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She glared up at him, fire in her eyes, though her voice and face stayed eerily calm. “What do you want me to say, Strider? That I learned early on with the Flagtons that I couldn’t show emotion—couldn’t be angry, couldn’t be scared, couldn’t be happy, couldn’t cry, couldn’t have opinions, couldn’t speak out of turn, couldn’t be anything other than a silent, frozen statue in their household? That’s all they would allow, so that’s all I was.”
His gut twisted harder.
While he had spent the last seventeen years raging at everything that moved against him in the slightest way, she had sat, silent, taking everything that was piled upon her by that blasted family. Taken all of it and channeled into her hands, her fingers, the scars he could see dotting her palm evident.
Rage against her false sense of calm reared in his chest and he yanked her wrist past his waist, making her fall into him. Her right palm landed on his chest so she didn’t crash into him. He leaned down until his forehead almost touched hers.
“If I ever see your hands clasp like that again, Pen, I swear—”
“You swear what—you’ll slap me? Yell at me? Beat me?” Her voice still held no emotion. “I’ve been through it all and you can’t do a thing to change what I do to survive.”
She stared up at him, so defiantly emotionless Strider snapped. Anything to put the real Pen back in front of him. He needed her yelling at him—not this block of granite she’d shifted into.
He dropped her wrist, reaching out and wrapping his hand around her neck. Pulling her into him, his mouth met hers—angry and raw and she didn’t know what to do with the kiss, with him. Not until her lips started to respond on their own, carving their own place against his mouth. Emotion. Honest emotion from her. Emotion she couldn’t hold fast against. He let his tongue slip past her lips to taste her.
A sharp blade of lightning cut down his spine—she tasted like summer and salty air and sweet. Things he’d locked away to the past and never revisited.
He pulled his mouth away from hers and stared down at her, their breath mingling. “This. This is what I’m going to do. Someone needs to shock you out of the granite statue you’ve locked yourself into.” Both of his hands went up, capturing the sides of her face, his voice so raw he didn’t recognize it. “Nothing in. Nothing out. That’s all you know when there is so much more, Pen.”
His lips clamped back down onto hers, the rage in him still boiling so savagely he couldn’t control it, couldn’t control the kiss until he was bruising her and still he wanted more. Hell,shewanted more—everything his mouth did she repeated. Enthusiastically—driven—like the secrets of the world were locked away in his mouth.
He didn’t just want more, he needed more. Everything she tasted of, everything she was.
Everything he couldn’t have—the innocence of her.
A split second of clarity and he yanked his lips away from hers.
Spinning around, he stalked toward the carriage they had left at the corner of the Jacobson estate.
She would follow or she would not.
He didn’t care.
Couldn’tcare.
{ Chapter 10 }
The black dress wouldn’t do.
She had known it after what she had seen on the London streets. Lace and chiffon and silk and muslin, all in the most wonderful of colors and patterns. Dresses that set off the women as formidable, important, distinguished.
No, the black dress wouldn’t do. Especially after seeing the Jacobson estate the previous day. They were people accustomed to lace and chiffon and silk and muslin. Not bland black dresses.
But Pen was at a loss for how to rectify the situation as she’d given all her money to Ole Ona to deliver Mrs. Flagton’s package.
She caught a glimpse of herself in the cheval mirror in the corner of her room at the coaching inn. The morning light hit her hair, making it glow, and she tucked a loose strand along her temple behind her ear. She’d left her hair long in the back, only pulling the front locks back into a loose chignon, hoping against hope her long blond strands would pull attention away from the black dress if she draped them forward over her shoulder.
But little could be done to temper the severity of the cloth. She resigned herself to her drab dress as she set it upon her body. The black would have to do—she had no other choice. Her family wouldn’t care, she was sure of it. They would be happy to meet her, happy to embrace her no matter what dress she wore.
If they were truly her family, that was. That still had to be determined.
And the pestering doubts that Strider had put into her head yesterday had stuck with her all night, making each second tick by with increasing dread. The closer to morning it got, the more anxious she’d become.
She’d let Strider rip holes in her hope. Hope she needed desperately to hold on to.
She looked out the window. Grey skies, but no rain. Maybe there was time for a walk before they set off to the Jacobson estate. She could clear her head in the open air—this country air that didn’t sink into her lungs, weighing her down like the air in London did.
Air that was free of Strider. That would be nice. She’d breathed nothing but his air in the waking hours these past days—air that had set into her lungs just as heavily as the London air. The man was insufferable, setting his doom onto her at every turn, scowling at her for hours on end in the carriage—and then he’d had the audacity to kiss her yesterday.
