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“You were the thing I didn’t know I was waiting for,” he said, his voice a gruff whisper.
Tears filled her eyes. “What?”
“I kept staying. I kept staying and I didn’t know why. But it was for you.”
He kissed her. But it wasn’t that desperate, feral thing that had roared to life between them at the cottage. He kissed her not like she might break, but like she was something of exquisite value that required a gentle hand, because that was simply the reverence with which you handled such a thing.
And she relished that. That moment. Where his mouth laid claim to pieces of her soul with every brush of his lips on hers.
He lifted her up off the ground. With strength. Strength that formed a shield around her. Strength that didn’t bruise.
A kind of controlled power that demonstrated to her exactly what manner of man he was. And if she had ever had any doubts, this would have shown her.
Just what he was capable of.
Not in the way that so many people thought, but that he was capable of bending his strength into a shield. Into extraordinary protectiveness. He carried her up the stairs and into the bedroom. The one he had been staying in, clearly. Not the master.
“It was an extra room. I couldn’t stay in their room. I couldn’t stand mine. This house is haunted.”
She nodded. Because she knew just what he meant. And yet he’d stayed in it, waiting. Waiting for her, he said.
He kissed her again, and this time, some of the gentleness was stripped away, but it was no less powerful for it. Because she liked that. Knowing that he was capable of both. Knowing that she could withstand both. And that he thought so.
The kiss went on and on, and her earrings kept jingling with the motion, all bright and cheerful and wrong, and she finally worked them from her ears and tossed them somewhere on the floor.
Then she stripped his shirt up over his head, and her heart squeezed tight. He was so beautiful. His body showing the marks of physical labor. His muscles clearly defined.
She had tripped her way through Europe indulging herself in fantasies. With young men, close to her own age. And she had enjoyed them. Their lean bodies that didn’t shift even with the carelessness of their lifestyle. Their muscles that existed—sleek and compact—simply because of their youth. Not fading because they spent their nights drinking, or their days eating whatever the hell they wanted.
He was different.
The efforts that he made in his life seemed to be carved into those chiseled marks on his body. The work that he did, the weight that he carried on his shoulders, what shaped him into the man he was.
Those other men—thoseboys, really—hadn’t had lines on their faces. They’d been all smooth, carefree perfection. And he had lines. Trenches worn in his skin by grief. By loss. By betrayal. The map of who he was, written there on his face, clear and achingly glorious.
She imagined that in his youth, in the beginning, he’d had that sort of carefree beauty about him.
But it was ever so much more compelling worn through with all these cares. And it hurt, to see what his life had cost him. It was indescribably sad. But itwas.
And there was no changing it.
No going back. No erasing it.
Honoring it, caring about it,lovingit—that seemed to be the best way forward.
She kissed his face, right where his eyes crinkled. In his forehead, where the deepest groove always formed between his eyebrows, anger and fear and uncertainty all expressed in that one line. Then she went back to his mouth, consuming him, igniting a fire that might well consume them both.
An echo perhaps of the fire that he’d started when he was a boy, because he was a man who carried so much heat around inside of him, so much anger. So much injustice, that it could never be simple. It could never be softer, easy.
But that was fine. She’d tried soft and easy.
It didn’t lead anywhere.
His large hands held her thighs steady, as he changed the power balance and kissed her neck, down her collarbone, as he started to strip her clothes from her body.
Ruby had never been self-conscious about her figure. And she wasn’t exactly self-conscious in this moment, but she felt seen in a way that she hadn’t before. His eyes were sharp, and he was assessing her in a manner that no man ever had.
But she realized it had never mattered before who they were. Just as to them it had never mattered who she was.
