“I know that this isn’t done,” Henry continued, his voice deeper and his words slower as he took one deliberate step into her room. “I could assure you that my servants are discreet or that none saw me. I could assure you any number of things, really, but that isn’t what I came to talk to you about.”
Good God, he could stop looking at her like that ...
She didn’t know what to make of how his eyes lingered on such seemingly innocent parts of her body. Her collarbone, her neck, the slope of her wrists. She swore she could feel his fingerstracing those areas as he ran his eyes over them, the heat in her belly pooling all the more thickly.
“And what is it you wanted to discuss, Your Grace?” Her tone was breathless, her words forced. She felt bold even asking that. Bold and embarrassed, a different kind of heat flooded her face as she tried not to fidget under his gaze.
“We’ve danced around it a number of times, these past few days.” He took another step forward, his eyes hooded and full of heat as he watched her reaction to his every move. “It is forward of me, maybe, to come to your bedchamber and talk about it with you, but there is no other moment we have that is private enough in which to. And given that it is a change in what we had previously agreed to, I need to discuss it with you before it is … appropriate for us to be alone.”
The way he said ‘appropriate’ sent gooseflesh along the exposed portions of her skin, her belly flipping at the dark promise in the word.
“Our agreement?”
God help her; she sounded like a simpleton. Addlebrained and sheepish. But words were hardly the first thing on her mind as he stepped even closer still, crowding her in a way that should have made her feel anything but the sudden rush of excitement that it did.
“You said that you wanted a marriage of convenience. One devoid of emotion, of sentiment. We agreed to be friends. The way I’ve come to feel about you, Josephine, is hardly that.” His voice dropped even lower as he stopped just in front of her. Toe to toe until she could feel the heat emanating off him.
It was everything she wanted to hear, but a small sliver in the back of her mind asked how she could trust such a thing.
Two big M’s instead of just the one.
Martha, Murder.
Desire overrode both of them.
“What is it you feel for me then, Your Grace?”
She barely recognized her own voice, deep and throaty, as she stared back up at him despite the horses galloping through her chest … despite the butterflies that had taken up residence in her belly and were threatening to try climbing up and out of her throat.
Could he see how nervous she was? How important the next words out of his mouth would be?
“Interest,” Henry murmured. He reached between them, his hand lifted until he could make contact with her face. His thumb brushed against her cheekbone, tracing the line down as his eyes bored into hers with an intensity that made it nearly impossible to draw another breath. “Fondness. Desire. I could categorize it any number of ways.”
And not one of the words he used was the one she most wanted to hear, but her heart leapt with the utterance of each of them all the same.
And her thighs pressed tighter and tighter into one another as well.
“I make you feel things?” she teased, repeating his words from the other night back to him.
He laughed, the sound a gravel-filled chuckle as his thumb changed its path and skipped over to the bottom-most swell of her lips.
“A great many things,” he agreed, his thumb pressing down on the soft flesh as he walked them towards the vanity she had only just stood up from. “The more I’m around you, the more that you do. The more that I want you.”
Want.
She had only the very basest understanding of what that meant and what that entailed. But after the last handful of days, she knew exactly what it felt like to want. To desire something she barely even knew the mechanics of.
“I’m yours, Your Grace.” And she meant those words more fully than she could explain.
Her saying them seemed to snap something in Henry, his lips parting and something feral moving beneath his features as he took one final, quicker step forward.
The back of Josephine’s hips hit the vanity, the bottles and jars she had on it rattling, but any thought to check to see if anything had fallen was stayed by his sudden lowering of his head.
He claimed her lips with a heat she didn’t know was possible, his teeth pulling against her lips as his tongue claimed hers almost immediately.
Her breath gusted out of her, her hands coming up to steady herself against the sudden onslaught of his lips. And her fingers twisted into his shirt almost just as quickly.
Oh, God.
