She threw her head back and laughed. “I want to rip your lying throat out.”
“That should not arouse me, but here we are.”
“You dare to?—”
He dared to step closer. Just one step. She could smell him now—hay and horse and man, and he prowled toward her with ease, stopping close enough to touch. But not touching. “Your scent is still on my tongue. Your scent sunk deep into every inch of me. Yes,arousal. Because I will not soon forget the sight of you spread before me in the moonlight.”
“Do not speak of that ever again.” She clenched her fist to keep from slapping him. “I trusted you. We all did. Yet you led the type of man most dangerous to us right to our doorstep.” She laughed, a lost sort of sound, distant and empty. “Youare the sort of man most dangerous to us. AndIled you to our doorstep. Mr. and Mrs. Beckett were right.”
“It’s not your fault. Griff will tell no one. I won’t breathe a word.”
“I cannot believe you.” All her fault if Hawthorne House crumbled. She’d been warned, but she’d thought herself clever enough to succeed anyway. She’d been wrong. “I came only to demand your silence.”
“Yet you refuse to believe me.”
“And to say what doesn’t need saying.”
He tilted his head to the side. “And that is?”
“I will not be marrying you. It was barely an agreement. You can’t hold me to a nod. I agreed to marry a stable hand, not a marquess.”
“Yet you originally intended to marry a peer. For duty’s sake. Do your intentions remain the same?”
Her plan. In shambles now. Could it be saved? Now more than ever she deserved the punishment of a cold marriage bed.“Not every woman is as lucky as I. As my mother was in having loving parents.”
“You’re punishing yourself.”
She scoffed. “How absurd.”
“It’s true. You punish yourself for being loved. For being safe. Because you feel guilty.”
“That’s not… that’s not—” Was it? Hadn’t she just thought that very word—the punishment of a cold marriage bed.
“You think that marrying for guilt and duty instead of love will even out the unfair hands fate has played to you and others.”
“No.” But her hands had become fists, and her jaw ticked with more than irritation.
He reached for her, and she flinched back, but he would not be stopped, and the door at her back offered few options for escape. When his fingertips finally brushed against her skin, she closed her eyes, hating how much his touch soothed her, how much she wanted to melt into it. He smoothed his thumbs up and down the mountains of her knuckles. Still she clutched anger in her palms.
“I know I am right,” he said, “because I’ve felt much the same since discovering Hawthorne House.” He gave a huff of laughter. “What a blow. To realize a woman you were supposedly protecting intended to run from you. To realize you don’t know a damn thing about kindness and love. I was not merely ignorant. I had never even tried to learn. After my mother’s death, women began to feel so very… temporary. Here to blaze with brief life and color, populate the earth, and die. My father didn’t care. No one cared. But me. The unfairness of it crawled in my skin like ants across a picnic blanket. So I ignored it. Until I couldn’t any longer. Then I lied to make amends. I think you’re lying to make amends, too.”
“I’m not lying.”
“The lie is that you must be unhappy to make life fairer for those born without your privileges. But you can have both happiness and duty, countess. If you marry me?—”
She ripped away. The hubris of this man! Proposing marriage.Again. After she’d just refused his proposal given in lies. “Marry you? Why would I?”
“Because you’d have a husband who knew what you were up to. And wouldn’t care. You wouldn’t have to live a lie. And you’d have a husband dedicated to making your every waking hour a pleasure.”
She snorted.
“It’s true. I’d make you come right now, if you let me. I’d throw Griff off that bed and toss you atop it, then I’d drop to my knees before you and?—”
“Well now, that’s quite enough, thank you!” The rustle of cloth and squeak of a bed accompanied the masculine objection.
Lucy yelped. There on a bed in the corner, indignant and flustered and half hidden by a curtain—the Earl of Finley. She’d quite forgotten about him. Heat flaming across her cheeks, she strode to the window and threw it open, gulped in fresh air.
“Ignore him,” Keats said, much too closer and whispering in her ear. “As I was saying, I’d drop to my knees before you. Because you deserve adoration. You deserve?—”
