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Not when you can’t be trusted with them.
The thought should have made him move away. But it didn’t. Instead, he put one hand on the bookshelf behind her head, leaning over her while he dragged the tip of his finger across the softness of her skin, tracing the line of her lower lip.
She shivered, taking another audible breath, her gaze never leaving his face. Her body was stiff with tension and yet she didn’t move, the spark in her eyes leaping higher.
‘Why are you touching me?’ Her voice had become even huskier than normal.
‘Why do you think?’
Every muscle in his body had tightened; his groin was aching. His anger had dulled. Physical desire was smoothing the sharp edges and making it less acute. Replacing it with another, safer hunger.
‘This is the reason you should have left, Leonie.’ He dragged his finger gently over her bottom lip once more, pressing against the full softness of it. ‘Because you’re a lovely woman and I’m a very,verybad man.’
Leonie couldn’t move. Or rather, she probably could—it was more that she didn’t want to. And she didn’t understand why, because what the duke was doing to her should have sent her bolting from the room in search of her knife.
A week ago it would have.
But that had been before she’d spent a whole week in his house, cleaning the rooms she’d been assigned to. A whole week of a comfortable bed and good food, of being clean and dry and warm. A whole week of being safe.
A whole week of him stopping by every day to visit her—sometimes just to say hello, sometimes to chat.
She hadn’t realised how much she liked his little visits until the fourth day, when he hadn’t stopped by the room she was cleaning and she’d begun to feel annoyed, wondering if she’d missed him. Wondering if she’d been forgotten.
If she’d still been the Leonie of a week ago being forgotten would have been preferable. But she wasn’t that Leonie. Not since she’d fallen asleep in his study that night and he’d gathered her up in his arms and put her to bed.
She’d woken the next morning disorientated and restless, panicking slightly when she’d realised what had happened. But when she’d jerked back the quilt she’d found she was still fully clothed. Only her shoes had been removed. She’d been asleep, at her most vulnerable, and all he’d done was tuck her into bed.
Perhaps that was why she felt no fear now, even though he was definitely touching her and threatening her into the bargain. But it wasn’t a threat like those she’d experienced before, that promised only violence and pain. No, this was different. This promised something else, and she wasn’t at all sure she wouldn’t like whatever it was he was promising.
Especially if it was this prickling kind of heat sweeping over her, making her mouth feel full and sensitive. Making something inside her pulse hard and low, with that same hunger she’d felt the night he’d gripped her wrist.
Unfamiliar feelings. Good feelings.
She didn’t want to move in case they vanished, as everything good in her life always seemed to do.
She tipped her head back against the bookshelf, staring up him, right into those intense green eyes. There was a flame burning there, giving out more heat than the fire that night in his study, and she wanted more of it. More of the heat of his tall, powerful body so close to hers.
Men had never been anything but threatening to her before, and sex something only offered as a transaction or taken with violence. She knew that there was more to it than that, because she’d watched couples holding hands in the streets. Couples hugging. Couples kissing.
She’d once been interrupted by a well-dressed man and woman slipping into the alley she’d been sleeping in at the time, and had watched unseen from behind a pile of boxes as the man had gently pressed the woman to the brick wall of the alley and lifted her dress. The woman had moaned, but not in protest. Her hands had clutched at the man, pulling him to her, and when she’d cried out it hadn’t been in pain.
Leonie had wondered what it would be like to be that woman, but she knew she never would be. Because to be that woman she’d have to be clean and wear a nice dress. To be that woman she’d have to be cared for, and the only person who’d ever cared for her was herself.
So, since physical pleasure was not for people like her, she’d had to settle on invisibility instead. Blending into the background and never calling attention to herself, staying unnoticed and unseen, the way her mother had always taught her.
Except she wasn’t unseen now. The duke had seen her, and continued to see her, and with every brush of his finger he made her more and more visible. More and more aware of how she liked that touch, how she wanted it. How cold she’d been before, and also how lonely.
And now he was here, with his hot green eyes and his hard, muscular body, and he was touching her.
He was turning her into that woman in the pretty dress in the alley and she liked it. She didn’t want to run away. She wanted to be that woman. The woman who deserved pleasure and who got it.
‘I don’t think you’re bad.’ She held his gaze, every nerve-ending she had focused on the touch of his finger on her mouth. ‘If you were that bad you wouldn’t have told me to leave.’
‘I don’t think you know bad men, in that case.’
His gaze was all-consuming, a dark forest full of secrets, making her want to journey into it, discover what those secrets were.
‘Of course I do.’ Her mouth felt achingly sensitive. His touch was so light it was oddly maddening. ‘I see them all the time on the streets. And I avoid them whenever I can.’
