Page 47

And as always, they fought for control. Tongues tangling, bodies melded, grinding, an aggressive kiss, nothing like the dreary one she’d shared with a reprobate viscount a year after she left Dorian. Her lone effort to forget, one that brought only rending heartache.

This was the approach they’d taken years ago after weeks of searing glances and accidental touches. Cautious flirtation turning into blatant, before their clothing came off. An explosion of desire, a flood of longing spanning mere moments, yet feeling like a lifetime.

Going on instinct, Juliet quit the kiss to nip his jaw, a tender spot beneath his ear. She scratched his scalp with her nails and leaned into him from chest to hip, giving a helpless little wiggle. She longed to rouse the beast in him, wondering if she still could.

“Your brazen assault is”—bracing his forearm against stone, Dorian hung his head, groaning—“interfering…with my style.”

“What if—”

The sound was distant but clear, the crunch of boots on a pebbled path.

Dorian lifted his hand to his lips and crossed with stealth steps to the row of watery glass panes. Glancing out, he whispered, “A groom heading into the stables. We’ll wait until he’s inside, then take the back entrance and around. Dawn will be breaking soon.”

Her partial plea— what if —hung like a stark moon over them minutes later as they made a pensive return to her cottage. He held her hand the entire way, fingers tightly linked, and he caught her against his side when she stumbled, but he was thinking .

Backing away from her in slow, cautious degrees.

She’d accepted her boundless heartbreak when she rejected his proposal, but she wondered if she’d comprehended his.

They entered her cottage and wandered down the hallway, halting in the doorway of the parlor—the one with the settee he’d sworn to scuttle back to, nothing on his tongue but the taste of her and the Sevilles.

The wall sconce cast golden light across his face, catching on the stubble lining his tightly held jaw.

His eyes were stark, and very, very blue, in the glow.

“I’m not sure I have the courage, Jules,” he whispered, telling her, one , she still had the power to rouse the beast and, two , she’d shattered Dorian Montrose’s heart into pieces along with her own.

“I wasn’t right for months after our separation, maybe a year or two actually.

Most of my antics didn’t make the scandal sheets, fortunately, but it was bad.

Tossed out of public houses and gaming dens bad.

White’s membership revoked bad. Hell, maybe I’m still reacting to my first love affair, the kind everyone says”—he shrugged with a tattered laugh—“you know, you get over. Only, I never did.”

“Wait,” she whispered, uncertain, but unwilling to let him bolt when it looked as though he might.

He was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet like he was preparing for a race.

One that would take him away from her. Her unfinished what if from the conservatory still had no ending.

Heavens, wasn’t confusion appropriate with passion twisting one’s heart into knots, tighter than a sailor’s rope?

She didn’t reject the questions spinning through her mind.

What did he want? What did she want?

And if they loved each other, what did that mean for the future?

“Go to bed, Jules,” he said, rubbing his chest, his weary sigh echoing down the empty corridor. “Your indecision is killing me.”

“Are you going to be here when I wake up?”

He crossed into the parlor without glancing back and, instead of answering, asked, “The marquess, do you have a date?”

Dazed and provoked, Juliet shook her head.

Why bring him up? “It’s Oliver’s plan, not mine.

I can say no.” I think , was left unsaid.

Her brother’s patience with her refusal to marry—five rejected proposals and counting—was wearing thin.

He cared little for her and was, frankly, eager to pass the burden of a contrary female to someone else.

By their father’s decree, her only sibling controlled both her funds and her future.

And without his assistance, her already meager existence would become untenable.

Dorian slumped onto the settee, planting his grass-stained boots on the table before it.

“Be vexed with me for saying this as my sordid reputation precedes me, but dalliances are fine. The ideal remedy in most cases. Tidy bundles and such. Only…not with you. I wish it weren’t true— gads , do I ever—but I worry you have the power to destroy me.”

Stunned by his honesty, Juliet’s gaze drifted helplessly to the fall of his trousers, his arousal unmistakable behind it.

Completely without shame—the power of being a man, she supposed—he brushed his closed fist over the hard ridge. “Oh, I’ll come tonight. Probably a minute or two after you shut your bedchamber door. Don’t mistake this for a lack of desire, darling, it’s fear .”

“I’ll do the same,” she said, furious for no good reason when the origin of the rift between them was equally shared. “It isn’t new to me. Or thinking about you while I’m doing it.”

“ Brilliant . I’ll use that mental image in future interactions with myself.

” His boots hit the floor with a thump, the teasing, taunting mien vanishing like a wisp of smoke in a strong gust. “Tell me, what are we doing in this memory-haunted cottage? Is this a random occurrence caused by my almost drowning in my brother’s pond, or is this something more? Is history correcting itself?”

Minutes passed as the mantel clock in the parlor counted off the time slipping away from them. Finally, Dorian dropped his head to his hands, his aching whisper tumbling through his fingers, “If I asked again, Jules…would you say yes?”

Truly, her hesitation was born of shock, of wonder…and, too late, of elation. No more than thirty seconds passed while she searched for words—when all he’d needed was one.

“Don’t,” he growled when she moved to step into the room. “Don’t bother.”

Rising in a fury, Dorian searched the space for a coat he hadn’t arrived in and finding nothing, brushed past her and stalked down the corridor. She wished he didn’t look so unbearably gorgeous in his anger, his cheeks flushed, hair a terror she longed to thread her fingers through.

And those eyes.

Those amazing sapphire eyes, filled with every unwelcome emotion he felt for her.

Every welcome emotion she felt for him.

Juliet caught the door before it could slam into the entryway wall, clinging to it as he took the steps at a run. “You’re really going to leave like this? This is the second occasion that I’ve had to chase you down.”

When he continued across the lawn, his stride furious, she shouted, “Yes! Yes, yes ! Do you hear me? I’m sorry I didn’t blurt it out immediately in there—my God , you stunned me to my teeth!

” She shouldn’t have overlooked his vulnerability purely because he was older and carried, just enough to be devastating, a trace of gray in his hair.

Because he was successful and, though she was loathe to admit it, experienced.

Mercifully, time and his many escapades hadn’t changed everything about him.

What Dorian Montrose offered the world was only a facade—never the full truth.

He’d only ever been his true self with her.

Juliet called to him again, and he halted, his shoulders sinking. Then he turned and strode back, taking the stairs two at a time. He reached, cradling her jaw as he pulled her hard against him. He pressed her into the door, his mouth slanting over hers, stealing reason, thought, intention .

The kiss was an inferno, rage driving it, an emotion so achingly close to passion.

She thrust her regret—five minutes old, five years old—into it. Her own quiet honesty poured out, unrestrained. Rising onto her toes, one hand gripping his shoulder, the other curling around the nape of his neck, she swallowed his groan, his breath, his love.

If he left her, she wanted him to remember .

“Make me believe it,” he whispered against her lips, his body rocking into hers, igniting a rumble deep inside her.

Sparks flashed behind her closed lids as a quiver resounded in her heart.

Love and want tangled for control. “Because I don’t.

And I can’t live with that. It’s all of you or nothing, Jules. ”

Then he released her, departed for perhaps the last time.

Leaving her to figure out how to make him believe.