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His instinctual kindness.
His tenderness, which expected nothing in return.
His resilience—so quiet it was, so ingrained, that he scarcely seemed to know it existed.
The green and the black, the atrocious dry jokes.
That was what he offered her. Love. Life with a man who promised to be mortar in the cracks of her broken heart; a vow he needn’t make with words at all.
This was where her thoughts lay when she ought to be doing the same. Instead, she sat where Anne had left her, stiff before her dressing table, fiddling with the beribboned end of her plait.
A sudden knock expelled the held breath from her lungs, and she flinched in her chair. The window. It had come from the window.
She was up and striding toward it a second later, her fingers fumbling with the latch. When it swung open, the warm burnt scent she’d chased all night and day tranquilized her senses. “Rafe.”
He wasn’t lithe limbed with his entry this time, but an overlarge, clanging man, more invader than stealthy lover. It delighted her all the same.
“What are you about?” she whispered once his first leg was inside. “Why haven’t you worn a coat? You’re practically glowing.” The brilliant white of his shirtsleeves illuminated the entirety of his upper body. “Someone’s liable to see—”
Her halfhearted protest was silenced by his mouth. He took her with rough passion, a possessive kiss that saw her lips parting, her waist yielding to the circle of his arms, her back finding the wall in a crush of cambric. Hell’s mistress.
They inhaled against each other’s skin. No kiss was allowed to reach maturation—they were too hungry for that.
Rafe’s lips left her mouth. Pressed the smooth skin under chin, the base of her throat. When he nibbled gently on her shoulder, she whimpered and squirmed against him. His state of undress—and hers—was doing a disservice to her pride.
The barriers between them were at their thinnest, with him in his shirtsleeves and her in a summer nightdress. Her fingertips found the wide, sagging V of his collar and pressed inside. Warm skin. The lush texture of hair on his chest. She allowed her flattened palms to trail lower, over his nipples, the delineations of rib and bone, the depression of his navel and the ribbon of hair below. She couldn’t breathe for want. She desired to learn every bare inch of this man, body and soul.
“Sophie.” At some point during her exploration, he had braced his palms on either side of her, leaning his weight forward on the wall. His voice mirrored the luxuriance of his physical form: warm, roughened, textured, sensual.
“Rafe.” She pressed her mouth to his, dragged her thumbs over the freshly shaven planes of his cheeks, curled her fingers into the faint dampness of his hair. She cocked a brow at him. “Did you jump out of the bath to come see me? Is that why you’re half dressed?”
His right hand slowly left the wall and found the pulse in the side of her neck. “Sure. Let’s blame it on impatience.” His short-trimmed fingernails crested over her collarbone to raise gooseflesh over her chest and tighten her nipples. “My real intentions might be deemed less honorable.”
“Rafe Balfour, are you trying to confess something to me?” She had intended her voice to be playful, but it erred more on the side of trembly.
“I do have things to tell you.”
Always so serious, her sweetheart. The moon was a thin blue veil on one side of his face. The room had no candles, no fire. Perhaps her eyes had adjusted to the shadows, or perhaps she was simply, finally, perfectly attuned to this man, because she saw his jaw tick, felt the tension ratcheting in his body.
A portender of bad news. But hadn’t she already known it? Hadn’t her heart made its choice some indefinable number of glances ago?
“Tell me.” One finger slipped beneath the waist of his trousers. She tipped her chin up and whispered, “But tell me after.”
He placed her head in his hands and kissed her. Chaste, at first. His fingertips skirted the lace-trimmed neckline of her nightdress, leaving trails of heat from her spine out to her shoulders. A light tug saw the garment pushed aside, clamping over her upper arms and dragging lower. He stopped just before her breasts were exposed.
“You’re going to stretch this pretty gown,” she mused, but her mouth had gone dry. She felt him working at the end of her plait, and the freed ribbon glanced down her back as it fell to the carpet.
“Would you rather I left it alone?”
She laughed. One small, delighted breath. “I’ve been waiting for the day you’d grow sharp-tongued. You’re a difficult student, you know.”
He was smiling. She knew it by the way his kisses felt—smaller, pinched, sweeter.
“All these lessons”—she paused as he edged her nightdress lower in a slow, sawing motion down her arms—“only to just now see progress.”
“I’d like a different variety of lessons, tonight, schoolmaster.” His breath was hot against the angle of her jaw. “I need you to guide me. Tell me what feels good for you. I’ve never … You see, I’ve never …”
She lifted her arm to take his chin between two fingers, and the action halted the southward inch of her gown. “It’s not as though I have, either.” His eyes bore a look of enchantment, the black of his pupils encroaching on warm brown. “I’m glad of it,” she whispered. “Glad that it’s you and me.”
