Page 51

“So where are you taking me, then?” she asked suddenly, turning on him. “If not to see Barnard.”

“I-I wanted to ask if you were well.” Words were coming with even more difficulty than usual. “Tonight’s been an ordeal.”

“You couldn’t question me by the carriage?”

His jaw tensed. “I wasn’t sure you’d confide the truth, with everyone else around.”

She laughed, high and cynical, and he suddenly wished she’d kept her gaze from him—it was red hot, lit with hurt. “You would expect me to be brazenly honest, wouldn’t you? When it’s just the two of us, I might be anything. Isn’t that right, Mr. Balfour? Bawdy, even. Is that not what you make of me?” Her anger brought her a step closer.

The rain began to pelt, an unforgiving downpour. Or maybe it just sounded like that. Louder, here, in the silence with her.

“No, of course not.” He made to close the distance, his hands already lifting, but she recoiled.

“Well, console yourself with the fact we did not even kiss, after all. I should never have made the effort, had I been able to guess how distasteful it would be to you.”

Effort. Not impulse— Effort. Something in that small, clinically spoken omission seeped warmly into his chest. “It wasn’t—isn’t—dista—”

She went to the mammoth-sized doors of the Painted Hall and wrenched one of them open, her back bending with the effort. Rafe glanced quickly over each shoulder. As if there were a choice. As if he wouldn’t follow her, every time.

The night and the storm had deepened the corners of the vestibule, and he heard, rather than saw, her footsteps clipping up the stairs. He wanted to call out, plead reason to her (Shouldn’t they ask permission of someone first? Could she just wait for a godforsaken moment and hear what he had to say?) but he bit his tongue and focused on closing the door as quietly as possible.

When he crested the landing, he saw her silhouette. Incredible, how she could look tall amid such extravagant scale. But Sophie had a presence unmatched. She could fill Notre Dame with her words and wit alone, and send a man like him to worshiping on his knees.

“Sophie.”

“Why are you calling me that?” She faced him, and the blue-grey light pouring in from the windows gave him glimpses: the slanted furrow bracketing her right brow and the honeyed color of her eyes, warm even now. As he walked closer, she spoke again, sharper. “That’s what you called me in the carriage, too, and I want to know why.”

He stopped before her, close enough that the tips of their boots brushed. He reached out to finger one of the stray curls dancing atop her cheekbone. “I called you that,” he said, “because you had just tried to kiss me.”

She snatched his wrist in her grip, her teeth clenched. “You make a mockery of me.”

Rafe twisted his hand slowly, until her grip loosened and she made to pull away. He squeezed her fingers then, and not giving her time to object, pressed them to his lips.

Warmth against cool softness. The window’s light revealed a fine dusting of pale hair in the space between her knuckles—a small, secret wonder. He turned her hand over, and kissed the plump underside of her wrist.

His mouth still pressed against her skin, he found her gaze. The lines between her brows had deepened, and her chest rose and fell in quick, choked breaths. But he could have guessed that. If his own thoroughbred pulse wasn’t proof enough, he could feel hers—with his lips, now his tongue. She made a strangled sound and he released her. Thank God she didn’t run from him, but stared at him with wide, expectant eyes. It was all he could do not to take her into his arms.

“I don’t mock you.”

She stayed still and breathless. He craved her invitation, but she would not give it to him. Very well, then. He would share in her boldness and risk the same humiliation he had unwittingly dealt her, because damn it all, he wanted to. Sense and reason and favors had not a pinch to do with it.

He found the same thick curl he’d held a moment ago and traced it, between his fingers, back to her scalp. His other hand found her waist—One last chance; Stop me; Spare me—and drew her flush against him. She didn’t stop him, but gazed at him with something like challenge in her eyes.

He’d never been this close to her. He wanted to consume everything about her, from the gently sloping curve of her waist to the exact pigment of her flush, cooler than pink, like the first rays of sunrise.

There was no sparing him. It was already too late.

He pressed his lips to hers, and she answered him as though she’d lost patience. His fingers curled in her hair, a man lost, drunk on reciprocation, and he deepened the kiss. Warmth grew in him, starting in his chest before traveling downward. Earlier had just been a tease—now that he could feel the faint dryness of her lips closing hungrily on his, nothing would suit. He wanted to nip her, taste her, memorize her. He broke from her and forced his fingers to unclench.

Rain. He had forgotten it was raining, but the sound returned to him, the torrent beating into the windowpanes with arrhythmic indecency. A fine pairing for his breathing.

“Was that”—she wet her lips, and he almost groaned aloud at the sight of her tongue—“really so difficult?”

“Yes.”

Her gaze, which had been focused lower, shot to his eyes. He felt her muscles twitch before she tried to move away, and deftly caught her back in his arms, even closer this time. Her breasts pressed into his ribs and her skirts tangled around his legs. He bent forward to properly meet her eye, and the effect left him breathless.

“Because now,” he said, “I know you’ll haunt me forever.”