“All right, then.” She sighed because there was naught else to do. “Hadleigh?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t take too long getting better,” she told him. “I don’t wish to grow up without you.”
Present Day
Ben had Livy where he wanted her: on her hands and knees, naked on the bed. Standing, he ran his palms up the backs of her thighs, loving the way she shivered at his touch like a mount recognizing its master. She was a filly not yet broken, and he burned to train her in the ways of desire.
Palming her arse, he spread her dark thatch with his thumbs, finding her as soft and juicy as a peach. His mouth watered with the need to taste her. To discover the flavor of his little queen’s surrender.
He leaned down, swiping the flat of his tongue up her pouting pink seam. Her sweet and salty essence drenched his senses, her breathless moans tugging on his turgid cock like a fist. He parted her secret folds, delving deep, groaning when her virgin passage clenched around his tongue.
Christ, she was irresistible. Innocence and sensuality wrapped up in one.
Possessiveness roared through him. And she’s all mine.
“There’s my good girl,” he growled. “Grind yourself against my tongue.”
She gasped, and he wondered if she was blushing even as she obeyed his command with wanton enthusiasm. She pushed her pussy against his ravenous mouth, presenting him with a veritable feast. He ate her until she screamed out her climax, anointing his tongue with her dew.
Swiping his hand across his mouth, he straightened. “Did you enjoy being licked, Livy?”
She tossed her dark tresses over her shoulder and turned her head. Shock punched him in the gut when he saw it wasn’t Livy looking at him...but his dead duchess.
“I loved it,” Arabella purred.
He stumbled backward. “You…you’re dead.”
“You killed me.” Her green eyes glowed with preternatural spite. “But I could never forget you, Hadleigh. I will always be here...”
Ben jerked awake. Heart thudding, he swung a panicked gaze around his surroundings…and saw that he was in his bedchamber, in his own bed, the sweat-soaked sheets clinging to his bare skin. Dawn’s watery light was just beginning to seep through the crack in the drapes.
Sitting up, he took a deep breath, trying to disentangle himself from the phantom web of the dream. Simultaneously, he felt an insistent throbbing in his groin. Glancing down, he saw his cockstand tenting the sheet.
Planting his elbows against his raised knees, he raked his hands through his damp hair.
Devil take it. Lust and guilt pounded in his veins. What am I doing?
Last night, Livy’s sweet acceptance of his past had torn down his walls, and he hadn’t been able to resist her. Even now, the memory of their soul-stirring kiss sent a hot sizzle up his spine. Yet he was also assailed by second thoughts. Was he taking advantage of her innocence? Was he being fair to her? Was he acting in her best interests?
His chest tautened. She deserved a better man, one who wasn’t damaged goods. Some fine young chap who would court her with poesies and an untainted heart. Instead, she would have Ben: an older man with a filthy past and even filthier desires.
If his dream was any indication, the kiss and conversation with Livy had obliterated his denial. He could no longer ignore the desire she ignited in him—could not fool himself into believing that his feelings for her were in any way brotherly. The truth confronted him: he wanted to do dark, depraved things to her…and he wanted her to love it.
His gut twisted; his cock throbbed. Christ, I am a bastard.
I am perfectly capable of deciding what I want, her voice reminded him.
Wry humor punctured his grim mood as he realized that, even in his head, his little queen bantered with him. Yet she did have a point: she should be the one to decide her future. She might be young, but if any woman knew her own mind, it was Olivia McLeod. She was not short on opinions, nor shy about sharing them. He trusted her to tell him if she found him unacceptable, a fact he found oddly relieving.
His job was to present her with the facts. When he called upon her today, he would tell her the other sordid details of his past: the catastrophe of his marriage and his opium habit. His neck tightened, and he rubbed at the corded muscles, wondering starkly if she would decide that he wasn’t worth the trouble.
“I could never forget you,” Livy had once vowed. “I will always be here for you.”
He’d been promised forever before. On his wedding day…and look at how that had ended. Before that, during the halcyon period of his childhood, he’d believed that he would have the love and support of his parents and sister for all his life.
He had ruined that too.
As much as he wanted to believe that Livy was different, he had to be realistic. She might be too young and innocent to give him what he craved, the fantasies reality had pulverized. Yet the ashes of his dreams were still there, hope buried in the Pandora’s box of his life, taunting and tantalizing him in equal measure. A part of him feared those needs, for they made him vulnerable…weak.
Arabella had used them to play him like a puppet. And though Livy was as different from his dead wife as he could imagine, the two women did have one thing in common: they were both headstrong by nature. His failure to do his husbandly duty and guide Arabella had destroyed their marriage.
He could not ignore that Livy was equally willful…hell, he’d found her dressed like a whore at a tavern last night. Even though he believed that her gambit had mostly been innocent, there was no telling what she could get up to if he didn’t keep a close eye on her.
It had been one thing to find her Willflower antics amusing when she’d been his little friend. Now that
