“I am trying to save you, Jackson. From me. I am leaving to save your family because I am no one good people like yourselves should suffer a connection to. If I stay, I will end up back in your bed, and I will likely one day give in to what you want because whether you believe it or not, I care for you. Too much. And that is why I leave. Because I care and do not wish to see you hurt.”
“You do not trust us to decide that for ourselves?”
“You are too good. Too kind. Too trusting.”
“Better all that than too alone, stubborn, and bitter.”
She gasped. Then she closed her eyes and nodded slowly. “Yes. Perhaps I am all those things. But you cannot understand.”
“Because you do not trust me to. Let us not mince words, Gwendolyn. You are a coward.”
Her eyes flew open, and she lunged toward him, her arm stiff at her side, fingers curled into a fist as if she meant to hit him, but she stopped just short, her arm bent but waiting. For what?
“You have no idea how scared I’ve been. Yet even with my heart beating in my ears, I’ve walked on. I’m no coward.”
“What do you call it, then, when you always flee from what you want?”
She blinked several times, and her chest stilled as her arm dropped through the air so slowly, as if it fell through mud.
“You can prove you’re no coward. Tell me. If you’re such an untenable connection for me, tell mewhy.” He turned and faced her, snagging her gaze and keeping it, demanding through their threaded gazes all the secrets he’d let her keep for so long.
She looked away, snapping the thread stretched between them with the utmost of ease.
“Hah.” His laugh the merest breath of air. “I expected nothing less. But I hoped. I should learn not to.” He looked at his parents’ portraits. “I feel most guilty looking at them right now. They thought me terribly bright and terribly… thoughtless. They knew the truth of me but loved me anyway. They’d love me even now, seeing my anger. Perhaps more so. Perhaps the way they taught me to love was foolish.”
“No. You are no fool, and you are not thoughtless.”
“I certainly was thoughtless before they died. I admit it. That’s not my point. Let me be more direct. My point is that they taught me to love past flaws.” Would she understand his meaning? Whatever she thought her flaws were, he would love her still. She did not have to leave.
“Some flaws are bigger than others. If you were thoughtless, Jackson, I was… obedient. Malleable. Naïve. Like wet clay, easily shaped and formed by others’ intentions and desires.”
Each word drained her of color until she stood pale and bloodless before him.
“We are not our pasts, Gwendolyn.”
“Quite right.” She pounded a fist to her belly. “And I am forging myself anew, a new future, too, the only one I can have without hurting everyone I care for.”
So much pain there. Not a moment of pain, but a lifetime. A pain she likely never stopped feeling. She merely kept others from seeing it.
Jackson’s anger washed away in his desire to take all her pain away. He stroked a line down the side of her face, and she closed her eyes, leaned into the touch until he cupped his hand, palmed her cheek.
He closed his own eyes, welcoming the midnight darkness at noonday, and let his lips find home. They did not need sight or sun to do so, only the sound of her breathing and the promise of a kiss like a beacon.
Her breath hitched, and he heard it in the golden dark, used it to find her, to set his lips to hers. He’d read a treatise or five on kissing, had observed others doing it in brothels across Europe, places he frequented for study of the amorous arts. But every word, every image scattered from his mind like a dust in the wind with the reality of Gwendolyn’s lips, soft and willing, against his own.
He moved slowly, kept it chaste in order to whisper worships to her with each slant of mouth across mouth. His one hand to her cheek, he curved the other around her neck, and held her softly, telling her with touch how he would hold her all his days—with gentleness and strength, keeping her safe from whatever haunted her, teaching her with each touch and caress the strength she possessed. He admired that strength. With every particle of his being.
Her hands fisted in his waistcoat, pulled his chest against hers, and her tongue parted his lips with a hiss and a curse. A shock. A delight. She gave him burning need for his quiet worship, and by Jove, he’d show her he could give the same. He swept his hands around her waist, pressing them against her back and making sure no space, not a bit of air, existed between them. Soft curves against hard chest, everything fit, locked into place—belonged together.
Her tongue swept against his own. “More,” she gasped.
He walked her away from the window and pressed her back against the wall. The jolt of their bodies hitting that barrier broke the seal of their lips, and they stared into one another’s eyes. Hers glittered cold.
She was going to retreat. He saw the retreat.
Then she didn’t. She tangled her hands in his cravat and pulled him to her once more, devouring him. He rucked her skirt up one leg, and cupped the backside of her knee, pulled it up until it wrapped around his waist, held her tight to him.
“What do you want?” he asked.
