Page 28 of A Bride By Morning
Yet for hours, Gabriel had imagined a thousand different ways and places around Meadowcroft he wanted to fuck her. He longed to push off her clothes, press his mouth to her quim, and devour her.
A harsh breath left him, and Gabriel downed his whiskey. The convenient bottle beside his book beckoned, and he poured himself another glass of the spirit—his fourth. Perhaps if Gabriel drank enough, his lurid daydreams would fade in the haze of intoxication. The clock on the mantel ticked away, indicating how long he had attempted to preoccupy himself since their arrival.
A sound just beyond the library door left him motionless. The whisper of slippers on the carpet lingered at the library entrance, and he knew even without looking that it was Lydia.
“Hello,” she said. A pause. “Are you all right?”
He longed to shut his eyes and revel in her voice. Ask her to speak again so that he could savor the smooth sonance that skated across his skin like silk.
Say something else,he wanted to say.Anything. Anything at all.
Gabriel missed listening to her. After a year in Vienna, he’d noticed that his memories of her voice faded at the edges. In Zürich, when he read her letters, it was as if she spoke them in a whisper at his ear. In Kabul, he’d lost the ability to hear her entirely. In Moscow, he had wholly forgotten how her voice once tempted him. The way it soothed him like the stroke of a soft hand down his spine.
So when Gabriel returned to London and heard Lydia at the door of his townhouse, his entire body had gone still.Will you please inform Lord Montgomery that Miss Lydia Cecil is here to see him?
The ice that constructed a lacuna around his heart had splintered by small degrees. He had very nearly forgotten that he was a monster. When he saw Lydia for the first time in seven years at a ball a few months later, the ice had nearly collapsed. She compromised the protections he had assembled in Moscow. She was too dangerous to know.
So he’d turned his back on her.
But now, she was his wife, and Gabriel didn’t have the option to abandon her. So he was reduced to avoiding her.
Gabriel concentrated on the flames in the hearth, watching how the golden whiskey in his glass radiated in the light. If he turned and looked at Lydia now, he’d lose command over his desire. She shattered him far too easily.
“I’m quite well.” A veneer of control remained in his voice. She couldn’t know that it was beginning to fray. “Is there anything you need? Are your rooms comfortable?”
She was silent for the longest time. The weight of her regard settled on Gabriel in a tangible press against his skin. What did she see when she looked at him? Did his performance hold? Or did she see a broken man who maintained the ice of his heart for her protection?
“Yes,” she replied. “My rooms are lovely. I’d wondered if you would visit them.”
Gabriel’s fingers scraped against the chair’s upholstery as his cock hardened. He needed her to get the fuck away from him. “No,” he said, a touch too sharply.
He wondered at her slight intake of breath. Was she upset? Relieved? He cataloged every sound and movement of her body, items he turned over in his mind as he pondered what each meant. Then his thoughts amassed in a forceful push: she couldn’t stay. He couldn’t keep himself together if she stayed.
Please go.
But Lydia’s slippers padded across the carpet as she neared his chair. In Gabriel’s periphery, he watched her reach for his discarded book, graceful fingers tracing the gilded letters of the cover.
What would those hands feel like on his skin? What would they look like wrapped around his cock?
Gabriel’s teeth pressed together. Fractures formed along the frost beneath his skin, splintering at her nearness. She threatened the order of him—safeguards he had erected since Moscow and Kabul.
Everything he needed to survive.
“So you are reading this tome on agriculture to put yourself to sleep,” she murmured. “Rather than visit me.”
Gabriel inhaled sharply. “Perhaps I’m not in the mood to fuck you. I told you this would not resemble a real marriage.”
He’d used coarse language deliberately, hoping to shock her into leaving. But he ought to have known that it would take more than a crude word to send her fleeing; she was the most stubborn woman he’d ever met.
In the corner of his eye, he saw her fingers curl into her palm. “You don’t intend on consummating this marriage?” Emotion strained her voice. Was she hurt?
You can’t help but hurt her. You were always going to, no matter what you did.
“No.” His pretense of control was going to fragment. He craved the sight of her face, the sensation of her skin. He’d caressed so little of it, kissed even less. He wanted to rend her nightdress in his haste to set his lips against her.
She made a soft noise. “Very well. If you don’t intend to visit me tonight, then I’ll see to my own pleasure. I’ve heard few men care about a woman’s release, besides.”
Gabriel couldn’t prevent the onslaught of images: Lydia, pushing up her nightdress to slide her fingers into her slick cunny. Lydia, with her head flung back in ecstasy as she brought herself to climax. Whose name would she call at that moment? Whose face would she picture as she pleasured herself?
