Page 106 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

His breath caught at the sight. Her hair tumbled and danced, joyous in the wind.

He drew her wrists down. His palms slid against her skin in a long caress until he held her hands in his. Once again, Aurienne felt herself on the edge of the something beyond right and wrong, or good and evil.

The storm raged. They stood hand in hand like lovers. Grave and sweet. Beautiful and strange. He brushed a strand of hair from her face. There again was that gentleness that she considered more attractive than power.

He drew a strand of her hair between his fingers. “I can feel again, thanks to you.” He brushed a fingertip against her cheek. “It’s a bit addictive.”

His touch left a little glow behind, equally addictive. She wanted more of it. Her breathing came fast and light.

Mordaunt’s eyes were soft. The soul of that white rose was in him, of imperfection reaching for better, of goodness in spite of, of the courage to grow out of the mire. His countenance was gentled by yearning.

Aurienne knew that it was anatomically impossible, but gods, she felt her heart was about to explode. For so long she had controlled, she had forced her feelings down into their compartments. She had pressed her heart away until it had hardened and dried up.

But she had been wrong. It had not dried up.

It had become chrysalis.

Now it burst forth, all silken flutters. The butterflies escaped containment.

She wanted to kiss him.

Normally the past and the future squeezed so hard at her that there was no present; it was extinguished between what was, behind, and consequence, ahead. She drew his face to hers. Now she was in the present.In the moment, drowning in the bliss of it. Lightheaded and faint, she was hardly conscious of anything other than his lips barely brushing hers.

The butterflies exploded in triumph.

Happiness was there, if she would only reach for it.

She had thought that he would simply take the kiss, as he had taken all his life. But he did not. He waited. He confirmed that latent nobility she knew was in him. Chivalry. Self-denial. Decency.

His eyes were half-closed, as of one enjoying a pleasurable torment.

“I want to be irresponsible,” said Aurienne. “I want to kiss you.”

His eyes opened and caught her in quicksilver.

“You like to collect rare things,” said Aurienne.

“Paradoxically, I wish your kisses weren’t so rare,” said Mordaunt. “I wish they were as recklessly abundant as the blossoms on that laburnum.”

“Wouldn’t you tire of them?”

“Impossible.”

Aurienne felt, again, that sense of impending doom, of fate’s tug, of lightning about to strike. The lightheadedness threatened to push her into a swoon. Her heart did not beat; it leapt and thudded and churned.

He pressed his forehead to hers. Their wet hair tangled. He sighed against her lips.

Rain and hail whipped at the earth in constellations, trigonometries, truths writ in water, truths writ in ice.

Something drew them together, fate or souls or hearts; whatever it was, she wanted to be whole with him, she wanted them pleated within each other, dashed together like the hail and the rain.

She pressed her mouth to his.

He had been right: neither of them was destined for an ordinary sort of love.

She tasted rain and the sweetness of strawberries. He rested a forearm against the wall behind her. She ran her hands through his hair andpulled him closer. The kiss turned passionate. She was alight—bones, nerves, flesh, skin, all awakened. She was bliss-filled. Endorphin-drunk. Kissing him as hard as he kissed her. Dizzy, tremulous, alive; she hadn’t been alive until now.

She tried to capture it all in memory, the scent of the storm, the crash and the roar, and him, in his steaming shirt, tasting of late summer—