She didn’t want to let go of him, which was why she did almost at once.
His hair was wildly mussed, which amused her. She was so tempted to reach up, to smooth it, simply to touch him. To tend him. How could the people among whom he’d been raised not have recognized the remarkable person in their midst? It seemed a terrible crime.
If she touched him that way and he stiffened, or dodged away, or worse, looked upon her with surprise, she would have died on the spot.
“Thank you,” she said. “Good night.”
He stared at her closed door for a few seconds.
Then he dropped his head into his hands.
He breathed in, and out.
In and out.
Christ.
Blazing elation and acrid regret. Triumph and fear. An almost helpless tenderness. The dregs of fury and hurt. They all had gotten hold of various tag ends of his being, and he felt as though they might split him apart.
He relived all of it now: The unthinkably silken skin of her thighs as he slid his hands down to spread them. His fingers twining in those damp copper curls over her quim to discover whether she was ready for him. Her uncertain gaze going swiftly hot and hazy with desire. Her pale throat arching back on a scream of release. Her body pulsing around his cock.
He closed his eyes as fresh waves of lust and shame slammed him.
He could not believe he’d taken his beautiful, estranged virgin wife like a soldier rutting with a camp follower. He knew how to properly make love to a woman.
But if he wasn’t mistaken... dear God, she had bloody well enjoyed it.
He’d thought he’d sensed this between them nearly five years ago: a spark that could be fanned into a conflagration. He’d wondered since then if it had been a delusion born of wishful thinking. Something he told himself to justify his untenable want for this one particular woman.
But maybe, for her, the spark—if she indeed felt such a thing—was entirely new.
Her brother’s tutor. Every time he pictured that slim, shadowy man reaching desperately for her, her body blending into his—misery and fury fleetingly slashed the breath from him.
But he found these feelings, for the first time, tempered with sympathy. For all of them.
Even that young man darting away in the dark.
He didn’t think Alexandra would ever love an idiot. And that somehow made it both better and worse.
How Magnus had wanted to be her refuge. And yet how odd it was to now feel a little gratitude that she’d had a source of comfort during a challenging time.
If he’d known she’d just ended a love affair, would he have married her anyway?
He didn’t know. Everything about her, in fact, reminded him of everything he didn’t know about love.
It still felt to him like a deception.
And he didn’t think loving someone was something one could simply cease doing at will.
Would it have been more honorable for her to tell him about her brother’s tutor? He didn’t know that, either. He did know that she had stood up in church and forsaken all others for as long as she lived, and hours later she had passionately kissed another man.
It remained unquestionably a betrayal, by anyone’s definition.
And this conviction brushed up against something implacable in him. A wall behind which he could remain safe.
Because if he touched her the way he’d always wanted to touch her, she would understand at once that she undid him utterly. And his pride still rebelled at the idea of her ever discovering the man known for mercilessness was entirely at her mercy.
Chapter Fourteen
