“If I truly believed George was my son, I would have accepted him as such,” Damien stated with great seriousness. “Even as I believe he is not, I am still not returning him to the streets. I will find his rightful parents and decide what to do from there.”
“And if you cannot find them?” Caroline asked, watching him rise to his feet.
Damien’s hardened gaze glittered.
“You may find me incapable of love, and perhaps you are right. Even so, I would not cast an innocent child to the streets. I wouldneverdo that. I would keep him as my ward.”
Hurt laced through his deep voice, and Caroline chose to drop the subject. She watched him walk to the door, trying to figure out whether to say something else or just let him leave as he so clearly wanted to.
“I am glad it was just a nightmare,” Damien stated before she could decide. “And I am sorry to hear that you experienced so much pain from the people who were supposed to love and care for you.”
Caroline’s mouth dropped open at his words and sincere tone, and she watched as he picked up the busted-down door as if it weighed nothing.
“Just so you are aware, you do not have to worry about such punishments here. Youaresafe, Caroline.”
Her heart and head pulling her in opposite directions, she merely nodded.
“Try to get back to sleep,” he gently commanded, walking the door over to the frame. “I will have this fixed for you first thing in the morning.”
Still at a loss for words, Caroline again only nodded as Damien leaned the door by the frame, providing her at least a little privacy for the night.
Alone again and this time wide awake, Caroline mulled over her thoughts for a long time afterward. She was good at finding patterns in people’s behavior, but with Damien, the more she interacted with him, the less he seemed to have one.
She had thought him rough and violent, yet Damien had busted down the door to get to her because she had had a nightmare. He had listened to her story without judgment, and even as she accused him of being a poor father, he still had not argued or even raised his voice to her.
Still, she was wary. Even though her dream-self had sunk willingly into his arms, she was certain that she could not do so in reality. Damien had not garnered the reputation he had for no reason, and she could not let a few moments of tenderness allow her to forget that.
This is why I cannot let him touch me.
What she could do, she decided, as she finally drifted back to sleep, was try to create a paternal bond between him and George. Because no matter what he said, Caroline had not been entirely convinced that there was no possibility that Damien could be the boy’s father.
Chapter 15
“Dash it all,” Damien grumbled.
He struck a line through yet another sentence of his letter, and dipped his pen in the inkwell to begin again. He readied himself to rewrite the sentence, but as he took in the page, he paused. There were more crossed-out sentences than legible ones, making the letter look a mess. Realizing he had to start over, he crumpled the page in his hand and tossed it off his desk.
It was the fourth correspondence in the last two days that he had had to rewrite several times. For even though he told Caroline that his thoughts and attention were on finding George’s parents, the truth was that what he was truly focused on was her. The way she felt, the way she spoke. The way her eyes glittered with pure mirth when she let out that beautiful laugh the other day. The lust in her eyes when she saw him nude in the pond, even if she would never admit it.
A good man would have let that go and remained focused on her other features, but he was not a good man. Which was why, in the center of all those thoughts, lay the image of her at the pond.
That damned dress.
The water had rendered it all but useless, clinging to every curve of her body like a second skin and leaving precious little to the imagination. He had seen women in far less, and none of them had ever undone him the way she had in that soaked, modest, entirely respectable gown. It was maddening.
The contract. Always that blasted contract.
Last evening had started with him sparring with Paul, his valet, in the small practice room adjoining his chambers. He had pushed the man harder than was fair, he knew, but Paul was loyal enough not to complain and skilled enough to keep up for longer than most. Even so, by the time Damien finally dismissed him, Paul had been visibly flagging, and Damien had barely taken the edge off.
He had called for a cold bath to be drawn, thinking that if exercise would not help him, the freezing water would temper his desire. The bath, however, had never happened. Instead, her screams had.
He had no choice but to break down the door to ensure her safety, but the imagery of her in her bed was still haunting him. Flushed and devastatingly beautiful, her nightgown slipping from one shoulder, her dark hair loose around her face. He had sat beside her in the dark and listened as she shared things she had never told another soul, and all he had wanted was to pull her into his arms and not let go. He had reached for her twice without meaning to, and twice he had stopped himself.
He clenched and unclenched his hands presently, still feeling the quiet yearning to reach out and touch her even though the moment had long passed. His cock began to pulse and lengthenat the fantasy of kissing her plush lips again, of letting his hand move lower than her throat, to the soft swells of her breasts, and down that narrow waist of hers.
He had done his best to ignore it all at the time, but the moment he had put the door back up, those images of her wereallhis mind wanted to focus on. No matter how hard he tried to work on the letters to his men investigating George’s parentage, or how he tried to work out his growing lust with exercise, his need for her only continued to grow.
For over five years now, that small ember of desire for her had steadily grown into a raging flame, and she was theonlywoman he had wanted. Yet how could he tell her? After she had shared her opinion of him the other night, how was he to make her believe that it had been over five years since he had even looked at another woman? Let alone touched one.
