Page 16 of The Autumn Wife (King’s Girls #3)

Abreath of a kiss. That had been Theo’s intent.

At the first touch of their mouths, her lips felt wet and tasted of wine.

He lingered just a moment, anticipating a flinch or gasp.

He waited for a sign, for then he would pull himself back before her fear bloomed.

A wiser man might have chosen another way to thank her for trusting him.

He was likely conflating a carnal urge to seize her with a loftier goal to prove to her that not all men were brutes.

Cecile was a beauty his body hungered for, but she was also the only true gentleness he’d encountered in years.

Marshaling his will, he pulled away a fraction. Her lower lip clung to his for a moment before separating.

There.

It was done.

Their faces hovered as closely as two people could without touching.

Through his lashes, he saw, even in the dim starlight, a spray of freckles across her nose and cheeks, kissed darker by sun during the summer weeks.

He began to count them—a way to distract himself from wanting too much from her.

As he did, the wind soughed through the pines at the edge of the woods while the river sang its gurgling song.

Cecile.

Her name rang in his head like a prayer. He yearned to whisper it aloud. In a moment—any second now—she would bend back, shuffle across the grass, or stiffen into stone. She’d turn her face away and lift her chin and raise the walls she’d built between them.

As the moment stretched, his control wavered, cracks spidering through. Why had he thought kissing her would ease her fears or increase her trust in him?

Was he mad to believe he could resist temptation? His count of her freckles passed twenty-five and still she remained unmoved, eyes lowered but lashes fluttering. He dug his fingers into the grass, wondering, for the first time, if it could possibly be affection—or desire—that held her in thrall.

Didn’t matter. He should be the one to put an end to what he’d started.

The grass ran smooth under his hip as, against all desire, he slid himself away, pulling back from the promise of those parted lips, that gleaming mouth.

“No.”

She whispered the word and seized him with her dark, churning gaze.

His pulse jumped. He’d watched her mouth form the word, but what did she mean? Was she finally coming to her senses and telling him that she didn’t want to be kissed? Or did she mean… Did she want him to—

No, he shook off the idea. It was madness to let his wishful hopes rise.

He glanced down at his hand splayed against the ground to find her warm, paler one sliding over it. The wind stopped sighing in his ears and the stars tilted in his sight.

“Don’t stop, Theo.”

The whispered command burrowed deep. His control fell away.

His palm ached to feel the brush of her hair against it—and now his hand filled with the silky warmth, gritty with ash, damp in places.

He cupped her head, guiding her so he could set his lips against hers with the urgency he’d held leashed for too long.

Their bodies pressed together. Ripples of sensation vibrated through him.

He could feel them rippling through her, too.

Easy, easy, whispered his better nature as he covered her mouth with his.

He’d banked these urges but now there was no holding back the surge.

As he tilted his head to tease her lips apart, justifications burbled and roiled—Cecile had been married, her husband was lost to the wilderness, she was no virgin feeling a man’s touch for the first time, she knew what this kind of kissing led to, he could feel that she wanted him.

He coaxed with the tip of his tongue to open her mouth—then she moaned.

A low sound, a flutter of the larynx.

White light exploded in his mind. He curled his other arm around her. He knew he could shift her down to the grass, tug her skirts over her thighs, touch her in all the places he wanted to taste. She would arch her back in excitement when they joined together. He knew she would.

Dark thoughts gathered. He would make it good for her. He would make her scream his name. In the long years to come, she would remember their merging, hungry bodies moving as one toward joy on the banks of this river.

She would remember him.

The madness of that thought jolted him back to sanity.

Here he was, eroding her will with a promise of pleasure when he didn’t know what she wanted—or if their minds were as one.

Wasn’t he just a laborer in tattered breeches, a convicted felon who had nothing to offer this woman but an evening’s delight?

Cecile deserved a thousand times better.

Damn it.

He yanked back far enough for the cool air to sweep between them.

“Cecile.”

Her name was all he could manage.

She breathed words he could barely hear but sounded to his hopeful ears like “Don’t stop.”

