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Her fingers stilled for a long moment before her head whipped up, her eyes wide as she pushed herself to sit up next to him.
This was the first time she’d ever heard him question the preposterous vow he’d made to Gilroy. The slightest crack in the iron-clad belief he’d constructed his life around.
She held her breath in her chest for a long moment. Time to choose her words carefully. “It’s not right. It never was.” Her hand reached out to cup the side of his jawline. “But it also has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with what you deserve.”
“And what do I deserve?”
She found the blue flecks in his irises and waited until his look met hers. “Happiness.”
His eyes closed, his head shaking slightly. “I’m not sure what I deserve.” The words cracked from his mouth in a low rumble.
Her thumb rubbed along the ruff of the dark stubble along his cheek. “You are the finest man I’ve ever met, Evan. Don’t doubt that. Don’t doubt what you deserve to have in life.”
He winced and, with a sudden breath, he jerked away from her, untangling his legs from under hers and leaving the bed. Reaching for his trousers, he shoved his feet through the legs and into boots, and then tugged on his lawn shirt.
Without another glance at her, he moved toward the door fastening the fall front of his trousers. “I need to find my brother. After what happened today…I have to see him.”
In the next instant, he was gone.
Gone and she didn’t have the slightest inkling what he was thinking.
About her. About them.
About the future—or the lack of one.
{ Chapter 22 }
Evan tromped up the circular staircase of thenorth tower.Boots clomping onto stone step after stone step. His right hand dragging along the smooth curved inner stones, he hadn’t bothered to bring a candle with him, for he knew these steps in the dark as well as he did in the daylight.
What the hell had he been thinking? That he could play at this? Actually marry Juliet and not want her? Not want her body and soul and mind and setting as many of his babes into her as she would dare to carry?
Lunacy.
A divorce would be easy he’d said.
And if it was what she wanted, he’d grant her that.
But not before doing his damnedest to change her mind.
To make her stay married to him.
An unclouded path before him, where there never had been one before.
Nothing in his life had ever been so easy to recognize, to understand, than the thought of her as his wife.
No matter the consequences to everyone around him. To Gilroy. To the only oath he’d ever made in his life.
He’d known it the moment he’d said “I do.” He wanted her. For real. That belief only verified when he had sunk his shaft into her minutes ago and it’d been like nothing he’d ever experienced before—soul shattering—so much so he’d had to leave the room. His every breath, every heartbeat had been dependent on her pleasure. His only goal in life to make her come so hard her soul shattered along with his. To make her happy or he would utterly fail as a man.
Finally accepting the fact that he wanted her for all of time had given him that. Clarity of purpose.
His left hand went down to readjust his cock. Damn that the mere thought of her writhing under him made him hard. Not the time.
Evan’s right foot hit the well-worn dip in the uneven step three from the top, and he paused for a moment, steeling his spine. Confronting his brother’s rage on this would take every wit he had, and half his wits were currently hovering about his cock.
Five deep breaths and he forged upward to the top floor of the tower, then went straight through the open door at his left.
A lantern on the chest of drawers by the doorway lent a glow to the room, but most of the light came from the three-quarters full moon through the two tall windows that were both wide open to the night air. Gilroy did that, liked to sit up here with the windows open, hoping birds would fly in. Fly in and take him far away from Whetland. He’d always come up here, hiding away, ever since they were young children.
