Page 46 of The Hellion is Tamed
“Is going to find me and return me to my time. Someday, hewill. He has no value, no purpose, other than this venture. You should take what time we have together, you foolish man.”
“Over my dead body,” Simon ground out between clenched teeth, his expression harsher than she’d ever seen it. A legitimate ruffian, someone to fear. This was the forbidding man he’d have been if he’d stayed in St Giles. If the lads in Tower Hamlets had faced him looking like this, they would’ve scampered into the night.
No fancy education or first-rate clothing could hide this brutality.
Crossing to him, she grabbed his wrist and squeezed as hard as she could to make him understand because it seemed he didn’t. “If it comes to that, I leave. If it comes toanyof your family, anyone in the League, being put in danger to save me, I return to 1802 on my own, do you hear me? I’ll be gone like a vapor in the night before I put anyone besides myself at risk.”
He whispered a vile curse and whirled, yanking open the door, sending it into the wall with a dull thump.
Taking two steps for his one, she pursued him down the conservatory aisle, feeling his walls rising, brick by brick. How could she make him trust her? She’d only leave if it meantprotectinghim. She’d never leave otherwise. But her words seemed like another abandonment, a vulnerable juncture for the boy inside him.
Even if he didn’t realize it.
Halting abruptly, his gaze roamed the space until she realized what he searched for. With a sigh, she pointed to the far corner. “There, beneath the orange tree.”
Crouching, he snatched the earl’s cufflink from the floor. Then rising, bumping into her because she’d stepped so close, he slapped it into her hand. “You can return it at Epsom. Say you found it in the grass and mooned over it for days. Felt closer to him, having something of his with you. Tucked under your pillow with one of those roses I’m guessing he sent.”
“You daft man.Yourgloves are tucked under my pillow! A blood-stained handkerchief you gave me weeks ago, too, if you must know.”
He blinked, processing this information as a man typically does,slowly.
She fisted her hand around the cufflink until the rounded edge bit into her skin. “After this, us,that”—she hiked her thumb over her shoulder, toward the utility room—“you’d send me off with Hollingmark? I should punch you in the nose. Or like my granny taught me, kick you in the nethers.”
He opened his mouth, closed it. Rolled his shoulders. Exhaled. Chewed his bottom lip until she feared he’d have it bleeding. His beautiful bottom lip. “Emma.” His hands went out in a gesture of surrender, then dropped to his side. “If I were a writer, and I started composing my thoughts during my last life and continued straight through to my next, I still wouldn’t have enough time to put into words all I feel for you.”
Her heart dropped, her throat closing around her feelings. This was love, then, wasn’t it? Awkward and halting, shy and reluctant, but so lovely. All Simon. “Thenbewith me. It’s easy.Bewith me. It’s what we’ve known we wanted since, well, since forever. I’m not asking for marriage, even, as I couldn’t care less about a silly slip of paper. And I have no family to care for me.”
With a snarl, he swept his hand over the shelf housing a variety of earthen pots, sending them to the floor with a clatter. Pieces of pottery danced around her feet, pinging off her slippers and her stockinged ankles. “I don’t know howtobewith anyone. You don’t understand the corner I’ve painted myself into with you. How unfit I am to give you what you need. What I had to do to survive before Julian twisted me up inside.Hedoesn’t know. Finn, whom I’ve told my darkest secrets, who knows me better than anyone, doesn’t know. Not everything.” He glanced over his shoulder, and she caught the ominous flicker in his eyes. The chill hit her, racing toe to cheek like an icy bath. He wasn’t going to let her in. That’s what his expression said.Stay out. “I wake in the night with terrors. St Giles, the slums, right there, beneath me. Bloodied hands, shouts no one was there to hear. Not to mention the haunts, who arenevergoing to leave me, Emma, not for one moment leave me. I walk into a room; they walk in behind me. Who but one imprisoned in such a world would want that?”
Affection was a soothing balm. Being afraid to love her was much better than not beingableto love her. Ornotloving her, which she didn’t think was the case. “You’re their savior; that’s why they come to you. They need you; they believe in you. You’re part of their journey. A safe part, I think. Maybe you’re the safe part of mine.”
He kicked a shard of pottery into the corner, his gaze anywhere but on her. “I don’t want them.” His tortured exhale rang through the conservatory, off the rows of polished glass panes. Shoving his messy hair from his eyes, his attention finally circled back to her. The devastation highlighted on the handsome, hard planes of his face frightened her, the sunlight she stood in unable to thaw her chilled heart. “And maybe I don’t want you.”
“You’re going to let me go,” she whispered, her mind clouding with the knowledge. She couldn’t grasp that this mighttrulybe his intention. Even after their spats and battling, that he might let her go. “There are…” She pointed to the house, indicating the console table in the foyer currently displaying her popularity. “Invitations, a dozen of them this morning alone. A ball at a titled gent’s somewhere in the country, a musicale a baroness of whatever is only inviting me to because she thinks I’m a scandal in the making. They smell something different about me, this pack of city wolves, yet they can’t quite figure it out. Still, having a duke for a cousin trumps all, I’m seeing. I have a choice, Simon, genuine choices aside from you.”
He tilted his head to stare through the domed glass ceiling, his hand snaking in his pocket and pulling a farthing free. She’d wondered how long it would take for him to startthatup. “Then pick. Roll the dice, Dark Queen of the West End. Will it be an earl, a viscount or a marquess? Centuries of near-royal blood for the taking.” He slapped his hands together, his heated gaze meeting hers, the coin, for the first time a play she could witness, sliding into the edge of his sleeve. “But whoever you choose, you bloody well better choose to stay in 1882 with them.”
His fear was vaster than she’d estimated. Shock was the current emotion racing through her, but rage trickled in like rain through a split in the ceiling. She was willing to unleash the storm on him,oh, was she.
Sunlight glinted off the coin as it passed through his fingers. “And just so you know, I’ll take care of Hargrave.”
“He’smyproblem,” she returned, rage bleeding into her words.
Simon retreated two paces, perching his bum on a bench that looked as shaky as the one they’d destroyed in the utility room. If only he didn’t look so attractive, a professorial swindler, standing there in a burst of light usually reserved for nourishing citrus trees. Drawing her even as she backed away because he’d pushed her. “He’s the League’s problem. You’re one of us now. You have been since you showed up in Oxfordshire and had Delaney’s mount tossing her into the dirt. It isn’tmyproblem if you’re just catching on to this fact. You came tous, remember?”
“I apologized to the duchess straight-off for that unfortunate event. I was only trying to get the Soul Catcher. Desperate. Out of options, time running out. Remember those things, do you, you bounder?”
He laughed then, lowered his head and let the rusty sound roll from his lips. Lips wounded fromherministrations. His shirt collar wrinkled from her ferocity. His hair a disaster because she’d tangled her fingers in the strands as he’d thrust inside her.
Made love, though not likely what he’d call it.
It had been love. Itwaslove.
“I’d buy tickets to see the Breslin version of an apology. God in heaven, I would.”
“Are you trying to hurt me, Simon?” she asked as the wail of the duchess’s children approaching the conservatory rolled over them like a wave. “Or are you trying to make me so furious I never wish to speak to you again? Is this reluctance because Iseeyou, as you see me? We’re alike, the two of us, in an exceptional way that terrifies you.”
His coin hit stone, his eyes blazing when they met hers. “I’m trying tosaveyou. From me. And,yes, youdobloody terrify me. My choices when I’m with you terrify me. As it is, I’ve had you three times without taking sensible precautions. You could be carrying my child this very minute, Emma. Have you thought about that?”