"Why not? We're alone, trapped by a storm that shows no sign of abating, in a library that might as well be on another continent for how isolated it is from the rest of the house. The servants have retired, no one knows you're still here, and I..." He paused, seeming to wrestle with himself. "I'm tired of pretending I don't want you."
"You don't want me," she corrected, though her heart was racing. "You want the idea of me, the distraction I provide from your orderly life. But when the storm passes and daylight returns, you'll remember all the reasons this is impossible."
"You're right," he said, surprising her. "In the morning, I'll remember that you deserve better than a bitter duke still wounded from his last romantic disaster. I'll remember that pursuing this would ruin your reputation and destroy any chance you have at a respectable future. I'll remember my duty, my position, my responsibilities."
He started to pull back, and Eveline felt something like panic rise in her chest. Without thinking, she grabbed his jacket with her good hand, holding him in place.
"But it's not morning," she whispered.
He went perfectly still. "Eveline..."
"It's not morning," she repeated more firmly. "It's night, there's a storm, we're alone, and I... I'm tired of being sensible. I've been sensible my entire life—choosing appropriate books, saying appropriate things, living an appropriate half-life that's slowly suffocating me. Just once, just tonight, I don't want to be appropriate."
"You don't know what you're asking."
"Don't I?" She tilted her chin up defiantly. "I've read those books you tried to hide from me. I know what happens between men and women when they stop being appropriate."
"Reading about it and experiencing it are vastly different things," he said, but his voice had roughened, and his eyes had darkened to the color of storm clouds.
"Then show me the difference."
The words hung between them for a moment, bold and dangerous and irretrievable. Then Adrian made a sound that was part groan, part surrender, and his mouth crashed down on hers with none of the tentative gentleness of their first kiss.
This was fire and desperation, weeks of denied want pouring into the contact. His tongue swept into her mouth with devastating skill, and Eveline heard herself make a sound she'd never made before—needy and eager and completely improper. Her good hand grabbed in his jacket, pulling him closer, while her injuredone throbbed in time with her racing pulse.
He kissed her like he was trying to consume her, like he could pour all his frustration and desire and confused emotions into this one perfect-terrible moment. She met him passion for passion, her inexperience more than compensated for by enthusiasm and the weeks of pent-up longing.
When he finally tore his mouth from hers, they were both breathing hard. But instead of pulling away, he trailed his lips along her jaw, finding that sensitive spot below her ear that made her gasp.
"Tell me to stop," he murmured against her skin, though his hands had settled on her waist, pulling her forward in the chair until she was pressed against him. "Tell me this is madness and we should maintain our distance."
"This is madness," she agreed breathlessly, tilting her head to give him better access as he explored the column of her throat. "We should absolutely maintain our distance."
"You're not very convincing," he observed, his mouth finding the hollow of her collarbone and doing something with his tongue that made her entire body arch toward him.
"Neither are you," she managed, though coherent thought was becoming increasingly difficult. "You keep telling me to make you stop, but you haven't actually stopped."
"I've got you," he murmured when another crash of thunder made her flinch, his arms tightening around her protectively. The gesture, tender amidst the passion, made something in her chest crack open.
"I once trusted too deeply," he said suddenly, pulling back to look at her with eyes that held old pain beneath fresh desire. "My previous betrothed made me believe I was worthy of love, then proved publicly and humiliatingly that I wasn't. She took my ability to trust, to hope, to believe that anyone could want me for more than my title and wealth."
"Then she was a fool," Eveline said fiercely, her good hand coming up to cup his face. "You're worth more than her betrayal, more than society's whispers, more than all the cold walls you've built around yourself."
"You don't know..."
"I know that you kept me on despite the gossip it would cause. I know that you laugh at my terrible jests about Roman breakfast foods. I know that you treat your servants with kindness when you think no one's watching. I know that you're brilliant and infuriating and wounded and wonderful, and any woman who couldn't see that didn't deserve you."
He stared at her for a long moment, something shifting in his expression from guarded to wondering. "How do you do that?"
"Do what?"
"See through every defence I've built, every wall I've constructed, straight to parts of me I'd forgotten existed?"
"The same way you see through mine," she replied softly. "Maybe that's why we're so dangerous to each other."
"You're dangerous to me," he agreed, then kissed her again with a thoroughness that made her forget her own name.
The storm raged outside, wind howling and rain lashing the windows, but inside the library, there was only heat and need and the crackle of the fire mixing with the sound of increasingly desperate kisses. Adrian's hands were everywhere; her waist, her back, tangling in her hair and sending pins scattering across the carpet.
