Page 57 of Pride: The Rogue
“No,” she confided, bringing herself up onto her elbow so she matched his body’s positioning.
“Bad dream?” he ventured.
“No. I just couldn’t fall asleep.”
Even with the dim lighting, she could make out the way he moved his gaze intently over her face. “Why?”
She lifted her right shoulder. “I don’t know.”
His lips quirked up at a corner. “Liar.”
“Yes.” Livian sighed. “And apparently, a very bad one.”
“That ain’t a bad thing, sweetheart.”
She snorted. “Not for the one whose looking for the truth from me.”
His even, white, teeth, flashed pearl white in the night. “No. That’s true.”
They shared a quiet laugh, and then fell comfortably into a silence.
The fire crackled softly, lending an even greater calm and sense of warmth to their exchange.
“So?” Lachlan asked.
She puzzled her brow.
“What is the truth?”
“The truth,” she echoed, dumbly.
That she couldn’t give him. Reason being, sheshouldbe afraid of sharing a room with him, a dark, formidable, stranger. The reality, however, proved even more terrifying; she was twisted up inside at heading to meet a stranger who’d become her husband while secretly relishing these stolen moments spent with a self-made man, who, in every way, was like the husband she’d dreamed of.
“Can I hazard a guess?” he asked, intruding on her unnerving thoughts.
“You can tr—”
“Reservations about your bridegroom?”
Her smile slipped and her stomach lurched.
His accuracy deserved to be met with honesty. “Y-Yes.”
That he, after knowing her so briefly, had known so easily her thoughts, set off a newfound wave of dread. Not because he had, but because she’d always dreamed of a sweetheart whose thoughts moved in synchrony with hers.
“Back in the taproom, you never did say why you were marrying,” he remarked.
He hadn’t missed that. “We got off-topic.”
“Yougot us off-topic asking questions about my past,” he all too accurately stated.
“Which you openly shared.”
“Which I openly shared,” he concurred. “And given you clearly didn’t wish to talk about the nob who’ll be your husband, I let the matter rest.”
Clever man. Too intelligent for his—or, more accurately,her—own good; he knew all that.
“You are a self-made man,” she said. “You secured the funds to build yourself and your club by fighting—”
