Firelight danced behind the screens, but no shadows fell on the broad expanse of bared muscle and ridged strength. What I had suspected beneath Hawke’s cleverly tailored attire was true. This was no waifish gentleman flattered by the fit of a coat.
What I had never dreamed were the wicked lines of puckered flesh marring that dusky skin. My heart shuddered in my chest as I counted as far as twenty before losing where one furrow ended and another overlaid. Each scar spoke of ruthless effort, relentless energy. They criss-crossed his shoulders, his spine, as low as his waist.
I could not fathom what grave transgression would coerce Micajah Hawke to tolerate a whip’s lash.
My mouth went dry. My voice, tight with breathless astonishment, balled up in my throat and even if my soul depended on its use, I could not summon a single word.
Rage flickered somewhere beneath my wordless inanity. Rage that some monster would mar such a perfect back, that a lash would be allowed to touch a creature of such strength and pride.
Hot, damp shivers wriggled down my spine—the heat of the room and the cool of the hall’s air behind me warring to claim my attention. That the awareness of all that bare muscle and skin conspired to add to my discomfort was a fact I chose to ignore.
Hawke had still not moved.
For the first time since tasting that bit of resin, fear touched me. That it could do so even while the bliss worked to take me was a testament to the strength of the feeling.
A feeling I chose to turn into abject curiosity, rather than truly explore what it was I suffered.
I left the door behind me ajar, as if the mere promise of an escape route would protect me, and walked silently across the sweltering room.
I halted just behind him, torn between wanting to crane about to see his face—make certain that he still lived—and to flee while I still possessed the opportunity.
“Hawke?” It was a croak, and one that barely earned the definition of whisper.
A muscle twitched in his back. The scars over it whitened briefly, and relaxed again. To me, to my searching study, it was as if the very air rolled over his skin like a caress. The firelight gilded his body, turned swarthy color to an uncanny luminosity tempting the senses. I wondered if he would be as hot as the air surrounding us.
If he would warm me as a fire would, or if I would simply turn to ash were I to try.
My greater sensibilities warned me away, but the dreamy space I occupied—that Chinese bliss so named for the sweet innocence it engendered within a body and mind—did not heed the warning.
To my great disbelief, my own hand reached to touch him. With him sitting the way I’d seen some of the Chinese do, legs folded, and myself standing, it seemed that he was in greater reach.
That he was somehow less intimidating.
A moment of fickle-minded folly.
What I intended, I could not say. All I know is that the tips of my middle—and forefinger settled upon one of those terrible grooves whitening the skin of his back. It was ridged, almost delightfully so in my opium-ridden senses, with a tactile pleat carved in skin at once smooth and rippled.
The muscle beneath my fingers contracted; the breadth of his shoulders went taut. His skin was damp, blazing hot where I dared to touch.
As if in a dream, I watched my own hand—eerily pale in comparison to his flesh—stroke the wicked line. “Who dared?” I whispered, shocked. At the question, at the rippled scars. At my own temerity.
What I had mistaken for unawareness turned to lethal poise. With a grace and speed I could not wholly follow, Hawke unfolded, rose as a tiger might from a disarming laze. I snatched my hand back, but my pride would not allow me to put distance between us. This game was one I was more familiar with—Hawke enjoyed brandishing his physical dominance over my smaller stature.
Yet as he turned, I realized too late that games were not the goal this day.
Ruthless intent shaped the stark lines of his features, hardening planes and angles I had spent too long admiring from afar. Hawke had always been a handsome man, even a blind woman would say so, but his was not the fashionably masculine beauty reserved for the harmless or weak.
A flush stained his high, sculpted cheeks, a strand of dark silk clung to his lower lip, and framed a gaze that was as direct as it was damning.
Blue eyes blazed from a frame of black lashes.
The room spun. Chills seized me, alternately cooling my skin and burning up where the heat battered at me from all sides.
It had been too long since I’d considered the quantities of opium or laudanum taken, and when was too much.
Perhaps, unbeknownst to my own reason, I’d passed that point.
I shook my head hard enough that I staggered one step back. One hand flailed for stability in a suddenly mad moment; fingers like hammered steel wrapped about my own. I found my equilibrium, but lost what calm I had left as Hawke utilized that single hold to pull me once more off balance.
I collided into his chest, inhaled deeply to feed my oxygen-starved mind and scented the unmistakable fragrance of warmed spice. With it, what I assumed to be the scent of overheated male.
It was not an unpleasant combination.
I craned my neck to glare up at his face, turned down to search mine.
If he had words, I did not know what he intended to say. He did not say them. Instead, very deliberately, he turned my wounded palm to his gaze, studied the ragged flesh.
Blue. His eyes
Were they always?
I wanted to deny his touch, to flee from this frightening scene, yet it was as if another force held me still—a return to my terrible dreams when I knew I was not sleeping.
Hawke’s unfamiliar eyes burned with a hunger I had never in my life seen before, did not know how to manage. Such fiery blue, the heart of a flame searing my flesh with but a look.
I inhaled an astonished breath as he lifted my hand higher still. Exhaled on a mingled gasp of pain and a whimper of outright confusion as his tongue dipped into the shallow furrow the rope had caused. Warmth pooled in my palm, shocks of stinging pain and the wet heat of his open mouth over the wound combined with the blatant certainty of danger. His tongue dragged across the aching groove like a cat’s. My hand shook in his.
I bit back another trembling sound, sharply aware of a treacherous awakening in my chest, in my belly. Lower, still, where the flesh he’d already tasted once warmed.
I swayed, possibly would have fallen if he did not suddenly remove my hand from his lips, pull it to the side.
“You should not be here,” he said, clipped to nearly nothing. His lips seemed softer, somehow. Damp from the caress of his tongue on my flesh or the sweat covering us both. His larger hand engulfed mine, holding it out at an angle that forced me to maintain contact against his bare chest. He did not touch me otherwise.
I stared not at him, but my hand, splayed wide as if my traitorous palm would demand more of his attentions. His fingers were very brown against my skin. Not so dark as Zylphia’s mixed color, but nothing as pale as mine, soot or otherwise. A golden shackle, outlined by firelight.
It was a startling contrast; a disconcerting observation that should not have caused an answering echo of want within me. Something fiercely hungry had replaced my fear, battled within me for dominance when all I craved was to be let go, set free.
A lie, that one, and my addled thoughts wasted no time in assuring me of it.
Unfair. So unfair. How could he do such a depraved act and then revert to business as if it had not happened? I wanted to reach up between us and slap his face with the wounded hand he had not so violated, I wanted to stomp on his bare feet and demand satisfaction.
That the word held no single meaning was a fact I instinctively knew he would throw back at me, and I was off-balance enough to attempt the challenge.
Bloody bastard.
A deep breath forced my corseted breast against him—a deed that did not earn me as much composure as
