“And perhaps you had your reasons, Gideon. But you made the decision alone.” Her eyes flashed. “That is what you do not get to do,” she said, quieter now. “Not with something that happened between us.”
Between us.
The words hit like a slap.
Because she was right.
And Beatrice? She did not blush. She did not retreat. Only watched him with that unnerving courage of hers, as though she had had quite enough of his waffling and simply wanted to speak the truth. “Would that have been such a terrible thing?” she asked. “Kissing me?”
“No.” He answered automatically.
Her lashes flickered. “Then… why?”
And suddenly, looking into eyes the color of bluebells, so close he could smell the sweetness of her skin, all the arguments he’d decided on… deserted him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The street narrowed around them.
“What does that mean?” she pressed.
It meant…
Gideon closed the distance between them and pulled her into his arms.
He should not. He knew it even as he did it.
“It means,” he said, his voice low, “Something’s changed.”
Her hands were on his coat. “What changed?”
“This.”
The kiss should have been brief. A mistake committed and ended in the same breath. But she pressed against him, sweet and strong, and every reasonable thought he possessed went out of his head.
His hand splayed over her back. Hers tightened at his lapel.
She made a small sound against his mouth, and that sound… it undid him.
He deepened the kiss.
There on his doorstep for anyone to see, Gideon kissed her as though every rule he had ever lived by had already been broken.
THIS
She should push him away.
She didn’t.
Beatrice kissed him back.
And in that moment, all the restless thoughts. All the questions. All the aching uncertainty that had finally driven her from her bed and into the pale morning street simply… vanished.
There was only Gideon.
His mouth. His hands. The rough sound he made when her fingers slid into his hair.
He pulled her closer, and she went gladly, rising onto her toes to reach him better as though this—this—was what she had been meant for all along.
