comforted him. They were exactly what men claimed to want to hear from women. She was talking about sin, passion…sex, with no strings attached. No demands. And yet he felt a little hollow when she said them.
“Then what do you want?” he asked to fill the space, to forget that it existed.
“I want to feel what I felt in that room. I want to drown in it.” She lifted his hand and settled it against her heart. “I felt so over my head at the club, Theo. I’ll go back if I must, but with you it feels…safe. I’d rather be with my friend, with you, if you’d help me.”
Theo let his eyes come shut and he let out a ragged breath. He’d been trying to fight this desire for this woman for even longer than he wished he admit. It had only been harder since she declared she wished for a lover and then made it clear she would find one with or without him.
He wasn’t going to be able to resist her anymore. Not now that he knew her taste, that he had felt the grip of her when she came. Not now when she was offering so much and asking for so little. Not now when what she offered was everything. He was too weak to keep walking away. He hoped he could still be strong enough to protect her...protect himself...in other ways.
Because this was going to shift his world. There was no getting around it.
He tugged her a little closer and wrapped his arms around her. She fit so perfectly against him that it set him off kilter and he had to adjust his stance to keep from staggering.
“I’m going to take you upstairs, Etta,” he said, his voice rough to his own ears. “I’m going to take off your dress and I’m going to make what happened in the hell look like something to whet the appetite, nothing more.”
Her eyes went wide. “O-oh.”
He nodded. “I’m going to take you if that’s what you want. And then, tomorrow, when everything feels less…sharp, you and I will have a long talk about terms and what will happen next. But for now…”
He shivered as he bent his head. She met him halfway and they kissed. And just like every other time that had happened, he was set back on his heels. He held her closer, reveling in the taste of her, in her increasing daring as her tongue tangled with his. Of the soft sound of pleasure she made. He wanted to make her do that more and more. He wanted her weak with pleasure, drunk on him. He wanted to be drunk on her. And now that he’d accepted that was the undeniable path of their future, he wanted it to start immediately.
So he drew back, looking down into her desire-filled face and said, “Now take me to your room, Etta. Let’s begin.”
* * *
Bernadette’s hands shook as she led Theo through the doors to her chamber. It was a nice room, with a pretty view of the garden behind the house. Her fire glowed and the bedclothes were already turned back on one side, she supposed in anticipation of her lonely return from wherever her maid thought she’d been that night.
“You look nervous,” he said with a smile as he shut the door, then locked it with a click of the key, which sounded like a gunshot to her sensitive system.
She caught her breath. She had to speak. She couldn’t just stare at him like a ninny.
“I am,” she admitted. “I’m realizing that no man has ever been in this room, beyond whatever servants moved my things in upon my arrival almost five years ago.”
His eyes lit up. “So I’m an explorer,” he said with a laugh that eased her worries a little. “I promise I won’t move the furniture around.”
She feared he would move far more than the furniture but kept that thought to herself. It was too dangerous to consider, let alone speak, when she’d just given such a big speech downstairs about how she had no expectations about whatever would happen between them physically.
