“I know perfectly well that you are a gentleman. You will leave an absolute chasm of space between us. You always do.”
Oh.She likely should not have said that aloud either. The fact that she was fully aware of just how much distance he always kept between them.
“I am not—” He made a vague, helpless gesture at the makeshift bed. “I am not a small person. I would take up the entire bed.”
“You are exaggerating.”
“I am not.”
“Kazrian.”
Another silence in which he did not respond. The rain continued to drum against the window. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rolled.
“Please?”
She heard him exhale a long, low grumble. He sat forward and began to remove his shoes, and the action, which signaled that he had given in, that he would be lying beside her within moments, sent something hot and dizzying spiraling through her chest and all the way to her fingertips.
Stop it, she instructed herself.This is nothing. It is a pile of cushions and two people who need to lie down for the night. THAT IS ALL.
He set his shoes beside hers near the door, moved to the makeshift bed, and waited at the foot of it, as though the cushions might offer him some alternative arrangement if he stared at them long enough.
“Oh, for—” A laugh escaped her, high and nervous and not entirely under her control. “Would you just lie down?”
He did not move immediately. She had the sense that he was watching her, could feel the weight of his gaze, but she could make out little more than the outline of him in the dark. She was glad of it. She was not entirely sure what her own face was doing.
“Very well,” he said eventually. “But I want it noted that I objected.”
“Noted,” Lucie said.
She lay back down and closed her eyes, her traitorous heart leaping wildly in her chest. And as she felt the cushions shift beneath his weight, she decided that this storeroom, this night, this man lying down beside her in the dark, was going to be the absolute undoing of everything she had ever told herself she did not feel.
Chapter Twenty-Four
She hadno idea what she had asked of him. No doubt she thought his reluctance had been a matter of propriety. And it was, in part. But the truth beneath that, Kazrian knew, was far less noble. It would be torture, pure torture, to lie so near to her in the dark and not touch her. Not reach for her hand, not turn toward her, not do any of the thousand things his body had been begging him to do for weeks.
She had not the faintest notion.
He lowered himself onto the cushions beside her, every movement careful and controlled, and lay on his back with his arms pressed to his sides like a man laid out for burial. The ceiling was dark above him. The rain went on. Somewhere outside, the wind shifted, sending a scatter of drops against the glass in a brief, insistent flurry. And beside him, close enough that he could hear each breath, each small shift of fabric, was Lucie.
He had been so careful. In the two weeks since the confessions neither of them had mentioned again—You felt forced; That is not what happened—he had kept a careful distance between them. In addition to it being the proper thing to do, he was wholly determined that he would never make her feel as Henry Stratton had. He had seen her step away from that man’s touch, swift and stiff. He would sooner cut off his own hand than see her flinch from his.
But there had been moments. The chain at the back of her neck, his fingers brushing her skin, her breath held still. And the stool, her body tipping, his hands closing around her waist before thought could intervene. And in both of those moments, everything in him had ached to pull her closer rather than step away.
And now, after all those weeks of measured restraint, she had insisted he lie down beside her, and his resolve had crumbled, and this was going to be the longest night of his life.
Torture, he thought, staring into the dark.That is precisely what this is.
“Kazrian?”
His breath caught. He cleared his throat. “Yes?”
“Thank you. For coming tonight. I hope it did not cause you too much trouble, what with Balthazar racing through your home, dripping wet and?—”
“It was no trouble at all.” His voice had come out slightly too controlled, too level, the voice of a man concentrating very hard on the precise mechanics of speech. “Balthazar was most persuasive.”
A small sound from her that might have been a laugh. “He must have looked a fright. Soaking wet.”
“Indeed. Though I suspect he was considerably more aggrieved by how long it took me to understand him than he was by the rain. I confess I do not yet read him with your fluency.”
