“Time,” Augusta echoed. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.” She thought of the month since her father’s arrest, the initial shock, the painful adjustment to a world where the ground had shifted beneath her feet. “Though some wounds never quite heal. They merely… scab over. Become bearable.”
“Until something breaks them open again,” Hudson agreed. His eyes met hers, dark and steady and suddenly terribly vulnerable. “Like a conversation overheard at a ball. Or a question about a parent’s death.”
The statement hung between them, laden with meaning.
Augusta’s breath caught in her throat. He had shared his pain with her, and now he was asking, without quite asking, for something in return. Not the details of her father’s crimes or her own narrow escape. Those he already knew. But the smaller, more intimate truth: that she understood what it meant to love someone who had failed you. To carry the weight of their choices. To wonder, in the darkest hours of the night, whether you could have done more. Been more. Saved them from themselves.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Like that.”
“Cassie doesn’t remember much of it,” he sighed. “The fire, I mean. She was too young. Sometimes I think that’s a mercy. Other times…” He shook his head. “The mind protects itself. Creates its own version of events. Her version has me as the hero, of course, charging through flames to rescue her from certain death. The reality was considerably less dramatic. I was simply the only adult in reach when she needed one.”
“The only one who came,” Augusta corrected gently. “There’s a difference.”
Hudson’s eyes met hers, dark and searching. “Is there?” he asked. “I’ve often wondered whether I could have reached my father’s rooms if I’d gone back. Whether he might have survived if I’d been faster or smarter or simply less concerned with my own survival.”
“No,” Augusta said, the word emerging more fiercely than she had intended. “You can’t think that way. You can’t tortureyourself with might-have-beens. You saved Cassie. You kept your promise to her. That’s what matters.” Her hand had moved without conscious thought to cover his, their fingers intertwining with an ease that surprised them both. “That’s all that matters.”
For a long moment, they stood in silence, hand in hand, the space between them charged with something Augusta couldn’t name but felt in every inch of her body.
Hudson’s eyes never left her face, searching, questioning, looking for something she wasn’t certain she could give.
“The world is chaos. People are unpredictable. And sometimes…” His breath caught. “Sometimes the thing you want most is the thing you can least afford to have.”
Augusta’s heart was hammering against her ribs, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps that she was certain were audible in the sudden stillness.
She held her breath as Hudson’s hand moved to brush a strand of hair from her face. The touch was so light that she might have imagined it were it not for the trail of heat it left across her skin.
“Augusta,” he said, the sound of her name on his lips sending a shiver down her spine. “I’ve tried to keep my distance. To honor the boundaries between us. But God help me, I can’t…” He stopped, his throat working visibly.
Before she could move or speak, he released a loud breath.
“With you, I’ve had to fight every base instinct I possess,” he confessed, his expression darkened with raw hunger. “I have been ruthless with my desires, Augusta. I don’t beg, and I don’t wait. Yet here I am, about to fall on my knees for a taste of you. I’ve tried to play the gentleman, but the truth is, I want to devour you. I want to leave my mark so deeply upon you that you’ll forget any other man ever existed. Tell me to stop now, or I swear to God, I am going to make you come undone… just for me.”
Augusta couldn’t have spoken if her life depended on it. Her breath caught in her chest, her heart hammering wildly against her ribs as she looked up at him, completely trapped by his towering frame and the sheer, intoxicating gravity of his words. Her pulse fluttered frantically at the base of her throat, her lips parted.
Heavens, she wanted him.
“Yes.” The word tumbled past her lips before she could stop it.
“Good,” he murmured.
With a sound that was half groan, half surrender, his arms came around her, one hand cradling the back of her head while the other settled on the small of her back, drawing her closer until she was pressed against the solid warmth of his chest.
His mouth crashed onto hers with a hunger that made her dizzy, demanding, desperate, as though he had been starving for this and only this since the moment they met.
Augusta surrendered to the kiss gladly, her hands finding their way to his shoulders, then higher, to tangle in the hair at the nape of his neck. It was softer than she had imagined, and the small sound he made when her fingers tightened there sent a pulse of heat straight to her core.
They broke apart reluctantly, both of them breathing hard, their foreheads pressed together as though neither could bear to put that much distance between them.
Something dark and hungry flashed in Hudson’s eyes. “You must be certain,” he said, his shoulders rigid with tension. “You have to know that this is something you want.”
“It is,” Augusta breathed. “I want this. I want you.” She laid a hand on his arm, feeling the muscle tense beneath her palm. “Unless you’ve changed your mind?”
“God, no,” he said, his voice rough. “I’ve lain awake night after night imagining this. Imagining you. Imagining us.”
An intense hunger flashed in his eyes before he bent to capture her mouth with his again. His hands settled on her waist, then slid higher, tracing her ribs through the thin fabric of her dress before coming to rest just below the swell of her breasts.
“I have been going out of my mind thinking about this. I want to taste every single drop of your pleasure, Augusta. I want to feel you trembling against my mouth until you have absolutely nothing left to hide from me,” he murmured against her lips. “Don’t you dare hold back. Let me hear how much you need this.”
