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“Come back upstairs with me.” He drew closer, and I stopped breathing.

Like all his commands, this one was difficult to ignore. He was close enough that I could feel the heat emanating off his body. His fingers reached and threaded slowly with mine, tempting me back to him.

But I was, in fact, very hungry. “I’ll only be a moment.”

“I can think of better ways to fill the moments,” he said in a voice like smoke. His other hand wound gently around my lower back.

I inhaled sharply, my thighs squeezing together as he closed the space between us, and his scent overwhelmed me. It felt like coercion—a very effective coercion. “I realize that everyone else around here does whatever you ask of them, Patrick, but if you think I’ve agreed to stay here just to fall in line and obey orders, then—”

He sighed at the ceiling, cursed beneath his breath.

“Then you’ll be disappointed to learn that I’m not that kind of woman. And—”

He kissed me. Took my waist in both hands and pressed me back against the wall. His lips covered mine, stunning me, and then unraveled me entirely.

The seam of my lips parted on a gasp, and he took advantage. His tongue stole my breath in long, luscious sweeps, forced a gasp from my chest. Then his hips pinned me there, and hot, liquid wanting filled my core, disintegrated every other thought.

Somehow, my legs found his waist and wound around him. My hands delved into his hair. The coat I’d thrown on puddled around my elbows, and when his lips disentangled from mine, a sound of longing escaped me.

“It’s early,” he murmured. And his voice was thick with need, heavy with it. The hard ridge of his arousal pressed into me. “Come back upstairs with me.”

I nodded, not caring much if he took me here in the stairwell.

On the top floor landing, Patrick barked at Sam to go home, and the boy went wide-eyed and fled, possibly mistaking the urgency on Patrick’s face for something else.

Patrick pulled me back into the room I’d just escaped, and it seemed we were both taken by something uncontrollable. A spring tension pushed to the limits of its constructs before it broke, gave way. He pulled me off the ground and onto his chest so that my mouth was aligned with his, so that our lips could connect again. We were drunk. Desperate. I let my coat fall to the floor, then wrapped my arms around his neck, urgently pressing my body against his. He cursed against my lips.

I found my back pressed onto the bed, the wide span of his chest hovering above my own. He braced his arms on either side of my head, and my fingers found the valleys between the panes of his chest, then his stomach. I felt him shiver.

“Last chance to change your mind, Nina,” he said, drowning me in perfect blue. As he spoke, a finger glanced the column of my throat, drew a line down my chest to the ribbons of my nightgown, pulled them free.I watched those eyes turn wild, ravenous. “You’ve got this one last second to tell me to leave.”

In answer, I kissed him. Amid all the noise, the endless machinations of this world, there was little else I knew better than that I wanted Patrick Colson. That I was willing to do whatever it took to stay here, like this. I’d traveled to every village and parish on the continent, but that any other man might have captured my attention seemed unfathomable to me now. None came close. There was only Patrick and his secrets and these walls.

How had that happened? How had he eclipsed everything so swiftly?

He pulled the ribbons down until the bust followed, the cotton sleeves slipping free of my shoulders, the lace hem creeping slowly over the swell of my chest until it caught on the peaks of my nipples. Patrick’s eyes ignited.

A thousand brilliant bursts of light ruptured in me when he looked at me this way, like I was crafted precisely for him. Like I was the only woman who had ever existed.

I whispered, “What have you done to me?”

He shook his head once, jaw flexing. “No,” he groaned. “What haveyoudone to me?”

He lowered his head to my chest and gently pressed his lips to the curves, making a reverent path to my throat, and something inside me surged, clawed for the surface. “Undress me,” I begged him. “Please.”

A sound of deep relief escaped his lips, and he sat upright on the bed, pulling me with him. With deliberate slowness, he drew the hem of my nightgown back over my thighs, his hands bunching the fabric at my hips, skating over my sides as he lifted it higher, and all the while, his eyes followed the trail. Lust flooded across his features as each new part of me was exposed, his hands tensing, jaw tightening. I wondered if he could feel how heavy my breasts became under his eyes, how the blood quickened beneath my skin. Soon the nightgown fell away, and Patrick curled his hand around my jaw. “I’ve never seen anythin’ so perfect,” he told me. And perhaps a million men had said just the same to a millionlovers, but never quite like Patrick, whispering it into my skin, lifting my wrist and sealing his lips over the mottled scar where a brand had once been, making every nerve ending writhe beneath it.

He left me alone in the middle of the bed and stood at its side, fingers making quick work of the buttons at his trousers, and they fell away.

It seemed every inch of him had been carefully drawn, precisely carved, and I could hardly stand to look away from him, but there was something more I needed. I met his stare. “Touch me,” I said. There was no waver in my voice.

I saw his eyes flash with hunger.

And I was sure he could see the same in me, how I breathed too fast, squirmed as he stood there, too far away, too devastatingly masculine. He bore down over my body slowly, holding himself just slightly out of reach, as though inspecting which part of me he would take first.

“Where, Scurry girl?” he murmured, and it thundered through my own chest. His fingers skimmed over the hollow of my stomach, and even this simple touch made me tremble. “Here?” he asked, and he watched me closely as his roughened hand traveled lower, lower, down to my sex, fingers teasing. He watched my back arch, my mouth fall open, and it seemed to unleash something wild in him. His mouth sank to my collarbone, then to my breasts, lips closing on one peak. I moaned his name.

I gripped his head in my hands and held him there, his fingers still massaging expertly, learning me instantly. “Please,” I said, and I undulated against the pressure of his palm, seeking more, more, desperate for him.