Wretched, Lucy cried, “But when will I see you again?”
A muscle worked in his jaw.“You won’t.This is over.”
“You don’t mean that.”Lucy’s heart was raw and swollen in her chest.“You can’t.You know me.You know my name—you kissed me!”
“I’ve kissed a lot of people.”Cool.Remote.Pitiless.
For the first time, Lucy wondered if the gentlemanly restraint she’d admired and sought to overcome had been something else all along.
Indifference.
The thought gouged her in a very tender spot, the part of her that had been shocked and dismayed to find that none of her so-called friends from her old life had truly cared anything for her once she was stripped of the wealth and rank of being a duke’s beloved youngest daughter.
But her Rogue had never been like that, a pained voice whispered in Lucy’s mind.He had seen her, so clearly, when no one else did.He’d cared.
He cared still.He must.
Tilting her chin up, Lucy met his gaze defiantly.“You like kissing me best.”
For a moment, the air between them shimmered with the crackling tension Lucy loved about their encounters.He wanted to smile, she could tell.
“What I like doesn’t matter,” he finally said.“You’re a child.Go home, little girl.It’s past your bedtime.”
The words were like an open-handed slap to the cheek, shocking and humiliating in equal measure.Lucy wanted to shout that she wasn’t a child, she was fully nineteen years old—but she was, as it happened, mature enough to realize that nothing could make her sound more like a mewling infant than that.
“You can trust me, you know,” she said instead.
He smiled faintly.Not unkindly.“I can’t trust anyone.”
“I wasn’t trying to unmask you,” Lucy insisted, sticking to her point.“But if I did, I would die before I betrayed you.”
The Rogue showed no outward reaction, but his mount stamped the ground restively, as though sensing his rider’s turbulent emotions.
“Go home and grow up, Lively.”
Frustration gripped her by the throat.Stalling for time, Lucy broke his gaze and lifted a hand to pet at Dante’s velvety black nose.
“Careful, he’s a bad-tempered bastard, known to bite—” the Rogue started, then broke off when his stallion lowered his massive head to butt gently against Lucy’s shoulder while she laughed and stroked him.
“Horses love me,” she told him.“Likely because I’m so sweet.Like a lump of sugar.”
The memory of the moment when the Rogue had tasted her for himself seemed to arc between them like lightning.
“I must go,” he said abruptly.His voice was hoarse.
Gathering all the courage she’d absorbed from watching her older sister charm, seduce, and browbeat her way into getting everything she ever wanted, Lucy met his stare directly.“Must you?I wish you would stay.I wish you would allow yourself to admit what you want.What we both want.”
The man she wanted more than any other she’d ever met or heard of glared down at her as though he wanted to either strangle her…or eat her up.Lucy shivered, possibilities unspooling before her like the silver ribbon of open road through the downs.
For a moment, the barest instant, she thought she finally had him.Then his expression darkened and his hands tightened on the reins so suddenly that Dante reared up in protest, forcing Lucy to stumble backward.
“What I want is for you to leave me alone,” he snarled in a harder voice than he’d ever used with her.“No more of these midnight rides, little girl.No more schemes, no more false injuries, no more bloody picnics.You stay away from me.”
Heart constricting, Lucy watched as the Rogue pulled his stallion’s head around and urged him to a flat gallop as soon as they reached the road.They took off down the highway as though the devil was at their heels, and Lucy followed them with her eyes until the blackness of the night swallowed him up.
She’d pushed him too far this time, she thought in despair.At every one of their other meetings, he had been…not biddable, but indulgent.Amused and intrigued, maybe even tempted.But tonight was different.
Tonight, Lucy had gone after what she wanted as boldly as she knew how—and he’d turned her away.And though she didn’t know this man’s name, she knew enough about him to understand that no matter how tempted he might have been, he meant what he said.
