He thought of how she had felt pressed against him in that study. How quickly her anger had softened into something else entirely beneath his hands. How she had bitten him, and how he had not wanted her to stop. How he had thought about almost nothing else since.
One step. That was all it would take. One step and he could have her.
“Well, Your Grace?” Elara’s breathy tone drew Constantine from his erotic thoughts. “What shall we do?”
Constantine stood very still for another long moment, his jaw tight, every muscle in his body coiled. He let his eyes take her in one final, deliberate look—committing her to memory with the grim resignation of a man who had already decided what he was going to do and hated himself for it.
“Go back to your room, Elara.”
His body instantly screamed in protest at his command. Elara, too, seemed to have trouble believing it. Her deep, icy blue eyes widened as a pink blush spread across her cheeks.
“I... I beg your pardon?” she whispered, drawing her hands up to cover her breasts.
“I told you to leave,” Constantine gritted out, his lust urging him to shut up and take her to his bed. “Put on your robe, go to your room, and lock your door.”
Hurt glistened in Elara’s eyes as she took a tentative step back, but to Constantine’s relief, she picked up her robe, drew it around her, and left. Alone in his rooms, Constantine groaned, pinched the bridge of his nose, and sat hard on the edge of his bed.
She is going to drive me mad.
The fire in the hearth had burned low, casting the room in dim amber light. He stared at the floor between his feet, elbows on his knees, and said nothing, because there was no one to say it to.
He had done the right thing. He was certain of it. This marriage had not been chosen by either of them, and she deserved better than to be taken to bed by a man she had married because she believed he was connected to her brother’s death. She deserved answers from him before anything else, and until he could give her those answers, he had no right to her.
That was what he told himself.
What he could not tell himself was that he hadnotwanted her. That the image of her standing before him wasnotalready carved so deeply into his mind that he suspected it would be a very long time before it left him.
He reached for the glass of brandy on his nightstand and quickly drained it.
He was in a great deal of trouble.
Chapter 11
“Ridiculous,” Elara muttered, staring up at the domed ceiling of her bedroom.
Mrs. York had kept her promise to help redecorate what Elara had playfully called her ‘sunspot room’. It had only been two days, yet the bright yellow and orange walls and furnishings had already been replaced with hues of blue, purple, and hints of silver. It was gorgeous, and the new coverings for her bed were breathtakingly soft and lovely. Yet for the second night in a row, Elara could not sleep.
“How ridiculous!” she muttered again, then flung the covers off. With a huff, she got out of bed and went to the window, giving up on sleep. She pulled back her new dark blue curtains and looked out at London’s night sky, wondering why she had ever taken her mother’s advice.
What was I even thinking?
The shame of being turned down by her husband had been brutal, but it was the way he had told her to leave that confounded her most. He had looked at her with hunger—shewas sure of it! Yet when he dismissed her, it was as if she had been the vilest thing he had ever seen. She did not understand the blasted man at all!
He is so insufferable, so indecent! And just when I thought I could not hate him more...
Tsking her tongue at the thought, Elara grabbed her robe—her favorite violet-purple silk one meant forherpleasure and no one else’s—and drew it around her ice-blue night shift. Quietly, she opened her bedroom door and, for a moment, simply stood and looked out into the corridor. When she was sure no servants were around to see her, Elara made her way downstairs. She had refused to leave her rooms for the past two days and had taken all her meals there.
She left the vast house through one of the back sets of French doors and drew in a deep, calming breath of the warm night air as she stepped outside. The scent of roses, lilies, hyacinths, and other flowers in the garden soothed her thoughts, and Elara dared a small smile as she made her way down the stone steps toward the flowers.
As she walked through the garden, Elara occasionally traced her fingers along the petals of the flowers; her thoughts shifted between how soft they were and how lucky flowers were to never feel embarrassment.
“You truly are lucky, you know,” she murmured softly, tracing her fingertips around the petals of a particularly large white rose. “It must be so nice not to have to worry about shame.”
She sighed and gently plucked a petal from the rose.
“I am never taking my mother’s advice again,” she whispered, rubbing the petal back and forth across her palm.
“Do you always tell the flowers your problems?”
