Page 23 of Greed: The Savage (Seven Deadly Sins #7)

Addien continued to torment Thornwick with the wishful story she’d painted one cold night in London to keep her friend alive.

“I told her, in other parts of the kingdom, there’s hills made not of pavement but grass.

” The glimmer in her eyes shifted, a move away from the sorrow to a place where a dream lived.

“Not the tiny, weedy, brown tuffs by the docks and waste grounds, but real green-like.”

He’d certainly never thought of them with any wonder, or even at all. Before now.

Addien tipped a look his way. “You got places like that, Thornwick?” Her child-like curiosity was sharper than any censorious jibe could.

Seventy-five thousand noncontiguous acres of land spread over several counties. Villages and hamlets owned outright. Nor did that include the handful of hunting lodges, fortified manors, and regional manors. A London townhouse. A residence in Bath. All passed to him.

“Yes,” he managed to say. “I have places…like that.”

The wistfulness in her gaze cut him clean through.

Addien’s eyes grew sad. “She froze that night.”

In Addien’s arms.

Maybe Dunworthy had put a blade in Thornwick’s blackened heart, and her words drove the final strike. For her telling bored into Thornwick like a spike, deep, sharp, and merciless.

He saw it all. The alley. The girl in her arms. Addien and her dying friend dreaming of a place away from humanity’s cruelest streets.

He’d never had a use for a rogue’s tongue. Thornwick didn’t waste time with niceties and inane talk. He dealt in blunt directness to the point of brutality. He wished for it now. “I’m s—” He broke off. What a fucking rubbish response.

“It is all right,” she said gently. “It was a long time ago.”

She sought to reassure him? The hell he’d allow her to do that.

Thornwick caressed his thumb over a palm of her hand that’d been forced to do too much. “Memories like that do not fade, Addien,” he murmured.

“No,” she assented. “No, they do not.” Addien’s gaze fell to the frigid water.

Now he knew what she saw, what she remembered.

He set his jaw. And by God this day, he’d ensure those dark memories were replaced with new, hotter ones—ones that would scour the cold from her mind.

“Dynevor operates an icehouse,” he said, his voice sliding smoothly into the silken cadence of seduction. “He has men who harvest the ice from a lake.”

Addien wet her lips. “Nobility and their peculiar collections.”

The air between them thickened, the warmth gone, replaced by something sharper, more deliberate.

“As you well know,” he said, “he does everything in the interest of, and only with the thought of, the club in mind.”

“Including the ice?” she asked.

Thornwick turned his attention to her lower wrist. “Oh, yes. Especially…” He stopped.

His gaze locked on the faint imprints of another man’s fingers, stamped into Addien’s soft skin, right where the delicate inseam of her wrist met her hand. Her pulse beat fast. Too fast. The pace not of fear, but wanting.

Her next breathless words confirmed her desire. “Are you trying to think of one?”

“One use?” he said, a silken purr.

More like trying to hold back the beast pacing inside him, straining at its leash, ready to run Dunworthy to ground and finish what he’d begun. Thornwick didn’t meet her gaze; if he did, she’d see the murderous rage within.

“I know all manner of uses for it, Addien.” Thornwick let his thumb drift over the fragile skin of her wrist. Addien’s breath caught.

He hid his smile.

What began as a bid to distract himself from the urge to kill for the hurt done to her soon shifted—for reasons far more dangerous. Wicked, carnal ones.

His thumb lingered against her skin, tracing the delicate seam where wrist met hand. Beneath it, her pulse quickened—an unguarded confession. What strange magic did she possess that such an innocent, oft-overlooked part of a woman could stir such raw wanting in him?

“Do you know what Dynevor keeps an icehouse for?” he asked, his voice low, lifting his head just enough to catch her gaze from beneath hooded lids.

Addien’s nod was uneven. Was it shame at her ignorance…or the shiver his touch and question coaxed from that sweet, hidden place within her?

The rapid beat of her pulse gave him the truest answer.

Thornwick’s jaw tightened, his hunger for her winding deep, hot, and inexorable in his chest.

Ever so slowly, he wrapped an edge of the cloth around his finger. He dipped the material, leaving it there to soak on a slab of ice.

“Ice has countless aphrodisiacal properties,” he said thickly.

He brought the material back closer to the bruise he’d previously tended.

“Does it?” her voice trembled.

Thornwick nodded. “Oh, yes.”

Never taking his gaze from hers, he lifted her wrist, bringing it close to his mouth. As he pressed the cool cloth to her skin, his breath ghosted over it.

Addien’s breath hitched—not the hiss of a woman chilled by cold, but the sharp, burning catch of one seared by the mingling of ice and heat.

Thornwick hid a smile. He wanted her. He didn’t care to wonder why—only that no woman he’d ever desired had ever stirred him so fiercely. All he knew was hunger. An ache to possess her.

A proper gentleman might feel guilt for lusting after a woman who had defended herself against Dunworthy this very day.

But Thornwick was no gentleman. He would have her—bent over a chair, beneath him, above him—in every way a man could take a woman.

She’d be as much a hellion in his bed as she was in every other clash they’d had.

He’d have her on her bloody knees, begging for it.

The day was coming, and soon.

Oh, yes, he’d see to it.

Until he had slaked this lust, he would never command his thoughts again. Nor, God willing, would she.

Because until he claimed her, every waking thought belonged to her…and he meant to take them back the only way he knew how.