Page 46 of Earl for the Summer
“What I feel for you,” he whispered, his breath hot against the shell of her ear, “is dangerous. You said so yourself.”
His hand slid down her back, tucking her closer, until she could feel the proof of his desire for her through her dress.
“Daphne.” He spoke her name as if it were a plea. Then he pressed his forehead to hers.
“Yes,” she told him in reply, then slid a hand up to lightly trail her fingertips into the open V of his shirt.
He let out a sharp exhale, then bent to take her lips. His kisses were hungry, desperate, as if after just a couple of days apart, he was starving for a taste of her.
When he pulled back, she almost cried out in protest, but then he bent to kiss her neck, to lick and nip at her skin. He found that same spot at the base of her throat that she’d just touched on his, and he laid a tender, reverent kiss there.
Daphne sought the top button of his shirt and slipped it free, then the next. He lifted his head to look at her, to stroke his finger along the edge of her jaw, then over her lower lip.
“I should take you back inside,” he said roughly.
“To your room?”
A laugh burst from him. “You are the greatest temptation of my life, Daphne Bridewell.”
“And you of mine, Captain Rourke.”
He kissed her again, tenderly this time. Daphne wanted more and wrapped a hand around his neck to draw him closer. Yet she felt the tension in his body, his shoulders, even his arms as he held her, and she pulled back.
“Answer my question,” she said, her voice husky and a bit breathless.
“Which one?”
“Why aren’t you a deserving man?”
He straightened his back, squared his shoulders, but didn’t release her. She wasn’t about to let him.
Reaching up, he swept a lock of hair behind her ear, then cupped her nape. “I don’t know how to…” Stopping, he drew in a breath, then let it out slowly. “I am not a good man, Daphne. You deserve tenderness, kindness.”
“You’ve never been anything but kind to me. You’ve kissed me tenderly.” She reached up to glide her finger across the fullness of his lower lip, as he’d done to her. “You’ve shown me your goodness.”
“When I was pretending to be my brother?”
“Not just then.” Daphne’s voice had turned sharp, like the little ache that had begun to pinch in her chest. Even in this moment, with their bodies seamed together, he was holding back. “You told me it was real. All of it. And that means the kindness was real. The tenderness too.”
She madehim feel as if he could be the man she thought he was—kind, good, worthy of her.
But he knew what she did not. That he’d been forged in cruelty, under the fists and lashing words of a brutal father, who thought kindness was a weakness. Whose rages came with no warning, much as Cassian’s anger sometimes bubbled up.
Then he’d lived for a decade and a half in the navy, which instilled its own notions of enforcing discipline in the harshest ways.
He’d never believed himself capable of giving his heart, of having a family of his own, because he felt aspects of his father inside him. Julian had inherited all their mother’s joyfulness and light, and he’d turned out more like their father, and he loathed those parts of himself.
But now there was Daphne. Temptation indeed. And not just because he was fighting the urge to take her right here against a hedge in the moonlit garden, but because of what she wanted him to be.
A better man. A good man.
When he said nothing, she began to pull away. Even as he told himself he should let her go, he couldn’t.
“If I am any of those things, it’s because you bring them out in me,” he confessed.
“But that means they are in you already.” She smiled, then reached up, curling her hand around the placket of his shirt, stroking a finger against his chest.
“There’s a great deal more too, I’m afraid.”
