It would kill her.
If she married him, she would spend every day in an agony of suspense, waiting for the moment when he began to regret their union.
Bess could not do that to him. Or to herself.
She knew what she had to do.
“I am beyond honored by your proposal,” she said, each word as slow, careful, and sincere as she could make it. Her head ached and her throat burned as though she’d swallowed boiling oil. “Truly. But one day, you’ll see that I was right. The way we feel now, it’s like a storm, a tempest that has overtaken everything else in our lives. I will not lie to you, I am as caught up in it as you, and I want to stay in the eye of the storm for as long as I can. I have never felt anything like it, and I know I never will again. But storms blow over. And when the sun comes out again, you must be free to go back to your life. And so must I.”
He opened his mouth to argue, a fierce light in his colorless eyes, but that light died when Bess took a deep breath and said, “I could not be happy as your wife.”
She meant it to end the agony of this conversation, and it did.
Nathaniel took the words like a blow, bowing his head. He stood for a moment in silence, defeated in a way she’d never seen him. Bess felt sick.
There was something frighteningly vulnerable about the line of the nape of his neck above his collar, even as the way he crossed his arms over his chest emphasized the raw power of his musculature. Muscles he’d honed in violence and aggression, in a bid to release the pent-up feelings he spent most of his life sublimating into fighting for change, for a cause, for a legacy he could be proud of.
God, but she loved him. And she was hurting him.
Unable to bear their distance a moment longer, Bess stepped close enough to put her hands on the taut muscle of his waist. Her right thumb went unerringly, unthinkingly, to the long-healed wound on his lower ribs—the first place she’d touched his bare skin.
She peered up into his face. His eyes were closed, his mouth a thin, hard line. There were dark circles under his eyes, she noticed, and longed to soothe them away with kisses, with care, with her arms around him to make him rest—but she couldn’t give him what he wanted.
Not when everything she knew, everything she’d seen and experienced, told her that marriage between them would be a disaster.
“This doesn’t have to be the end of us. I will still come back with you to London,” she said softly. She could feel his breaths beneath her hands, his ribs expanding with each inhalation. “If you wish it. For as long as you want me. But only as your mistress.”
He breathed out, long and shaky, and opened his eyes to pin her with their diamond sharpness. “I’m not strong enough.”
“What do you mean?” Dread curdled in her stomach. “You survived being sent away from home to a brutal existence without anyone to care for you. You’ve never lost a fight in the ring. You work every day to do what you think is right. You’re the strongest man I know.”
Nathaniel raised his head and lifted one hand to tuck a stray lock of hair behind Bess’s ear. “Not strong enough for this. Bess. I can’t live my life knowing every day, every minute, that someday I will lose you. It would destroy me.”
Tears threatened, surging into the back of her throat, but Bess choked them back. She clutched at him, her fingers white with tension. “Maybe we can’t have forever, but we could have this. Please, Nathaniel.”
But he was shaking his head. “I can’t. Don’t ask it of me.”
“I am asking,” Bess said stubbornly. She shook him, wanting to force him to look at her. “I’m begging. I can’t be the wife you need, but that doesn’t mean we are nothing to each other. Nathaniel, don’t do this. Don’t throw away what we could have, simply because it’s not all that you think you want.”
A light flared in the depths of his eyes, burning like an unholy flame. He clasped her shoulders tightly and drew her to him. His body was a line of solid fire along her front, his voice a rough growl in her ears.
“I never thought you cruel, Bess. Do not offer a starving man a fistful of crumbs. I love you. I love you too much to ever be satisfied with less than all of you.”
He loved her. The words burst in Bess’s mind like the bubbles in a glass of champagne, sweet and sharp and heady…and fleeting.
“I love you, too,” she said, for she would not deny him now. She would give him everything she could, and hope that it would be enough. “The love I feel for you has eclipsed every other love in my life—it’s the sun, blotting out the moon and the stars from the sky.”
The fire in his eyes raged out of control, and with a harsh oath, he bent his head and kissed her ferociously.
Bess surrendered to it utterly, melting into him and giving it all up to him. She poured everything she felt and everything she wished and every hope she’d dashed into the kiss.
He tore his head away, his arms like bands of iron wrapped around her. “If you love me,” he snarled, giving no quarter, “then marry me.”
Bess went limp, all her fight guttering out like a candle burnt to a stub.
He would not bend; she could not bend.
It was over.
