Page 17

He stared, frozen, for a moment that stretched as if the clock had stopped on a still world.

The wild moan of the wind keened past the windows.

The candle capered, casting tempting shadows over her fair skin and the bone-white garment.

Her breasts rose and fell with her fast breath, and she curled her toes into the patterned carpet.

A shiver raked her frame, head to toe, and Hew rose from the bed without thinking.

“You’ll catch your death,” he growled. “Don’t you know there’s a storm out there?”

“I know. It’s wonderful. The heat was driving me mad.”

He caught up the shawl. God’s toes, it smelled of her, powder and flower and soft woman. Thoughts struggled to form through the haze of sensation conjured by her nearness. Skin. Hair the gold of old coins. The rose-petal pink of her lips. He could not seem to look at anything but her lips.

Stiffly, he tried to settle her shawl about her shoulders. She slipped her arms around his back, clasping her hands, and looked up at him, her face as open and bare as a painter’s canvas.

He couldn’t breathe. She shivered again, but she wasn’t cold. She was warm. So, so warm. Heat rose from her skin and curled toward him, carrying the scent of warm earth and clean rain.

Trying to haul words into his brain was like trying to push a wagon with a sixteen-pound cannon uphill. “You enjoy storms?”

“I adore them. This one makes me want to run about in it.”

The thought caught his breath, of this girl in his arms running into the roil of weather outside, hands lifted as if she might catch the rain, her lovely face full of laughter.

Ah, yes, she was in his arms. Hers still linked around his chest—he was afraid to move, lest she release him.

And his hands had come to her shoulders, holding the shawl, but found some reason to slide over her arms and cup her shoulder blades.

They fit in his hands like delicate wings, reminding him that he mustn’t hurt her.

He mustn’t kiss her, either. Must not . She wasn’t his.

“Anne,” he said, his voice scratching his throat. A small piece of logic pierced the fog in his brain, the haze whispering things he knew could not be true. “You can’t wish to be ruined.”

With her face tipped up, eyes locked with his, her mouth was within easy reach. He need only bend his head, the angle perfect, the most logical and inevitable of trajectories.

She moistened her lips, and his groin tightened. That was a trajectory he couldn’t allow himself to consider. How he could pull her against him with his two hands and fit her body to his, as easy as sliding a cartridge into the bore of a cannon.

“I cannot marry Calvin,” she said. “I cannot .”

Relief pounded him as if the fierce wind had thrust through the window to pummel his skin. Praise Venus. She didn’t want his brother. Hew felt like raising his head and howling to the moon he couldn’t see.

“Then don’t marry him,” he said. “Don’t.”

He shouldn’t be crowding her closer, pressing his palms against her upper back.

There must be space between their bodies.

There must be space for words, for logic.

She wasn’t a spoil of war that he could carry back to his cot.

She was Anne. Vixen. Venus. A nymph who tore apart boughs of myrtle with her hands.

Blood pulsed in his head. Not Calvin’s. Not Calvin’s . That meant she could be his. Hew’s.

“I said no,” she whispered. “They wouldn’t listen.”

Every line of her face was a study in softness.

The flutter of her thick lashes, darker than her hair color, dewed with tears.

The flare of her nostrils on that nose of hers, straight, strong, determined.

The trembling of her lower lip. He wanted to kiss every plump groove of that lip.

He wanted to suck it into his mouth and nibble.

He wanted his mouth on every part of her.

He struggled to keep the surge of his body at bay. “Then we make them listen,” he said.

He wasn’t certain what he meant. But he would do it. He would do whatever she wanted. He would do anything she asked.

“Kiss me,” she whispered, lifting her chin. Her lips grazed his jaw, and his entire body jolted with the rush of blood.

Yes. God, yes. He wanted to roar his triumph over the hills, releasing it like a clap of thunder. She chose him .

He almost did it. He almost closed his arms and hauled her against him and let his mouth fall upon her, devouring. He would kiss her until they both forgot their names.

But say he did kiss her. Then what? What came after?

Hewitt Vaughn never did anything in the moment. He always, always had a plan.

Carefully he cupped her shoulders, holding her in place. She seemed delicate, but she wasn’t. Firm muscle met his fingers. She might be slender, but she was strong.

“What?” he asked, searching her eyes with his gaze. “What are you asking me, Anne?”

