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The sight of her made his bones feel weaker, and almost immediately, all he wanted was for her to return to her room, to allow him to grapple with the lingering remnants of his nightmare in the solitude he so often craved after these late-night visitations from his past.

“Catherine, it’s terribly late,” he said, his voice weary, tinged with the need for her to simply go away. “You should be asleep.”

“I heard you,” she said, her tone gentle yet laced with a quiet concern. “I heard you cry out. You sounded… distressed.”

He hesitated. He didn’t want her to witness him in this vulnerable state, shaken and haunted by the demons that plagued his sleep. “It was just a bad dream, Catherine. Truly. Nothing more. Please, go back to sleep.”

But she remained at the door, her presence a tangible warmth in the otherwise cold silence. Then, she crossed the threshold, giving him a clearer view of her slender silhouette framed against the dim light spilling from the hallway. Even in themuted light, just seeing her felt like a soothing balm to his frayed nerves. She was the light to his darkness.

He felt the suffocating tension that had gripped him beginning to ease at the sight of her standing there, clad in a simple white nightgown, her rich auburn hair cascading loosely around her shoulders like a silken shawl.

She looked like an angel that had come to save him, and his hands twitched above the covers, his mind barely able to give in to the need bubbling within him. He wanted to pull her into his bed and ravish her until her moans banished the dregs of his nightmare.

“Sampson,” she said softly, her voice barely above a whisper as she stepped into the room, closing the door gently behind her with a quiet click that seemed to shut them off from the rest of the sleeping household.

She moved towards his bed with a silent grace, her bare feet making no sound on the polished wooden floor.

He tried one last, feeble attempt to dismiss her, his voice still rough and unsteady around the edges of his lingering fear. “Catherine, really, it’s nothing. Just a nightmare. I’ll be fine. You don’t need to?—”

She stopped at the foot of his bed. Her gaze, though he couldn’t read it in the dim light filtering from the hallway, felt direct, unwavering, and filled with a quiet empathy that resonated deep within him.

“Let me help,” she said, her voice barely a whisper, but her words bled with sincerity that erased his reluctance at alarming speed. “Let me be here. Please.”

He looked at her, truly looked at her, and saw not pity in her stance, but a genuine offer of solace, a quiet willingness to share the burden of his fear.

Suddenly, he considered a few things he could do to forget his nightmare—all of them involving his wife and her rather flimsy nightgown.

It wouldn’t take much to rip it off her and lose himself in the warmth of her body, give his heart another reason to race in his chest. She looked so beautiful like this, her eyes gentle and her frame delicately pliant, he had an inkling that it wouldn’t take much for him to commit to spending the rest of the night giving her pleasure and taking it from her.

All those ideas sucked the fight out of him, leaving him feeling utterly weary and emotionally drained. He was tired of the constant loneliness that followed these nightmares, tired of battling the terrifying shadows in the suffocating silence of his mind.

With a soft sigh that seemed to carry the weight of years of unspoken fear, he finally conceded.

“Alright, Catherine,” he whispered, his voice finally giving way to the exhaustion and the lingering tendrils of terror. “Alright.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Thank you.”

Sampson was confused by her gratitude. Why would she be thankful when she was the one offering him kindness and solace?

But her voice was a small beacon of comfort in the storm raging within him.

He gestured vaguely towards the edge of the bed, and she sat there, her gaze soft and questioning. The silence that stretched between them was different now, less charged with the usual playful tension and more with tentative vulnerability. Sampson found himself wanting to speak, to unburden himself of the heavy secret that had been his constant companion for so long.

He wasn’t sure why he felt this sudden urge to confide in Catherine, but her quiet presence seemed to have granted him a reprieve from the relentless echoes of his past.

Sampson could not point out exactly when this change occurred, but he had noticed that sometime after her arrival, he had begun to feel less tired, had spent less time dwelling on the details of his difficult upbringing and become more focused on the joy of being with her.

With a sigh, he maneuvered his body so he could rest his head on her lap.

“Why are you awake?” he asked quietly. “It couldn’t have been my—me. I couldn’t have woken you up.”

He had hoped that wasn’t the case, but the look on her face told him that it had indeed been his cries of fright that roused her from her sleep.

Still, she said softly, “I woke up because I was thirsty, and I was already on my way out of my room when I heard you. Do not worry.”

Oh, Catherine. Far too precious for someone so undeserving.