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“I don’t even know.” He shook his head, his look going to the ceiling. “Out for the marquess, checking on the new flocks, if I recall. But I do remember I was muddy and exhausted and I had to clean myself before appearing at your father’s home and I thought you would understand.”
“So it was just another time you chose the almighty Vinehill estate over me.”
His look dropped to her, skewering her. “Ye ken that’s not true. That it was never true.”
“Wasn’t it? Because your bloody loyalty to them was all I ever heard about from you. Every excuse I ever heard from your lips was lined with the needs of Vinehill.”
Her arms unthreaded from her chest. “We couldn’t be together because I was betrothed to Vinehill men—first Jacob, then Lachlan. We couldn’t be together because the marquess needed you to scour the estate for his blasted sheep. We couldn’t be together because Lachlan needed you to tramp about the countryside with him, scouting roadways. We couldn’t be together because you had to go out to collect the rents. We couldn’t be together because you couldn’t leave the family in crisis after the fire that took Jacob. We couldn’t be together for hundreds of reasons and every single one of them had to do with Vinehill.”
His lips pulled inward, this battle that he’d fought with her a thousand times rearing up from deep in the past. “Ye know why I’m loyal to them. Ye cannot ask me to be otherwise.”
“I can’t?” She grabbed his upper arm, the touch sending fire into his veins.
The first time she’d voluntarily reached out and touched him since he’d found her in the snow.
Her look pinned him. “I know you were an orphan. I know they took you in. I know that they built you up to be all that you are. I know that they are your family. But what about me, Dom?”
His stare shifted from her, fixating on the silver platters of food on the sideboard.
“Look me in the eye, Dom.” Her fingers dug into the muscles in his upper arm.
His jaw flexing, his gaze dropped to her.
“What about me? What about living for yourself? For me? That was what we were going to do. Us, together, a farm, a flock of sheep—I didn’t care. All I wanted was you. And you know the marquess would have given you whatever you asked for. He’s a wicked old devil, but he rewards those that are loyal—and there have been none more loyal than you. He regards you as one of his grandsons.”
Everything she said he knew to be true. And that grated on him all the more. “I had planned to do all of that, Karta. But I didn’t know I was on a blasted time limit.”
“You didn’t know?” She shook his arm. “No, don’t try that, Dom. I told you—I told you how important it was for you to be at that ball. I told you our life together depended upon it.”
“Yes, but you’d said that before, again and again—our future depended on me being somewhere—at a ball, at the horse racing your father sponsors, at the Vinehill dinners. Our future always depended on those things—but all those I missed, it was because I was working on our future, working on how I would exit Vinehill.”
Her body stilled, her hand dropping from his arm. “Yes, well, you ran out of time.”
She took a step backward—away—and her hip bumped into the chair.
“Don’t move away from me, not now.” The words came out in a low roar.
“Why not now, Dom?”
“Not when you are in front of me for the first time in six years and I realize exactly how I failed ye. Not when there is the slightest possibility that I can right whatever wrongs there were of the past. Not when I want ye more than I ever have. Not when this unlikely gift of the two of us together again—trapped, with nothing but time—appeared out of nowhere just before Christmas.”
He stepped closer, staring down at her, waiting. Waiting for the slightest motion, the slightest indication that all was not lost between them.
Her dark lashes fell closed. Her chest rising in one breath. Two. Three.
Her full lips parted. “It can’t be the same, Dom.”
He stared at her closed eyes. She was teetering. Opening up her heart to the possibility.
His words rumbled low from his chest. “I don’t want it the same. I want you. However you come to me now, I take ye.”
Her brown eyes, warm with streaks of honey gold, opened to him. Uncertainty, but it was there in her look. The possibility.
His mouth descended on hers, taking her into a kiss.
He felt it instantly, the quiver that ran through her, that sent her body pressing into his. He parted his lips, edging hers open. No resistance. Plunging. Descending into the depths of the kiss, the draw of how their bodies had always needed to be touching.
His tongue slipped out and tasted the sweetness of her mouth. Sweetness and heat. Matching him with every swipe of his tongue, every shift of his lips.
