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“Here’s the great news, Crete,” she said, and he felt certain that he would not find whatever news she was about to share at all great. “When I was your mistress, it fell to me to try to keep you happy. And I failed at that. I failed at it so completely that you not only finished things, but ordered me to move out immediately—then made sure your security detail saw to it that I did.”
“That is not entirely true.” But it was close enough to make him uncomfortable, he was forced to acknowledge.
“Whatever it is you want tonight, both you and I already know that I don’t have what it takes to please you,” Timoney said. Not as if she was apologizing or even particularly broken up about it. She inclined her head. “So perhaps you’d best move along.”
It was an order, clearly. But against his will, all he could think about was all the ways she really had made him happy.
Again and again and again.
He had moved her into his flat within a week of meeting her—and with only the most superficial vetting—because once he’d tasted her, he couldn’t bear to have a single free moment and not indulge himself with more of her. His craving for her had been so intense that he’d reasoned the only way to handle it was to immerse himself.
Completely.
And still it hadn’t been enough.
For the first time, he admitted that maybe, just maybe, there had been some small part of him that had been relieved when she’d crossed his uncrossable line that night. When she’d spilled over with those words she should never have said.
Especially when he was not the least bit tired with her yet.
Because he had spent whole months consumed with her, and maybe, just maybe, he had been grateful to get his head back.
But he realized now, as the mist swirled around between them and her blue eyes glistened in the dark, that he’d only been fooling himself.
“You cannot marry that man,” he growled at her.
“Why not?” she tossed back at him. “It seems to me that Julian is as good as anyone else. Better than most.”
“He is neither. He is a cretinous gasbag who sheds wives—”
“The way you shed mistresses?”
He didn’t care for that. “There are no similarities between us.”
“That’s why I agreed to marry him in the first place,” she snapped. “I understand his expectations of me, Crete. There’s no pretense.”
“Your body. Your soul. Your life.”
Timoney laughed at that, but the sound was bitter, and he hated that. She had been so joyful. So bright. He hated that he had rendered her something less than that. That he had taken it along with her innocence.
Maybe he truly was the monster his father’s wife had always maintained he was.
All evidence suggested it.
“Imagine that,” Timoney said when she stopped laughing, and her blue eyes shone cold. “Julian wants the same things from me that you did. But look at all he’s willing to offer me in return. His name. Children, if I wish it. Primarily my body, yes, but the difference between the two of you is that he’s not afraid to sweeten the pot. Nor will he cast me aside if I displease him, unlike his former wives. Divorce would be far too expensive. My uncle has seen to it.”
That she was comparing him to the likes of Julian Browning-Case was insult enough. That he was losing by her reckoning was insupportable.
“You cannot marry him,” Crete said again, while a terrible storm wailed in him as he pictured, against his will, what she was describing. Surrendering herself. Selling herself. Giving the decrepit old man that body of hers that Crete understood, with a certain resignation, he had long since considered only and ever his.
It turned out that he was not prepared to share.
“Why not?” she demanded. Her hands turned to fists and she knocked them into his chest. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t?”
He welcomed the faint kiss of her fists. He welcomed any touch from her at all, and what did it say that he’d fallen so far? But there was no arguing with the truth. There was only accepting it and moving forward.
Crete had built his life on exactly this premise.
And he was more than happy to provide her with all the reasons she needed to see this truth as he had. Surely that, in the end, was why he’d come here.
Surely that was what mattered.
“Because, little one,” he growled at her, “you have belonged to me since the moment we met. You still do.”
And then Crete proved it the way he always had, by crushing his mouth to hers.
