Connor’s thumb moved against her waist.“I willnae take what ye forbid.”
Violet opened her eyes. “Then what are ye doing?”
“Showing ye what ye keep running from.”
The danger was not his hands; that was clearer than anything. It was the fact that shetrustedthem. Every pause, every question, every place where he held back made her want to give him the answer he waited for.
She thought of a true marriage, a shared bed, children she had sworn she would never risk, and a future her old illness hadtaught her to distrust. Wanting him felt like stepping toward a life she had no guarantee of keeping.
A small blue cloth tucked into her sleeve slipped free and fell beside the desk. Jane’s cloth. She looked down at it, startled back into sense. Connor followed her gaze, and for a moment, neither of them moved. Then he bent, picked it up, and set it carefully beside the untouched whisky.
“John is still safe,” he said. “Ye ken that, do ye nae?”
The gentleness almost broke her more than the kiss had.
“Connor,” she said, half-warning and half-plea.
“That sounded like a rule.”
“It wasmeantto.”
“Well, ye will need to try harder.”
His mouth returned to hers, and the argument scattered. He lifted her onto the edge of the desk with impeccable strength, his hands steady even when his breath was not. Papers shifted beneath her, and a pin loosened somewhere near her sleeve and struck the floor with a smallclickshe should have cared about.
Connor’s hands were on her laces before she had finished deciding. She sat on the edge of the desk and let him undo thembecause her hands had stopped listening to her some time ago. The bodice gave, and cool air kissed her back, but then his palms replaced it.
Violet told herself she would put a stop to this shortly and believed it for approximately four seconds.
His mouth moved along her collarbone, and she felt the patience in it, the way he paused exactly where he should, as if he had considered this already and knew the order of things.
A letter crinkled beneath her, and she would have been mortified if she still had space for it. He gathered her dress.
“Connor.” His name left her lips without permission.
“I hear ye,” he said, then kissed up and down her throat.
His fingers found the inside of her thigh and moved with a slowness that shattered her ability to think in complete sentences. When he found the heat between her legs, she stopped thinking entirely.
She had expected him to rush it, but he did the opposite. Her hand curled around the edge of the desk. Outside, the fiddle climbed into something bright and celebratory, and she was aware of the guests the way she was aware of distant weather.
There, but not relevant.
Connor watched her face the entire time, and she didn’t know if she could bear it. His hand was working her from the inside, but his eyes… the brown in them was the real problem. They were fixed on her and reading her with a patience that should not have been more frightening than anything else he was doing.
She closed her eyes and decided to focus on his hand.
Her hips bucked against his hand before she caught them. He adjusted without comment, and somehow that made everything worse. The pleasure built slowly, but then his hands stilled, and he stepped back.
“Look at me,” he murmured.
Violet opened her eyes and immediately wished she had not. His face in the firelight was open in a way she had not seen before, and looking at it made everything sharper and considerably more dangerous.
He held her gaze and went down on his knees, and all the breath left her body at once.
His mouth touched the inside of her knee. She felt it travel upwards, and by the time he reached her thigh, she had lost count of her heartbeat. When his mouth found her center, she made a sound that the noise outside was not loud enough to cover, but she did not care.
He gave hernochance to care.
