“Oh, Gabriel. I never thought I might be adding to your pain.” His heartbeat muffled her whisper. “I never thought to fall in love with you, either. But I have.”
Chapter 18
Still trembling from the release of his confession, weak from laying down the burdens of his past, Gabriel tried very hard not to hear her.
No, no, no. The denial scrubbed through his brain with the pounding of his pulse.
But her words were more insidious still, slipping past his hard shell, his thick mask, to wend their way into his bloodstream. Heat bloomed in his belly and spread to his limbs in a tingling rush. His arms tightened around her.
Yes, yes, yes.
Malevolent forces had been at work in his life from the beginning. In time he’d even come to court them. But surely, surely, their appetite had been sated. They had taken so much. Mightn’t they let him have this? Just for now? Just tonight?
Because, of course, he dared promise her nothing more. He’d spent a decade or more making enemies of the very men who would decide his fate. He’d likely be convicted—if he hadn’t been already.
Cold terror came rushing back, creeping through his veins the way frost spreads across a stream and turns its merry babbling inexorably to ice. He forced himself to set her away from him before they both froze solid.
“I think, my dear, you cannot have been paying attention,” he said, looking at her with what he hoped was his customary mocking expression. “Did you not hear me explain what has happened to the people who care for me, or for whom I have dared to care? I’m damned, Camellia. I ruin everything I touch.”
As he spoke, he watched an unexpected sternness settle over her features, the face of a woman who had scolded and cajoled five younger siblings out of their childish fears. When she parted her lips to speak, he spoke first.
“Please.” He certainly was not a child, in some ways had never been a child, but he was not above begging. “Please don’t let me ruin you too.”
If anything, his plea only served to etch the expression deeper. “It seems I am not the only one who hasn’t been listening,” she said. Shifting, she settled on her knees facing him, palms flat against his chest. “I do believe I told you I cannot be ruined.”
“Camellia.” It was his turn to be stern. “I’m quite serious.”
“As am I,” she said, laying a string of whisper-soft kisses across his cheeks, tracing the path of his tears. “I am used to being in control of a plot’s twists and turns. But every encounter with you has been something unexpected. You sent all my careful planning out the window. From this point forward, however, I’m taking back the pen. This is my story too.” Her lips were at his ear. “And I’m not going to leave you tonight, no matter what you say.”
His tears kept flowing, melting away the mask he’d worn for so long—it had only ever been papier-mâché—but he let them come, let her see the grief he’d been hiding. Her fingertips whisked the moisture away, but she did not tell him not to weep. Instead, she held him, murmuring words against his hair, in a language no one had ever spoken to him before. Beneath her gentle ministrations, the shudders of anguish became tremors of need.
After a time, those fingers moved to slip loose the buttons of his waistcoat and slide the knot from his cravat. Though he knew he should stop her, he did not. The heat of her touch on his chest was a brand, and he could not resist her claiming. They were here, together, at Stoke, and she knew and still wanted him. Still…loved him. Ah, God.
Laying his arms across the back of the sofa, he opened himself to her, let her have her way with him. What her lips lacked in experience, they made up for in eagerness. As she traveled from his earlobe, along his jaw, down his throat, he could feel her little hums of pleasure vibrating against his skin. Her hair smelled of wood smoke and spring rain and every simple comfort he’d never known. Her fingers tickled through the hair on his chest, then traced his collarbone, before gripping his shoulder for balance as she lifted herself higher and settled astride him.
Then, with one hand on either side of his head, fingers tangling in his hair, she parted her mouth over his. He dropped his hands to her hips, circling first, then kneading, sliding lower, over her thighs, down her legs, to slip beneath her skirts and petticoats and shift on an illicit quest. When his fingers at last found her bare skin, she whimpered, and his self-control began to fray. Using her slight frame to steady himself, he shifted higher on the seat. She was still above him now, but only just, and he met the searching strokes of her tongue with more demanding ones of his own. The silken skin of her thighs invited his touch.
No sooner had he dared to slide his fingers between them, grazing her crisp curls and wet heat, when she moved again, wobbling to balance on her knees as her hands scrambled down his shirt front to the buttons of his fall.
This would not be the leisurely pleasure-seeking of two nights past. Just raw, unvarnished need—a feeling he doubted she had ever let herself own. Something he had never let another see.
At first she did not even break the kiss. Her eyes were closed, her fingers determined as they worked the buttons loose. But when the task was done, she pulled away just enough to see what she’d wrought. One hand dropped to shove his shirttails away and his cock stood between them, hard and eager. Her bright eyes darted back to his—seeking permission, he thought, as she reached out one daring fingertip
