Page 124 of Pride: The Rogue
Until time passed, and their breathing returned to a slower, sated cadence.
When had sex ever left him shaken? Never. The actual and immediate answer was—it hadn’t.
All he knew was, in his entire existence, not one single thing had felt more right than being in Livian Lovelace’s arms. It was a place he didn’t want to leave.
But with the power of his orgasm fading, the threat on the other side of that locked door loomed greater.
Reaching between them, Latimer fished a kerchief from inside his jacket. Still not ready to set Livian away, he continuedto hold her while he gently wiped the remnants of his seed and her juices from between her legs.
After he’d finished, Latimer placed a kiss on Livian’s shoulder. And another. And another.
“Oh, God, Lachlan. What have we done?” Those words were whispered so faintly, it took a moment for Livian’s horror-laden whisper to register.
With frustrating ease, Livian scrambled off his lap so swiftly she knocked his arms free and stumbled backward.
She tripped over her skirts. Latimer shot a hand out and caught her before she tumbled onto the floor. “Hey now, love,” he said soothingly.
Wild-eyed, she stared at the place where Latimer’s fingers circled her wrist. Horror wreathed every expressive line of her ivory complexion.
Gasping, she jerked herself free of him. “This shouldnothave h-happened, Lachlan.”
In the greatest irony of Latimer’s miserable life, a vise cinched hard in his chest, in a place that felt dangerously close to where his heart resided.
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” he drawled, striving for relaxedness on the outside, all the while failing on the inside. “A few moments ago, it’s all either of uswantedto happen.”
“Yes!” she rasped, her eyes wild, errant curls hanging about her face. “Desire compelled us, but that is all it was and is between us.”
A dark, unpleasant feeling sent his belly churning. “Oh, yes, Livian?” he jeered, his voice sharp and riddled with frustration and anger. “And here I thought at the inn, you’d declared us friends.”
“You were right,” she whispered.
She stared at him with her big eyes filled with such pain it nearly ended him.
Unable to find his voice and ask for clarification, he shook his head instead.
“Men and women can’t be friends,” she said softly, sadly.
He narrowed his eyes.
They’d been more than that, but that’d been back in Hitchin, which seemed a world away.
And I want to go back to that.
“We are more than that, Livian,” he said quietly.
A palpable tension built in the very air they breathed; so that there wasn’t enough between them.
Livian turned her palms up. “We weren’treallyanything, though.”
Fury blazed to life within him. “The hell we weren’t, sweetheart.” A hiss exploded out from between his painfully gritted teeth.
“Yousaid it, Lachlan,” she gently reminded.
He drew back. “What the hell are you talking—?”
“At The Saint George’s Inn,” she explained.“‘This isn’t anything but sex… there’ll be no feelings involved. We aren’t something more. We’re nothing.’”
Nothing.