No, she didn’t mean that—she could hardly raise her head or hold his gaze.

He glanced to the ground to see the bottle of wine they shared was overturned and drained. Had she taken more than a few gulps? He hadn’t been paying attention.

As the moment of their separation stretched, her breath grew less shallow, her gaze steadier.

“Oh.” Her voice was breathy and low. “Oh, Theo, I’m…I’m—”

“Blame it on the wine.” He nudged the bottle with his foot, then forced himself to face the river. He lifted one knee to hide the evidence of his desire. “Or blame it on the starlight. Or the fire.”

He meant the fire in Montreal—the panic and exhaustion and the sense of intimacy that arose between people in any crisis—but he was also thinking about the burn still lighting up his blood.

“As for me,” he confessed, “I’ve wanted to kiss you for a long time, Cecile. I still want to kiss you.”

For a moment, as she slapped the back of her hand against her mouth, he regretted his honesty—but the regret lasted for only a moment. Tonight, she had revealed that she trusted him, despite his past. If he lied about how he felt, he would destroy that fragile trust altogether.

“Don’t worry.” He mustered the last of his better nature and muscled to his feet. “I won’t let that happen again.”

Unless you want it to.

Cecile heard the words—not from Theo, now striding away in the darkness—but only in her head.

In dizzy confusion, she remembered that her husband—before he was her husband—had once stolen a kiss, too.

Her first kiss. It had been a starry night in the upper town of Quebec in mid-September, like now.

She remembered the gritty cobblestones beneath her boots.

She remembered her pulse racing as the man who had just proposed marriage after ten days of courtship seized her in the shadows.

She remembered the violence of his hard mouth and the unwanted and unsettling things the kiss theft did to her body and how her senses were clouded long after they broke apart and she ran back, confused, to her bed.

She’d figured, in her innocence, that was the way between men and women. So she’d chosen to cede to her husband’s authority in this matter—which led to the hell that followed.

But you know now, said a whispered voice in her head. Theo’s kiss wasn’t stolen or violent.

She swallowed hard, the pointed claws of fear threatening to scrape new furrows inside her.

Groping for clarity, she let herself admit that Theo hadn’t grabbed her.

He had given her a choice after the first touch of their lips.

She’d had more than a moment to say no, as better sense demanded.

It had been her choice to be kissed. But she hadn’t expected a simple kiss to so quickly stifle the memory of all those terrible years of her marriage—or allow her imprudent younger self to emerge in foolish glory.

That na?ve girl with the hungry heart had once yearned for the kind of gentleness that Theo offered, the kind of gentleness she wanted with an ache so fathomless that, at the memory, her feet arched within the confines of her boots.

She hauled herself to her feet, swaying, and stumbled down the bank toward the siren song of the water.

She didn’t bother to tug free the laces of her ash-smeared habit or even remove her boots.

Wading into the shallows until she stood thigh-deep in the river, she spread her arms and fell into it, letting the chill close over her head.

Holding her breath, she felt the eddying of the current pull her skirts about.

As she was cast in such darkness, floating weightless, her swirling thoughts slowed until she heard nothing but the pounding of her pulse in her ears.

She threw her arms out and tried to will the water to seep the heat from her trembling body, calm her heartbeat, and rock her until the tremors stopped.

Instead, the wicked current tugged at her braid, like Theo’s hand had when he’d cradled her head. The cool water brushed her lips and slid down her cleavage. Behind her closed eyelids, the outline of Theo’s face arose, still lit by starlight and gripped by banked passion.

She shot up, struggling to pull her feet from the suck of the river bottom.

Saints alive, a kiss could cause so much tumult.

She knew this already, and yet here she was again, pressing a hand against her chest as if holding up the rubble of the wall Theo’s kiss had shattered.

The barrier she’d erected to seal off the desperate, fanciful idea that a woman like her—an abandoned baby, a despised wife—could ever be cherished, protected, and loved.

She raised her face to the heavens and allowed herself to wonder, for the first time in forever, Am I a fool, to still hope?