Moving slowly, as though giving her time to retreat, he prowled close enough to knuckle under her chin and tilt her head up to meet his intent stare.
“Perhaps I don’t know you.” His voice was so deep, deeper than the ocean. “But I see you. Elizabeth.”
The sound of her full name on his lips made Bess sway toward him. Against all odds and all sense, she thought perhaps he did see her. It was as excruciating as it was exhilarating.
She hadn’t planned to pick a fight about a woman’s right to sexual freedom, but she hadn’t been able to stop herself from poking and prodding the conversation to a point where she could confess at least a partial truth about her past.
Bess was not built for secrets and lies. She wanted, more than anything, to tell Nathaniel the truth. And here, now, wearing this mask, she could finally be honest with him in a way she’d never be able to if he knew her identity. The freedom of it was intoxicating.
So she said, “I want to stay here tonight. With you. Will you stay?”
Eyes blazing, he seized her unceremoniously and carried her to the bed. He laid her down and followed her to the mattress, stretching the length of their bodies to press together and tangling their legs. “Yes. I’ll stay.”
Bess, who had gripped his shirt tightly in surprise when he lifted her off her feet, used that grip now to pull the garment over his head. “And you’ll take off all your clothes this time.”
One corner of his mouth pulled up, irresistibly. “And yours.”
Proving himself a man of action, Nathaniel proceeded to efficiently evict every article of clothing from the bed, leaving them clad in nothing but moonlight and masks.
Though he’d seen her body before, Bess thought briefly again about being abashed or embarrassed—her breasts were no more than middling sized, her arms more muscular than any willowy lady’s. There was a sturdiness to Bess that served her well in life but was perhaps not the most aesthetically pleasing in the current mode.
But the look in his eyes as they passed over the slight swell of her stomach. The aching reverence in his fingertips as he traced a circle around the taut, pink bud of her left nipple. The unmistakable, hot pressure of his prick thickening and lengthening against the outside of her thigh.
Bess couldn’t doubt that he saw her as she was and wanted her anyway.
“What should I call you? I can’t call you ‘Berserker,’” she said, allowing her hands to move as they wished, caressing his sides and those broad shoulders, the strong hollows of his throat. She felt it when he swallowed against the gentle stroke of her thumbs.
“Ridiculous name. I should never have agreed to it.”
“I don’t know.” Bess cupped his cheeks, letting her thumbs slide along the bottom edge of his mask where it molded to his aristocratic cheekbones. “There is something of the Norse raider about you. And the way you fight…”
His mouth turned down a little. “I know you don’t…like it. When I fight.”
“I don’t like it when you’re hurt,” she corrected, seeking the best way to put her feelings into words. “And I don’t like the way the rest of the crowd reacts, as if it’s pure spectacle and not two human beings in the ring. Their bloodlust robs you—and them—of humanity, I think.”
He shifted as though uncomfortable, and she let him go. Lying beside her, sharing a pillow and staring up at the canopy over the bed, he said, “I don’t feel entirely human in the ring. That’s what I like about it.”
And there he stopped. Bess fought the urge to turn on her side to search his face. From the way he reacted when she studied him closely, she could tell it made him uncomfortable.
He wears a mask, she told herself with a wry smile. What was your first hint that this man prefers not to be fully known?
“You don’t have to tell me,” she finally said, relenting. “If you don’t wish to. But I would like to understand.”
Beside her, his chest rose and fell with a deep breath. “Unlike you, no one in my life would ever describe me as contented. Not even when I was a child.”
Now she had to look at him. Bess turned her head on the pillow. Candlelight flickered over his profile, accentuating his hawkish nose and the strong lines of his jaw. The incongruously plush softness of his lower lip, the sharp Cupid’s bow curve of the upper.
“My nursemaid used to scold me that I wanted too much—ironic, considering the lofty heights she aspired to.”
Bess had to fight not to jolt at the mention of Henrietta, the nursemaid who had married his father and become a duchess. Before she could even flinch at the sharp contempt in his tone, he continued more softly.
“My mother said I felt too much. My father, when he noticed me at all, noted that I thought too much. It pains me to acknowledge it, but I believe he had the right of it. I find it very difficult to quiet my mind. I am always, always thinking.”
“That sounds tiring.” He’d spoken of his mother to her, and she’d been struck then by the depth of his regard for the late duchess—and the stark contrast of his contempt for the man who’d sired him.
“It is. Yet I don’t sleep. Not much. I’ve tried many things, many ways to lull my thoughts to stillness. Books. Music. They work for a time. But nothing has ever worked so well as fighting.”
Bess wanted to protest, but she didn’t want him to stop speaking. So she stretched her hand down to his and intertwined their fingers.
