Page 80 of The Duchess Curse

She dropped her shift and stepped into the tub, turning off the water and sinking into it up to her chin. “Don’t leave.”

His shoulders rose then fell, and he turned back around, found a shadowed wall and leaned against it. He’d not lit any candles, and there was only one window high up—circular stained glass.

She couldn’t see him very well, but the glamour was gone. He was large, his black clothes doing more than the shadows to hide him. But a bolt of green light from the window above fell over his eyes. They were the greenest thing she’d ever seen. As green as spring, as green as things that had been dead coming back to life.

He stayed there, silent, as she bathed, and silent, as she stepped from the tub and rubbed herself dry with a clean linen. He only moved after she slipped into her wrapper and made for her bedchamber. When he was behind her, at his bedchamber door, one single word from her lips stopped him.

“No.” She looked over her shoulder.

He looked over his.

The darkness stretched between them, shadows turned green and gold like the stained glass above them.

“I need you,” she said. And then she stepped through the doorway into her bedchamber and wasn’t surprised when he was behind her, then in front of her, pulling the blankets back just before she slipped beneath them and stretching out beside her on the bed without a sound.

She slept. Because she needed to and because she looked forward to what came after she awoke.

17

MORE TORTURE

When Guin next opened her eyes, the darkness was of the gray-blue kind that coalesces in the early morning hours just before dawn. That meant she’d slept through the day and the night and right into the next day.

She stretched, feeling better than she had, except… Memory was coming back to her. She’d asked Bran to stay and watch her bathe, she’d asked him to join her in bed. And if she were really quiet and held her breath… Yes… she could hear the steady inhalations and exhalations of a deeply sleeping man.

He was still here.

Gently, she turned around, and there he was, curved on his side, facing her, one arm under his head, the other stretched out toward her. He lay on the very edge of the bed, as far from her as possible, wearing only his trousers and untucked shirt. He’d been fully dressed when he’d climbed in bed with her. He must have undressed after she’d fallen asleep, then rejoined her.

She inched closer so their knees, both bent toward the center of the bed, almost touched. He was entirely himself in the dark—black hair and lashes, slashing white scars and large, veined hands. One was turned palm up, and she pressed her finger gently into its padded center. Then she traced one line striking across the top of it, another that slanted toward his wrist, and there she paused, circling her thumb lightly around his pulse before traveling up his corded tendons to the bulk of forearms mostly hidden by his shirtsleeves.

His cheeks were rough with dark stubble, his generous lips slightly parted, and she took her explorations to them, testing the stubble beneath her fingertips, outlining the curve of his lower lip. She’d never seen him like this—quiet and still and vulnerable. She’d woken up like this after the fight in the alley, when she’d discovered his deception, but she’d been too angry to discover him, too, the real him she was only now coming to know. Not simply a guard with a single name. Not a duke with a hidden visage and high ideals.

A man who straddled light and dark, who was neither and both at the same time.

She explored the sleekness of the scar slashing down one side of his face. It cut a path through his stubble, resisting it. He’d come to her with that scar. Perhaps she’d ask him one day how he’d gotten it.

So many secrets. He’d kept them from her. She’d kept them from him. Her parents… they too had kept information in family mausoleums. They were all locked in little boxes, alone, clutching their keys tightly so no one else could get in.

She didn’t have to give away her key, just… slip into another’s box now and then.

As she reached for a lock of hair that had fallen over Bran’s temple, his eyes opened.

He didn’t flinch to find her watching him. He merely laid there, barely breathing, letting her fingertips touch their fill. When she drew her fingertip down his nose and tapped the tip of it, the corner of his lips bounced upward, shaping his mouth into the smallest smile she’d ever seen on his beautiful, scared face. Downward, she kept going, over the bump of his lips, the cliff of his chin, and down the strong length of his neck. The chest exposed by the open V of his shirt was hard and dusted with dark hair, and she avoided it, rounding to draw a line over his upper shoulder and down his arm, back to his palm where she rested, pressing her own palm—smaller, paler—against his.

He moved without anything in his eyes hinting that he would, closing his hand over hers and lifting it to his mouth. He kissed her fingertips. He kissed her knuckles. He flipped her hand and kissed the center of her palm, and it felt like he’d found a lever to press to open her box so he could step inside. But he only kept scattering kisses across her hand, his tongue darting out for the briefest taste of her increasingly erratic pulse.

Surprising her voice sounded so steady as it drifted through the quiet between them. “I want you to—” What? Make love to her? There would be none of that. Sleep with her? That too tame. She’d slept who knew how many hours, and now she needed action. Coitus—too clinical. Fucking? Yes, she supposed that was the right way to say it. What she wanted was raw and passionate, a meeting of bodies she’d never be able to have with another man. She could have it with Bran, though. Because he’d betrayed her. She could never love him. That made him safe. “I want you to fuck me. I want you to make me forget everything except for the places our bodies join.”

His hand banded around her wrist, and he yanked her against him, her arms caught between them, her palms flattened against his massive chest. He was a rock, but his heart was a horse, running breathless to a place she couldn’t see.

He dipped his head to kiss her, and she turned, his lips hitting her cheek instead. This was not about kisses. She would show him what this was about.

She tangled her hand in his shirt and tugged as she pushed to her knees. He sat, muscles flexing, and she pulled his shirt off over his head, sent it floating off into the air.

Now she couldn’t breathe because there was so much skin and even more muscle and it was ordered into little lines down his torso that made her want to touch and taste, that made her hot and willing between her legs. But even more arousing than the sight of him was knowing that he knew well how to use all that muscle, that he possessed a deadly grace that he exerted for her. He was a well-made machine, and his cogs and mechanisms were tuned to her protection.

She shivered.