“When I fight, there is nothing but the present moment,” he said, still staring up at the canopy. “Nothing but the pain and the effort and the force of it. There’s no room for thoughts or feelings—all of them get pushed out of me and left behind in the ring. You say you don’t like to see me in pain, from the fight…but when I’m fighting, I promise you, all I feel is relief.”
Her heart squeezed, wrung out like a cloth over a bucket. She thought of the way he’d looked that first night she’d heard him in the hallway outside her door at Ashbourn House. Or the way he’d staggered into the kitchen that night she’d bound his wound. He hadn’t looked relieved of his burdens then.
But there was a time she could think of when sleep hadn’t been impossible for him. A week ago, in this very bed.
“I can see the appeal,” she said carefully. “But I do wonder if there might be better ways. You mentioned books and music, and the fighting. But there is one other activity we might perhaps try, to get you out of your head and into your body.”
Slowly, deliberately, she lifted the large, blunt-fingered hand she held to her lips.
She waited until he finally turned his head on the pillow to look at her, his gorgeous eyes shadowed and fathomless. Then she opened her mouth and took his index finger inside, hollowing her cheeks to suckle at it.
He tasted of salty skin, and beneath it, a heady, musky flavor that she realized was herself. Bess moaned around his finger.
His lips parted. He stared at her for a heartbeat in which Bess felt the throbbing pulse of desire begin to beat through her blood once more, deep and lush.
“You are determined to break me,” he grated, hauling her over him so that she covered him like a blanket. His renewed erection was a line of fire against her belly.
She released his finger with a wet pop that made him groan. “Most broken things can be mended. With enough care.”
They did their best to shatter each other for hours, caught up in a haze of mutual need and shared pleasure that left them both in pieces, too wrecked to do more than drag a coverlet over their sweat-covered bodies and wrap around each other in sticky, sated bliss.
Exhausted and spent in the darkness, the candle having long since sputtered out, Bess stared at the sprawl of Nathaniel’s huge, muscular form.
His shoulders were relaxed, his head nestled into the pillow. He breathed deeply and evenly.
He was asleep.
For the space of an instant, Bess allowed herself to fantasize about slipping off her mask and removing his. Waking in the morning in each other’s arms, as themselves, in the light of day.
With a bittersweet smile, she left their masks as they were and laid her head on Nathaniel’s chest.
She couldn’t have that, she reminded herself firmly. But they could have this. For as long as it lasted. And Bess would not trade this for the world.
Chapter Seventeen
For the next week, night after night, Nathaniel fought to win her.
He took on all comers, anyone who would challenge him in the ring, and beat them down for the chance to spend the rest of the night in Bess’s arms.
They didn’t always fall straight into bed; sometimes Bess asked Madame Leda to send up supper, and she would sit on Nathaniel’s lap and feed him from her own hand until he could not hold himself back from having her for dinner instead.
Sometimes they talked, carefully vague stories about their pasts that nevertheless made Nathaniel feel as if he knew her, and was known by her, better than anyone in his entire life.
The night before, after they’d burned through the initial clash of mouths and tongues and grappling, hungry bodies, Nathaniel had put his pants back on and Bess had donned his white shirt. She wore that and her mask, and nothing else. He’d taught her to spar, the basics of a fighting stance and how to hold her hands so she wouldn’t break her thumbs with the first hit, and how to throw a punch.
She’d taken to it surprisingly well, until the sight and feel of her wearing his clothes sent Nathaniel’s brain—and cock—surging down a possessive pathway that led them back to the bed.
Afterward, as the sweat cooled on their bodies and they curled together for warmth and closeness, Bess had asked about how he learned to fight the way he did.
“I know we’re not supposed to reveal anything about ourselves,” she’d said, “but you’ll forgive me if I have deduced, using the most basic of observations, that you are a gentleman. Fair?”
“An astute assessment,” Nathaniel had replied, amused. “What gave me away?”
“Everything,” she’d told him, her nose mere inches from his own. Her eyes laughed at him from across the pillow they shared. “But what I want to know is, how did a fine gentleman like yourself learn to brawl like a back-alley bruiser?”
He’d turned on his back to stare up at the canopy over the bed. He kept his voice light but he wasn’t sure what his face might do when he said, “When you’re the smallest boy at boarding school, about four years younger than the next youngest student, you learn quick enough.”
Tensing a bit—he’d told her some of this before, as himself. Would she draw a line between The Berserker and the duke?
