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“Just?”
“I deserved it.” Her gaze lifted to him, the light gold in her amber eyes flickering in the firelight. “For what I did to you.”
“And all your friends abandoned you?”
“No. Not all.” Her fingers tightened around the glass of brandy. “But the ones that did write, I never responded to. I knew I was a pariah and didn’t want them to suffer by association.”
“How long has it been since you’ve seen Lady Harrison or Lady Mattson?”
Her chin tilted up, her eyes shifting to the ceiling as she walked back through memories. “Since the night of…us. The Detmolds’ ball. The one we snuck out early from.”
“The night that preceded the worst week in my life.”
She nodded, silent, her lips pursed.
They were slipping into dangerous territory. Especially when he’d sworn to her no anger this night.
He shifted his mind back to the night of the Detmolds’ ball. How they’d slid under the shadows of the mews behind his family townhouse and through the empty gardens. The townhouse had been empty, the staff given the night off.
Him and Laney alone. Blessedly alone. For hours.
The night he’d given her everything of himself. His body. His soul.
His secrets.
The last moments before everything exploded. A night that sat in his mind, a touchstone to the past that he could never manage to abandon.
He lifted his glass to her. “You know that one night, though, that was the best in my life. If everything that happened just after it hadn’t happened—I could have lived in that night forever and died a happy man.”
The saddest smile he’d ever seen on a person crossed her face as she nodded. “Me too.”
He stared at her for a long breath, unable to move, unable to let his mind leave that memory.
She lifted her hand, clinking her glass to his. “We were good together, once, weren’t we?”
“Aye, we were. Especially that night.”
Her damn lips again. He couldn’t pull his eyes away from the slight crease in the middle of the bottom of her plump lower lip. The memory of those lips dragging across his skin. The moment those lips wrapped around his member.
He forcibly closed his eyes, his face shifting away from Laney.
Dammit. Damn that night. Damn the memories.
When he didn’t want to kill her, he sure as hell wanted to kiss her. And more.
He opened his eyes to find her stare on him. Hungry…wary…but desperate to resurrect the past they had no business revisiting together.
A smart man would stand and excuse himself. An angry man would do the same.
But he was neither of those things at the moment and her lips were slaying him, through and through.
He set his tumbler on the floor and leaned forward, meeting those lips, taking them as his own as easily as he once had.
No resistance.
His right hand slipped behind her head, his fingers moving into the thick of her upsweep, and he tilted her head to the side, his tongue slipping past her parted lips, exploring, tasting her again.
Like coming home. Home into the only woman he’d ever loved.
