Page 61 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

He pulled his away before skin could touch skin. “You were right. We should be prudent. What would be the point of anything else?”

“Must there be a point?”

“Anything else would be dragging down the moon.”

He pulled away his hand entirely then and shoved it into his pocket. Even for a stupid little game, his rejection of her touch hurt Aurienne more than she thought it would. She was seldom rejected.

Stung, she turned away, and made for the bedroom.

Mordaunt snatched her wrist.

Aurienne looked down. His fingers met around her wrist. His tacn touched her skin. He didn’t let her pull away.

She met his eye, combative, annoyed. “And what of the moon? Are we manhandling it now?”

Mordaunt’s eyes were as glassy as the surface of the lake. “I’ve no desire to run into an inevitable goodbye.”

He released her. With a shiver of seith, he shadow-walked away.

Aurienne felt that she had caused a deep hurt.

She stood in the silent night, alone on the balcony, uncertain whether this had been a strange quarrel or a stranger confession.

Aurienne brushed her teeth, slippedinto bed—a luxurious affair of silken sheets and pillows climbing into cumulus formations—and closed her eyes. Mordaunt wouldn’t, she supposed, be back tonight. He was probably off lurking, or stealing, or murdering.

Aurienne nevertheless left the balcony doors open.

She tossed and turned and wished that she was back in her own quarters at Swanstone, and not here, drunk and alone, in this romance-saturated suite where no romance could happen.

She had spoken of Amagris. She didn’t like doing that. She wished she hadn’t. To talk of her was to talk of grief. To think of love was to think of loss. Aurienne sifted through the ashes of memory, of nights in Amagris’ arms, on beaches with low waves unfurling, of wet silken kisses, of youth. And then abandonment. Warming her bed with an occasional body.

Her heart was an urn.

But why couldn’t Mordaunt be one of the occasional bodies?

No one would ever know. It had nothing to do with love.

The moon hung low on the horizon, almost too bright, just at the height of the balcony, as though she was keeping an eye on the goings-on within. A breeze blew the long gauzy curtains inward. They swept the floor in soft hisses, drew white whorls across the boards.

A shadow crossed the moon.

A figure appeared, broad about the shoulders, a half-tucked shirt billowing around him, moonlight haloing his hair.

How was he so fine in form and yet so unwholesome in nature?

Mordaunt came to stand at the side of the bed. Aurienne’s heart beat faster.

She looked up at him. Seeing that she was awake, he sat beside her. The mattress dipped.

He spoke in a whisper addressed to the night. “I don’t often want things I can’t have.” He pushed a hand through his hair and made it a silvery, disarrayed mess. “And when I want something badly, I don’t mind what I have to break, or steal, or kill to get it.”

He ran the back of a finger up Aurienne’s forearm. Fine paper wings fluttered in her veins.

“But now I’m faced with something that can’t be had, not by violence or artifice, nor by blood or blade or tainted money. And I hate it.”

And what was the thing that Mordaunt wanted but couldn’t have?Aurienne had felt it in the squeeze of his arms at the lake and saw it now in the pained silver gaze that wouldn’t meet hers. It was her.

He wanted her, and he hated her for it.