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His throat worked on a swallow, and his eyes glittered with something thoroughly primal and a bit intimidating.
“Would you like to talk?”
“No.”
“Then what—?”
“Fuck,” he said quite rudely. “That is what I want, Duchess.”
She gasped. “You are being deliberately crude.”
His left brow arched insolently.
“Are you so afraid of showing me what you feel, Edmond?”
Rage filled his eyes at what he must have perceived as an insult. In that moment she realized he was like the wounded tiger she had seen once in a menagerie, and the slightest imagined infraction might cause him to lash out. He had the power to wound her, deeply. She pushed such thoughts away, and directed her thoughts on what she instinctively knew, that she had the capacity to offer him comfort. When she’d cried for her mother, she had no one. Days of being alone in her room, crippled by the loss that pummeled her anew with each anniversary, she had been frightfully alone. And so had Edmond. He had been woefully alone with his pain…his unreasonable guilt.
She tugged off her riding bonnet and dropped it onto the floor. Then she bent and unbuttoned her boots in silence.
“What are you about, madam?”
“Is it not obvious? You said you wanted to f-fuck.” A blush heated her entire body.
“Such crass words from yours lips should not be enticing.” His voice was a hoarse rasp. “It is best you return to the main house.”
“You need me.”
“I need no one.”
“Perhaps that has been the problem, my love, you’ve never had a shoulder to cry on, arms to hold you when you rage.”
Shock flared in his eyes, and she frowned. She stiffened.
My love…
She waited with a pained breath for him to acknowledge her slip. He did nothing, but stare with shivering intensity.
&
nbsp; “Get on the bed and await me.”
“I think not, my duke.” She would offer him the comfort of her body, but she would not allow him to dictate the terms in which she rendered her arms.
She strolled over to him, noting that he braced himself. The rain started in earnest and he shifted his eyes to the small window to their left, peering outside in the dark. The drops slapped against the windowpane like hardened pebbles. When he shifted back his regard to Adel, her throat tightened.
“I can hear her cries with the wind.”
“And what do they say?”
His expression shuttered, but she glimpsed an edge of pain and fury in his eyes that had her mouth drying.
“She berates me for not saving her and our son.”
Adel stood on tiptoe and kissed his mouth. He trembled. Yet he kept his hands fisted at his sides, not touching her.
She pulled her lips from his slowly. His face hadn’t lost the strained look. “And what do they say now?”
He shook his head. “When you touch me…nothing else seems to matter.”
