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CHAPTER SIX
EVERYTHINGINSIDECRETEshifted into a long, low, simmering beat.
His chest. His temples.
Deep in his sex.
Timoney stood in the center of this curiously welcoming room bathed in buttery light. She was so beautiful it felt like a terrible ache to look upon her, and a greater ache that the man she thought she was going to marry had not seemed to notice.
He had looked at her as if she was a bauble, nothing more.
And Crete had no doubt that Julian intended to glut himself on her, but it was not the need in him it was in Crete.
It couldn’t be, or he would not have left her here tonight.
There were a great many things that Crete could have said on the topic of Julian Browning-Case, and surely one of them would have gotten through to her, but nothing as pointless as another man seemed to matter with Timoney’s gaze on him.
That endless sea. Enduring. Beckoning. Blue enough to make a man believe in miracles.
He could not resist her. Then again, he did not wish to try.
Crete stalked past her outstretched arms, crossing to the door to make sure that it was locked. That it would admit no further visitors this night—and would not require that he debase himself any further by concealing himself behind the furniture as if he was taking part in some noxious theatrical production of a play he would dislike. When he turned back around, she had dropped her arms and had twisted around to watch him.
With a look on her face that suggested she thought he might have been on his way out.
The way he knew he probably should have been.
But Timoney had haunted him when he had never before believed in ghosts. She’d stayed with him even after he’d scrubbed his home of any stray trace of her presence. She had woken him in the night. She had chased him through his days and all over the world, never giving him a moment’s peace.
He could remember, if vaguely, other women he’d been with for a time. He had always, eventually, felt a sense of great calm when away from them. That was usually how he knew that it was time to move on. When even sex could not give him a moment’s peace. When leaving their side was far preferable to suffering their presence.
This normally did not take very long. Six weeks at the outside.
But everything with Timoney was inside out. Six weeks had come and gone and turned into six months, and he had still felt undone by her. Tonight he wasn’t even touching her. He was gazing at her from across a room, having actually secreted himself behind some old pots so as not to distress her. Allshewas doing was looking at him with the expression he remembered best. The one that haunted him most.
Open and soft. Sweet and yielding.
It felt like peace.
And yet deep within that peace that only came when he was with her, and layered all around it, was this wanting that never seemed to fade.
When he had walked up to the house tonight, he had assured himself that all it would take was a glance in a window and he would feel the fool. That he would feel nothing when he saw her again. That he would melt off back into the night, taking his shameful obsession with her along with him when he left.
Alas, he had found her in the garden instead.
Andfoolishwas not at all how he felt.
“Go back and sit on your little couch,” he ordered her, in that tone he had always used when he intended to indulge his dark desires.
And like she always had, Timoney shivered. Visibly. He watched with a familiar surge of delight as goose bumps tracked down her neck and over her bare shoulders. His sex was like iron. His mouth watered.
He wanted to taste her more than he wanted his next breath. He would have happily traded it in.
When she did not move as instructed, he only raised an eyebrow. And Timoney let out a rush of breath. Half a laugh, half a sigh.
A sweet music he had missed.
Then she turned, her dress rustling around her, as she set about obeying him.
