Her breath caught. “Christian—”
“Not as you fear,” he murmured, a shadow of a smile touching his mouth. “But... this.”
He loosened the knot and let the velvet fall from his shoulders. Beneath it, a plain white nightshirt clung to his frame, unlaced at the throat.
With deliberate calm, he lifted the linen over his head.
The birthmark lay revealed in the firelight.
She had seen glimpses of it before—in the training hall, through the gap in his collar—but never like this. Never in its full, unapologetic sweep.
It began beneath his jaw, deep and wine-dark, trailing over his throat and collarbone before spreading across the broad plane of his chest. Its edges softened outward like drifting smoke, fading from burgundy to muted rose.
It was striking.
It was powerful.
It was his.
“This,” he said evenly, though the effort cost him, “is what they named monstrous. What made my mother flinch. What caused the nurses to whisper of curses. What persuaded my father to keep me from court, from company… from view.”
He did not look at her as he spoke.
He braced himself.
For revulsion.
For pity.
For confirmation of every fear he had ever harboured.
She stepped forward and pressed her lips to the very centre of the birthmark.
He went utterly still.
She kissed him again—slow, deliberate presses of her mouth against the wine-dark skin. Not tentative. Not curious. Certain. She traced its edges with gentle reverence, her lips lingering where others had recoiled, mapping the shape of the mark that had shaped his entire life.
“Fiona.” His voice fractured on her name. His hands rose instinctively to cradle her head, trembling in her hair. “What are you—”
“I am showing you.”
She looked up at him, and she knew her heart was in her eyes, knew she was giving him everything, and she did not care. “I am showing you what I see. Not a monster. Not a curse. Not something to be hidden.” Her fingers brushed lightly across his chest. “I see a man. A beautiful, extraordinary man who was treated cruelly by those who should have loved him best.”
His breath turned uneven. She felt the fierce rhythm of his heart beneath her palm, the tremor that moved through him like a breaking dam.
“I have never—” He swallowed hard. “No one has ever—”
“I know.” She pressed one final kiss to the hollow of his throat, just above where the mark faded into untouched skin. “But I am not no one. I am not them. And I think you are magnificent.”
Thunder crashed outside, rattling the panes. Firelight leapt and flickered across his bare skin. And Christian Hale, Duke of Thornwick, looked down at the woman who had kissed the thing he most despised in himself—and saw in her eyes not fear, not pity—
But wonder.
“I think,” he said slowly, as though the words were newly discovered and terribly fragile, “that I may be falling in love with you.”
The confession hovered between them—immense and inevitable.
Fiona felt it settle inside her like something long awaited.
