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CHAPTER SEVEN
“THATMAYBEso,” she managed to say with what she hoped sounded like a great calm. “But I’m afraid it doesn’t matter.”
He looked astonished, taken back, and possibly outraged at the notion thatshedared tellhimthat his feelings were not of paramount importance across the Commonwealth, if not the whole of the planet. He also looked, unusually for him, faintly disheveled.
Because he was Crete, more stunning than any one man had the right to be, that his hair looked like he’d run his fingers through it only made him look better. However impossible that should have been.
And Timoney kept telling herself all these ridiculous stories, thinking that she could handle this, handle him. Yet the look of surprise on his face didn’t thrill her the way it should have. It made her want to make it all better. To jump into his arms and race him back to London. Anything to make him happy—
But then, she’d already tried that.
She had to take solace in the fact that however he felt just now at the prospect of her wedding in the morning—and she could see how he felt, written all over his face—it was nothing compared with the way he’d made her feel that last night in London.
There was a part of her that was already racing to tell her exactly how much of a fool she’d been to allow this to happen. Because now it was all brand-new again. The feel of him, deep inside her body. His mouth moving over her tender flesh. The reality of him, so strong and hard and solid, pressing her down to the ground—
Just thinking about it made her tremble, everywhere, as if it was that close to the edge all over again.
Timoney tried her best to tamp it down, because the longer she stood here, looking at his rampant male splendor—his talk of taking her back to London with him ringing in her head, more temptation than any woman should have to bear—the more she had to face the facts. Chiefly that she already regretted this.
All of this.
Because she’d made a critical error here.
She had come alive again, with him. As if she had never been anything but a rush of brilliant color and raw sensation. Her two months of gray were over. She couldfeelagain.
Timoney felt gloriouslyalivefrom her hair to her fingers to her toes and back. There was an electric current sparking within her once more, making her skin seem to glow. Her bones seemed to hum inside her limbs.
And every place he’d touched, inside and out, blazed still.
There was no undoing that. She wouldn’twantto undo it.
She told herself that it had to be better to take this memory with her when she sank down into the swamp again. And if somehow she couldn’t freeze herself solid again, well. Julian could do what he liked with her body. Timoney would go off in her head, come back here, and that, too, had to be better.
This way she wasn’t losing anything. Heading off to London with him again, on the other hand, was a recipe for loss. Would it be six months again? Less? And when he was done with her again, when he had truly destroyed her—again—what would she do then?
Maybe she shouldn’t have indulged herself with Crete, but she would have a long, safe marriage in which to consider the matter from all sides. She might not be happy, but she had chosen her path. It wasn’t a seismic event. Like meeting Crete.
Like losing him.
She told herself the choosing was what mattered.
“I do not think that you are understanding me,” Crete bit out. His grip on her upper arm felt like a band of steel. And that, too, felt like a gift.
Timoney would hoard it all up, these excruciating gifts like too-bright treasure. And her hoard was what would make the next few years fly by before Julian tired of her. As she knew he would.
She couldn’t wait.
“I think I understand you perfectly.” She forced herself to meet his gaze again. “I just don’t agree with you. I know that must be difficult for you, it being so rare.”
Temper flashed over his face, and something in her seemed to roll over at that. Not in fear. Not in anxiety of any kind.
It was pure exhilaration.
Because the man Timoney had lived with in London had never let his veneer crack, even a little. There had never been a question that she might see beneath the masks he wore. The hard-edged businessman. The intense lover. The remote man.
This, too, was an unexpected gift.
“I am the bastard son of a man who could have taken care of me but did not.” He bared his teeth at her. “You know this. You must also know that I would never, ever allow a child of mine to be raised apart from me.”
