Page 54 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo
“Have they?”
“… No,” she admitted glumly.
He lifted a challenging eyebrow.
“Not in pastries anyhow,” she amended.
His lip twitched in an almost charming semblance of a smile. “You eat. I’ll bathe. How perfectly civilized we’ll be.”
“Oh yes,” she mockingly agreed. “It’ll be breakfast, a bath, and then a bit of rape before tea.”
He cast her another one of his scalding looks. One that made her wonder if as much steam rose from her skin as did from his bath. Turning from her, he peeled his shirt off unnecessarily wide, smooth shoulders before announcing, “One cannot rape one’s wife.”
Lorelai really did desire to summon a rejoinder, but the salaciousness of his statement coupled with the sight of his skin struck her completely dumb.
She couldn’t say why it pleased her to discover that she’d been right about the tattoo on his back. Fanned over mounds and mounds of sculpted muscle, a black-winged tattoo flexed and flowed with astounding artistry, leaving no expanse of flesh uncovered. If she were anything other than a practical—some would say cynical—woman of a certain age, she’d truly believe he could spread those dusky wings and take to the skies.
Her disobedient fingers itched to stroke the designs. To splay against the smooth flesh beneath and discover— Oh heavens! He’d dropped his trousers.
Gasping, Lorelai spun around, but not before she caught sight of his lean hips and a backside that had once not been so thick.
What else had changed in twenty years? She’d peeked where she ought not to have done when they were young. Did men change… intimately as well as they matured?
Stop it!she admonished herself. These treacherous thoughts didn’t bear consideration. She must keep her wits about her, if she were ever to survive this ordeal.
“You couldn’t be more wrong.” She replaced her wicked thoughts with traumatic memories of Veronica’s pleas echoing through their wing of Southbourne Manor as Mortimer violently forced himself upon her. Lorelai would tremble in her bed, helplessly weeping for her. And she’d often go to her after, helping the injured woman off the floor, or from wherever she’d been discarded, and into her nightgown.
Every time we’re broken, we get back up and limp along.
“Wrong? About what?” he queried.
“A man can absolutely rape his wife. Legally or no, there is no mistaking the sound of the deed. The terror, the pain, and the…” She swallowed vehement emotion. “The irrevocability of it.”
He met this with another of his infuriating silences. The sloshing sounds of displaced water drew insolent pictures in her mind of what she might find when she turned around.
Unwilling to do so, Lorelai drifted closer to the table and inspected the food laid out artfully upon it. She could have been at the sideboard of any royal, all told. Not only did she find croissants and apricot marmalade, but Devonshire cream, various tarts, thick slabs of crisped bacon, flat, round foreign cakes soaked through with melted butter. Next to these she found a syrupy amber liquid darker and less thick than honey. Little coils of steam rose from silver coffee and teapots.
Suddenly she felt faint with hunger.
She supposed that obstinately starving would serve no purpose at all. If she were to escape her fate, she’d need the strength a hearty breakfast and some strong coffee would allow her.
With her unsteady gait, she made her way around the table and daintily claimed the green chair, which placed the copper tub in her periphery. She stubbornly avoided looking at the dark head and wide shoulders above the rim as she slathered a croissant with a generous portion of marmalade and tucked into it with more relish than she allowed herself to display.
If she had to look away from her plate, she made a point of staring out of the windows, as more and more of the mist dissipated, unveiling an emerald sea.
“You know.” His cavernous voice broke the silence, causing her to start and nearly choke on a splendid bite. “If you weren’t so fixated on the physical aspect, you might bring yourself to consider that marriage to me could be the best thing that ever happened to you.”
Though she’d promised herself not to look, he’d stunned her enough to evoke an openmouthed gape in his direction. He scrubbed his long, decorated arms with some sort of pumice stone lathered with soap. In complete contrast to his back, colorful tattoos wended their way across his chest, his shoulders, and stretched down the swells of his arms all the way to the wrists. Lather covered some of their particulars, and she snapped her eyes back down to her plate before she became completely transfixed by the shapes and forms.
“How could it possibly?” she marveled. “Other than your infamy, what do you have to offer me? I’d be the wife of one of the most wanted men in the world.”
“Granted, but you’d be the wife of one of the wealthiest men in the world.”
“Your wealth means nothing to me,” she said tartly. “I’d rather starve than remain married to you.”
“You say that because you have never starved.”
Something about the way he stated this left no question that he had.
