He was different, she realized belatedly.
In the three years since they’d last seen each other, his physical appearance had altered only slightly. A small line in his brow that hadn’t been there before. Hair that was slightly longer. But his demeanor... his demeanor had changed. If she’d thought him cold when they’d parted ways in Connecticut, it was nothing compared to what he was now.
Frozen.
Dominant.
Unforgiving.
“I am... sorry.” The word stuck in her throat. A bone that refused to go down even when she swallowed. “I didn’t know you would go to such great lengths to find me. I assumed you would search for a little while, and then—”
“And then what?” The newspaper fell to the carpeted floor when he tipped forward, his muscular body suddenly making the large interior of the coach feel drastically smaller. “And then I would resign myself to being married to a ghost and give up?” His jaw clenched. “You are mywife, Abigail. We took vows. Vows that I understand now to be meaningless to you, but they are not to me. Our agreement is not meaningless tome. You collected on your end. It is time for me to collect on mine.”
She wanted to ask him what he meant, but she was too afraid of what the answer might be. Shoving her chin back into her scarf, she returned to staring out the window as Stephen picked up his paper and they resumed their brittle silence.
*
Somewhere in themiddle of their journey, Abigail fell asleep. It began with a slight head nodding. A fluttering of lashes. And finally, to Stephen’s unwilling amusement, a soft symphony of feminine snores.
Against his better judgment, he leaned toward her, his gaze drawn to the freckles that still dusted her nose and cheeks in a random pattern of tawny gold flecks. When his hand tingled, his fingertips magnetically drawn to trace short lines between the dots, he crossed his arms and scowled.
While Abigail may havelookedas innocent as an angel with her lashes fanning out across the top of her cheeks in a spill of inky soot, he was no longer fooled by her act as he now recognized her for the deceptive creature that she was. A doctorin sheep’s clothing, such as it were. A seductress who agreed to one thing even as she plotted something entirely different.
Dammit, if she’d only told him that she planned to disappear, that she no longer had any interest in honoring their agreement, that she valued her independence more than her word, he would have understood.
Maybe.
But she hadn’t even given him the courtesy of a chance... and therein dwelled his greatest vexation. Her dishonesty. Her deceit. Her blatant disregard for his time or emotions.
He had lov—
He hadlikedher a great deal.
But now that like had turned to loathing, and he wasn’t sure if it could—if he even wanted it to—turn back around.
When her teeth gave a small, involuntary chatter of cold, he gritted his own and removed his greatcoat. Stretching forward on braced thigh, he spread the heavy garment across her lap, the back of his hand brushing against her arm. She stirred slightly, her little nose crinkling, and would have likely drifted right back to dream had the coach not chosen that inopportune moment to strike a rut in the road.
Stephen swallowed a curse as he was thrown off balance, his shin enduring the brunt of it, and was there anything other than a year-long betrayal that hurt worse than hitting that bloody bone on a hard surface?
Catching himself mere inches above Abigail, his left palm sinking into the cushion beside her thigh whilst the right made a print on the cold glass window, he steadied his weight before beginning a slow, careful retreat back to his own seat. And he likely would have made it without his estranged wife being any the wiser had her eyes, drenched in shades of evergreen, not suddenly sprung open and then widened even farther at the sight of him looming over her.
“S-Stephen,” she stuttered, her voice husky from sleep and her gaze flickering with confusion. “What are you doing?”
“You looked cold, the carriage rocked, and I—to hell with it.”
He kissed her.
How could he not?
With her crooked spectacles, her tousled hair, and the rich velvet in her throat, she was irresistible. It would have been easier to stop breathing than to stop his mouth from covering hers. The time spent apart may have fostered his anger, but it had done nothing to diminish his ardor. He desired her now every bit as much as he had then. Maybe even more so, for was a man not hungriest when he had been denied sustenance?
Kissing Abigail again, tasting her again, touching her again, was like drawing a long breath after being trapped underwater. A combination of passion and desperation that fueled his blind lust for her as he went to his knees, torso contorting within the confines of the moving coach in an effort not to flatten her smaller frame beneath his considerably larger one.
After a heartbeat of stiffness, Abigail kissed him back, her small hands tentatively resting on his shoulders before digging into the nape of his neck when their lips parted and their tongues met, swirling in a dance that was both old and new, familiar and foreign.
A bolt of need, as potent and powerful as a lightning strike, shot through him when he swallowed her moan, the taste of her own lust an elixir of sweetness that trickled down his throat like warm, sticky honey. He shot upward, his palms slamming down on either side of her head as he deepened the kiss, taking it somewhere decadent. Somewhere dark. Somewhere fervor blended into fury until the lines were indistinguishable and heaven threatened to crash into hell.
The carriage jostled again and this time he leaned into the friction, hands gliding down her voluptuous frame to cup hersoft, round breasts as his mouth went to her neck, kissing below the crescent of her earlobe as her fingers tightened around the ends of his hair and tugged, the tiny motion setting off an entirely new wave of passion.
