“Me lead?” She looked around the private garden as if he’d said something scandalous. “You won’t feel… I don’t know… emasculated?”
At that a true smile touched his lips, one he couldn’t suppress if he wanted to. “Miss Felicity, if my manhood could be threatened by learning something from a woman, then I wasn’t much of a man to begin with.”
His words seemed to please her so much, she unclenched her fingers before sliding her glove into his. “Indeed not.” The smile she granted him had lost its brittle edge.
She stood across from him, glittering like a moonbeam, and set her hand on his shoulder, moving into the circle of his arms. Her fingers disappeared into his as she stretched their hands away from their bodies to adopt the waltzing posture.
Gabriel stood still and solid, worrying that she’d change her mind. That somehow, she’d recognize him.
He knew it was gauche to look at her, that their necks should arch away to avoid the intimacy of eye contact.
But she never broke her gaze from his as she stepped one way, and then— encouraged by his effortless follow— she stepped again. And again.
Gabriel’s body attuned to her every gentle cue, to the nearly imperceptible nudges of her hands. The soft wisp of her slippers as they kissed his shoes, urging him in time to the music. This waltz was a slow one, thankfully giving him time to adjust. He’d watched her dance once before at the disastrous Midnight Masquerade and marveled at the change in her. The confidence she’d possessed when she’d drifted out of her mind and into her body.
Just as she did now.
The temptation to join her in that place was undeniable, and before long, Gabriel became lost in the rhythm of their movement and her breath and his thrumming heart.
“You, Gareth Severand, are either a liar or a natural,” she said after a while, her eyes twinkling in the dim light of the garden lanterns. “I can hardly believe you’ve not done this before.”
“A liar,” he confessed ruefully. “My mother did teach me a bit before she died.”
“Oh?”
A pang lanced his heart at the memory. His lovely, young, ebony-haired mother trying to teach an impatient boy of eight a new waltz. “That was very long ago. I hardly thought to remember.”
“It sounds like the memories of your mother are good ones.”
“All of them,” he murmured.
“And your father?”
The last thing he wanted in this conversation, in this moment with this woman so close to his body, was the intrusion of his father.
“None of them.”
Observant as she was, she seemed to accept discussion on that account was closed.
They were silent a moment, lost in the steps. In their thoughts.
“Do you really not have a sweetheart?” she ventured. “I think that’s an awful shame.”
Lord, but did she think to poke every bruise his soul possessed?
“No. I do not.”
“Why not?” Her mouth drew into a vague little pout. “Did someone break your heart?”
No, but she would eventually.
“My heart is not sweet, Miss Goode,” was all he could offer by way of explanation.
“I don’t believe that.”
“You don’t know who I am.”
She considered that for a moment, narrowing her eyes in thought. “Who are you, then?”
Gabriel swallowed over a gathering lump in his throat.
He could tell her.
I’m the man who took a bullet for you. He could say. I’m a gangster used to wielding power and precedence over an organization of ruthless criminals. I am a damned soul who has done unspeakable things to survive. My brother is married to your sister and I’ve been watching you for longer than Raphael even knew the two of you existed.
Who am I? I am Gabriel Sauvageau. The fallen prince of a dismantled empire.
And I love you.
He said none of that as he gazed down at her upturned face. He was too selfish a bastard to utter anything that might drive her from his arms.
He loved her.
He wasn’t certain how to describe the phenomenon before now.
But he loved her. He did. He thought about her every morning upon waking. Every night before sleeping. He pictured her when pleasuring himself. He’d kept her image on the backs of his eyelids during the months of suffering through the several surgical procedures that left him only just palatable to be seen in public without a mask. Her safety and comfort were his first priority, a responsibility he assigned to himself without a thought of asking for anything in return.
“It doesn’t matter who I am,” he whispered, distracted by the light gilding the soft moisture on her lips with an ethereal sheen. “Not tonight.”
All the reasons he shouldn’t touch her disappeared into the darkness, fleeing before the creature of primitive instinct the moon and the music seemed to make of him.
His blood roared. His cock filled. His muscles tensed and built into a straining, pulsing machine, overwhelmed with the need to find other, more primal rhythms.
But he would rip out his own heart before he succumbed to any of that.
Because the soft cling of her fingertips against his shoulder was enough to keep the entire monster leashed with unbreakable chains.
Everything that was hard and horrible about himself, rough and possessive, selfish and violent, he beat back with all the considerable strength he possessed.
Which left him powerless to resist her.
Only when her hand left his grasp to rest against his jaw, did he notice that they’d stopped moving. That her mouth had parted, and his shoulders had already curled forward.
His head lowered.
Her toes lifted.
The breath that feathered across his face was warm and vaguely flavored of fruit from the punch. Her intricate coiffure gleamed like gilded braids of gold and he imagined her skin was as smooth as cream whipped to a froth.
But it was the way her lids became heavy across eyes darkened with the very same need roaring through him, that unraveled the last of his sanity.
The invitation he read there.
His mouth hovered above hers for the last futile moment, if only to give her
