Page 36 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo
Before she could process what was happening, he spun her to face the bed.
He stood behind her now, one arm clamped around her, just above her breasts, as he relieved her of her tiara and veil and tossed it to the ground, heedless of the glittering precious heirlooms.
She barely noted the tug as the bulk of her awareness was completely focused on the bed in front of her. A decadent, cavernous thing, the canopy strung with enough vibrant silk to shame Salome. The coverlet belonged in a sultan’s harem, stitched with a riot of silver thread into sensual patterns across a vivid blend of fabrics.
She couldn’t have conjured a more dissimilar wedding bower to the one she’d expected to endure this night.
They stood like that for several silent, heaving breaths as the storm raged outside, tossing the boat this way and that. His powerful legs stabilized them both. His thighs flexed against the curve of her rump in a disquieting dance with the unstable ground beneath them.
Rather than bother with a bustle, Lorelai had favored gathers and ruffles for a train, and she regretted that now, as every swell and sinew of his well-hewn body pressed against her back with naught but a fabric barrier.
The short but heavy breaths pressing his chest against her contradicted his inscrutability.
“Where are you taking us?” she ventured, frantically trying to distract them both from the bed looming right before them.
“Wherever I desire.” His arm kept her prisoner against his unyielding bulk, as the questing fingers of his free hand continued to delve into her hair. He whispered something against her skin, but her heart beat too loudly in her earsfor her to correctly perceive it. Questing lips trailed over her skin. He paused at heart-stopping intervals to drag in deep lungfuls of air as though he could store her essence inside of him.
“After everything…” He released a harsh breath. “Aftertwenty years. You aremine.”
A note in his voice froze Lorelai in place. Not with fear, but something adjacent to it. For the first time, humanity seeped into his timbre, and along with it some terrible mélange of bleak rage and awestruck anticipation. It was as though he were as astonished as she to have found themselves here.
So many questions stung like vicious wasps behind her lips, but she was too much a coward to give them breath. Ash would have patiently answered each one. But the Rook?
Who knew the depravity of which he was capable?
A hoarse gasp of shock escaped her as he roughly bent her over the bed, imprisoning her with his hips as he unlaced her gown with rough tugs against her ribs.
It was the thickening shape of his sex against her backside that finally galvanized Lorelai from panic into action. She clawed her way up the counterpane, kicking out at him from behind with her ineffectual leg and scrambling across the bed. It was an undignified retreat, to be sure, but an effective one.
Lorelai thrashed and struggled against her unwieldy skirts, but finally gained her feet by way of a clumsy roll. Now she stood against the terror of the high seas with only a bed between them. Blinking rapidly, she found him staring across at her with a possessive savagery she’d not expected from a face that had thus far been so carefully expressionless.
And yet he made no move to follow her.
“I’mnotyours,” she declared, rather courageously, in her opinion. She’d meant to say more, to talk sense into this barbarian, but a tightness in her chest stole her capacity for breath, and thereby, words. Her vision began to blur, distorting his brutal visage and clarifying the motes of dust sparkling in the dim silver light of the storm, aided by a few flickering lanterns.
Lorelai had never known true fear before. She’d lived her life under the thumb of a cruel and intemperate bully. But the trepidation and anxiety she’d considered a part of her every interaction with Mortimer ill prepared her for this pure, mortal terror.
She’d thought she understood what helpless was.
She’d had no idea.
A detached part of her marveled at it. Athim. This man crafted of lethal strength and absolute Cimmerian ferocity. She had held him so long ago whilehetrembled in pain and fear as a boy. She’d brushed that inky hair away from those austere eyes and coaxed reluctant smiles from his hard mouth.
In this moment, no one would believe such a thing possible. Were her memories a lie? Had he never touched her with gentle deference? Had he always been this callous, violent beast?
Where are you, Ash?
For he was not here. Not with her in this room. Not inside the sinister villain who wielded his muscle and sinew to devastating effect.
Lorelai’s chest burned and her heart hurled itself against its cage. Finally, her body forced her to expel a breath she hadn’t realized she’d kept trapped in her lungs.
The movement drew his gaze to her bosom.
Glancing down, Lorelai found that her loosened bodice had drifted to her waist. Her corset pinched her breastshigh enough that the shameful pink crescents of her areolas crested above the contraption, the abundant flesh quivering in time to the trembles of her body. If she’d been wearing her own cotton camisole, it would have shielded her flesh from his view. But Veronica’s gauzy French chemise, so iridescent it barely deserved the name, shimmered like gossamer hummingbird’s wings, revealing more than it concealed.
With an indecorous squeak, she yanked her bodice up to her shoulders, clutching it to her décolletage.
A flash of lightning turned his eyes into silver embers, glinting every bit as hard and hot as tempered steel. “Come here, Lorelai,” he ordered. Was his voice less steady than before? Or had she imagined it thus?
