Page 57 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo
Eek.She slammed her eyes shut. That had definitively grown along with the rest of him in twenty years.
“Tell me you do not, and I’ll tell you you’re a liar.”
Her lips parted to deny it, but not a word escaped.
“You may do what any other has died a torturous and painful death for even attempting.”
“What is that?” She blinked up at him, resolutely watching his eyes and never drifting lower.
“Use me.” He held his arms out, hands up like a pagan sacrificial offering. “Wield me, Lorelai. I am at your discretion. I am at your disposal. Whip me, bind me, torture me, degrade me. Any need you have, I will fulfill. Any curiosity you can conceive of, I will provide the answer.”
The first smile she’d ever witnessed spread over his fiendishly sensual lips. It was the smile of a shark, all teethand temptation. “Out there, I am captain and I am king. In this chamber, you rule me. You command me.”
His eyes captured hers, and where she’d seen voids before she now saw nothing but opportunity. And something else. Something… she might have once called yearning.
“You own me.”
CHAPTERTWELVE
He’d have done it all again, the Rook decided.
He’d have waded through twenty years of hell and oceans of blood to get to this moment. To see Lorelai’s eyes glitter like the most precious gems in the Amsterdam markets. They sparkled with the cerulean agony of indecision.
Reality touched her with more beauty than his memory ever could. Even as tenaciously as he’d clutched at the memory of her visage, twenty years had dimmed certain details in his mind’s eye. He’d remembered the unruly tendrils of gold at her temples, but not the matching flecks of gold in the azure of her irises. Likewise, the brilliance of her smile had benighted many of his dreams, but he’d forgotten that beloved dimple in her cheek. Just the one.
Time and melancholy had robbed some of the hope from her eyes, and the light from her smile. But none of her beauty.
If there was a better word for perfection, he would have used it.
The years, the sun, and the sea had been far unkinder to him.
Touch me.He didn’t ask. He didn’t beg.
Not out loud.
The Rook begged no one. He asked nothing. He commanded. He ordered. He decreed.
He used his cunning and ruthlessness to get what he wanted. He’d used it to get her here, into this room, in fact. He was the kind of man that ruined people. One way or another. And something had whispered to him that the moment he’d found his way back to Lorelai, he’d ruin her, too.
But for twenty long years she’d been the grit in his oyster. The one memory he could not be rid of. The obsession that had kept him alive. Had driven him to survive what so many had not.
He’d had his weak moments, of course, where he’d wondered if she was some halcyon specter of the past. Unreal and unattainable. He feared he’d find her a figment of perfection his defective mind had somehow enshrined as a mechanism for survival. His memory was faulty, after all. His brain seemed to work differently than others’. When men became impassioned, hot, and angry, he became cool, remote, and unfeeling.
He closely watched those around him, their hearts on fire with greed and lust and so many other human emotions. It made them reckless and illogical, but that fire also made them strong, tenacious, and brave.
Were he capable of envy, the Rook would have coveted that very human heat. But he realized early on his heart was made of other stuff. His internal workings emulated the complications of gears and cogs found in a watch. His was a clockwork heart. Where others’ beat and burned, his only tick, tick,tickedaway the hours, the minutes, theseconds that separated him from one other soul on this enormous globe.
Lorelai.
Every year he suffered, every chain he broke, every possession he took, and every man he killed, he’d done it in her name. Knowing all the while, she’d not want any of it. That she’d reject who he’d become the moment she laid eyes on him. It’d occurred to him she might even have moved on. Fallen for someone else, some gentle, pretty lord, and given him a brood of children.
Would he have taken her if that were the case? Stolen her from a happy life?
Probably.
He’d become a monster, after all, and monsters did monstrous things, despite the consequence to anyone else.
In fact, he could scarce believe that he’d found her just as he’d left her. Untouched by another. Unloved.
