Page 68

I awoke wrapped in Patrick.

His breath on my neck, my back to his chest, his hand on my stomach, my nightdress bunched indecently high. I felt all the hard planes of him against me and had never felt as restful. How little it would take to shut my eyes and sleep another day.

My stomach, however, would not be ignored. It growled insistently.

I rose with the intention of finding food for the both of us. Surely Patrick would be hungry when he woke. God knew when he’d last eaten.

His discarded pocket watch on the bedside table read just before six. Dawn broke beyond the rooftops; I would likely meet no one but Sam in the stairwell, nor in the pub or the kitchen. I slipped a coat over my clothes without bothering to dress properly.

Sam was snoring with his head lolling on his chest. The stairs creaked as I descended but the rooms on each landing were quiet. Barely any sounds from the street permeated.

I was almost to the bottom when I heard a thundering from above. Feet pounded the steps as they descended, intensifying as they neared. I frowned at the way I had come, watching a window shudder in its frame.

Patrick appeared, barreling around the banister.

His hair stuck up at every angle. He remained shirtless, as he had been in sleep, trousers unbelted and hanging loose on his hips.

The way he panted made the muscles of his chest and stomach expand in distracting ways.

Truly, I had never seen a man more magnificent.

I swallowed, blinked rapidly. Then said, “Is someone chasing you?”

He braced his arms against the wall and hung his head, cursing. “God almighty , Nina. It’s barely daybreak. I thought… I thought—”

“What?” I asked. “That I’d left?”

His cheeks hollowed and filled. “No, I—”

“I’m only finding breakfast,” I told him, trying not to stare at his body. Trying to ignore the warmth pooling low in my stomach at the sight of him. “I’ll return soon.”

But Patrick shook his head, descending the last of the stairs. “I’ll have it brought up,” he said. “That’s what I pay the cooks for.”

“I’m capable of procuring some toast,” I argued. “And I’m hungry.”

“You aren’t even properly dressed,” he countered. “And your feet are turnin’ purple with the cold.”

“So are yours .”

“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 have you done 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 million lovers, 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.

“Ah, how I’d hoped you’d beg, just like this,” he said against my skin, and his palm pressed down hard.

“Patrick!”

“Hoped you’d whine like that, too.”

I was shivering, legs trembling, my hips moving instinctually, needing more. His smoky voice was a drug to me.

“Do you know how many times I’ve imagined fucking you?”

I forgot how to breathe, how to think. There was only this, only him. He guided the head of his erection inside me, and my head fell back, my mouth opened in shock.

“Holy god,” he uttered. Only he was looking at me, like I was some divine entity.

For an eternity I was lost in all those devastating sensations.

The shudder of his chest, the urgent pulsating of my hips, begging him, pleading with him to satiate this burning.

Each time I thought the ends of the earth had been found, the intensity increased.

Each thrust pushed me further into insanity, made my nails dig into his shoulders.

My body moved in discordant ways, hungry, ravenous.

“This is how I want you every single time,” he told me, his tongue playing with the skin behind my ear. “Just like this. Undone. Wild.”

My inner walls were tightening, and I watched his face transform into one of agony, acute pleasure. He captured my mouth and growled my name.

And I turned to shafts of light, rivulets of music, the shiver of stars misaligning.