“Kiss me,” she said stubbornly, reaching her mouth toward his.

This wasn’t right. She didn’t want him . She wanted … something else.

“And then what?”

Another growl of thunder shook the window casement. Hew swore it rattled the boards beneath their feet. Cold gusted into the room, and she shivered. Pink spots burned on her cheeks, pale as the linen of her shift.

“When they find me here,” she said. “In your room. Then I am ruined, and he can’t marry me. They can’t make me.”

The cold wrapped around Hew, digging through skin to bone. “Then what happens?”

His voice did not sound his own. His voice sounded to his ears as it had after the torture, when he’d stepped away from his body to watch, from a distance, what was happening to that heap of man-shaped flesh.

“I ruin you.” He shaped the words through lips that didn’t want to cooperate. “Then what?”

“Then I have to leave here,” she said softly, her words a thread of sound against the swirling storm. “And I am free.”

His hands felt numb and heavy, curled over her shoulders. She didn’t know him. She didn’t want him. She meant to use him to get something she wanted.

Wasn’t that what people did? Wasn’t that how the world worked? It was only dolts like him, Hewitt Vaughn, who thought there should be more.

Who assumed he didn’t deserve to have what he wanted anyway, so it didn’t matter if he were denied.

“You suppose I will simply … tumble you,” he said.

It wasn’t the word he thought of first, but she was a lady, a gentleman’s daughter.

And she was not a seductress, whatever else she was about; her hands hadn’t moved from their desperate clasp about his back.

He felt the weight of her arms, a slender rope hauling him like a fish into her net.

His voice really was not his own; it was some beast coming from deep inside him. “And then you will go about your merry way.”

She blinked. Her long lashes tangled, clinging together with their globes of tears. “Well, yes. Isn’t that how it works?”

For his brother, maybe. And for hers. Not for him.

He told himself to straighten his arms. Told himself again. After a moment, his limbs obeyed him. He pushed her away.

She didn’t let go, kept her hands stubbornly locked about his body.

“Anne,” he said gruffly. “Go back to your room.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“If you don’t want to marry my brother, then we will find a way to end it. I will help you.”

Idiot! the beast inside him roared. Take her! She’s yours.

She pushed herself close to him, breasts to his chest. Hew’s mind blanked of thought. Pure sensation took over. Craven need, choking his mind like the dust storms that whirled up out of the desert.

Yours! The wind roared, ramming the glass panes of the window.

“This is how to end it,” she said. “Kiss me.”

He wanted to do more than kiss her. He wanted to consume her. He wanted to raze her to the ground, and he wanted to lose his mind with her. Inside her.

To outrun, finally, the agony, and the humiliation, and the ghosts.

“What if you can’t walk away?” He kept his eyes on her face, because her breasts were too close, and he felt the outline of her through the thin linen of his shirt. “What if this doesn’t make you free?”

She hadn’t thought this through. She didn’t know what she was doing. She was an innocent; that much was obvious. She didn’t know the first thing about what two bodies could do to one another. The pleasure. The entire cessation of pain, and of fears for the future.

She shook her head, and a gold ringlet swayed against her shoulder. Hew was trapped in the gleam of her hair in the candlelight, against the soft glow of her skin. He could smell how soft she was.

“I cannot simply walk away. They can find me and make me come back. I need you to do this for me. Hewitt.” Her whispering his name untied something in him. The straight, clean lines of logic he usually thought in. “Help me. Please .”

“Ruin you.” The words were a dry crackle from his suddenly parched throat. He hadn’t been this thirsty in the hottest days at Acre. “When you don’t even know what it means.”

“I know I want it to be you ,” she said, and pressed her mouth to his.

He was lost.

He saw it all. Even in a storm, even in the midst of mind-crushing agony, Hewitt Vaughn was strategic. He could see the end of things. He saw—or thought he saw—the end of this.

It would end with his being torn apart. Again.

Anne Sutton pressed her mouth to his, and he surrendered.

She tasted of flower petals and honey. Her lips were the sweetest delicacy, smooth as custard, firm as a bonbon.

Her skin held the scent of myrtle. And she’d never kissed a man in her life.

She simply mashed her lips to his and held them there, and Hew held back a chuckle of delight.

She didn’t know how to kiss. He was her first.