She rose, stretched the stiffness from her back, and crossed to him.
He didn’t move. His eyes tracked her like a man tracking a threat.
“If you would rather I left,” she said softly, “say it.”
His jaw flexed once. “I would rather you stayed.” The words were gruff, as if they cost him.
Eleanor lowered herself to the rug by the hearth, drawing her knees up. “I want more…” She trailed off. “This night. The two of us. I want you to kiss me without restraint. I want all of you.”
He was silent long enough that she wondered if he had fallen asleep standing. Then, he said, “Do you understand what you are asking?”
“Of course,” she whispered. She stood and went to him.
His hand lifted, trembling slightly as it hovered near her cheekbone. “I am not gentle,” he said. “Not in any sense you might want.”
Eleanor caught his fingers between hers. “Gentle is overrated.”
A low sound left him somewhere between laughter and pain.
Then he reached down, lifted her as if she weighed nothing, and drew her into his lap.
He kissed her, tentative, as though he were testing whether she would flinch.
She didn’t.
She returned it, steady and certain, mapping his mouth with hers until the restraint in him began to give way.
He drew back just enough to search her face. “Are you sure?”
Eleanor traced the thin white scar that bisected his chin. “I choose the risk,” she said. “And I choose you.”
Graham kissed her again—harder, hungrier—like a man who had been starving and refused to acknowledge it. Eleanor met him with the same fierce honesty, her hands tangling in his hair, her pulse answering his.
Buttons became the next battleground.
She fumbled with his waistcoat, and he laughed into her neck, the sound so unfamiliar she stilled, startled.
“Sorry,” he said, breathless.
“Do not be,” she whispered, and managed the next button.
His hands slid along her spine, fingers tracing the ridges of bone through the thin cotton of her gown. She shivered. He paused as if to make certain he had not hurt her.
Eleanor took his hand and guided it—lower, surer.
“You can,” she breathed. “It is all right.”
Something in him broke loose.
He backed her against the desk, the edge cool against her thighs, the map crinkling beneath her palm.
Graham unfastened her bodice with careful, infuriating patience, as if each button were a vow. When her gown slipped from her shoulders, his mouth found her throat, the hollow beneath her ear, the pulse at her collarbone. Her breasts.
Eleanor’s hands tightened in his hair as she pressed against him, wanting, longing, burning for him.
He took his time, too much time for a man who claimed he wasn’t gentle, until she slid her hand over the hard ridge of him and felt his breath stutter against her skin.
“Eleanor,” he murmured.
