Page 78 of A Proposition for the Comte
‘And you will deal with it?’
‘Easily.’
She laughed. ‘It must be so satisfying to believe in yourself like you do.’
‘Don’t you?’
She couldn’t answer. As a child she had lost her mother, and then her father and stepmother had not wished for her company. Lately, though, after the hard years with Harland, she had been starting to regain something of herself, an independence and bravery, but even that was difficult. ‘It’s hard to be brave when you are so afraid.’
‘And yet you stopped your carriage to pick me up?’
‘Perhaps there is an end-point in fear, then. A place where you turn back into life because there is nowhere else left to go.’
‘Or perhaps you were always a lot more courageous than you thought you were. You are shivering.’
He brought her against him, his warmth seeping through her coldness, the demons and ghosts of the past shifting from the light into the shadows. ‘Come, let us get warm again.’
Always with him there was a sort of magic in touch, a connection that startled her. She felt it now in the promise of what might come next.
The bed was an old one with embroidered hangings on each side sporting images of deer and lions and horses entwined in bowers of ivy. He had removed his boots and his breeches followed.
His skin was so much darker than her own, the contrast making her smile, though when his hand came to cup her breast she was consumed by another feeling altogether.
Breathlessness. And anticipation. Her body rose up to meet his.
She was so damn responsive, nipples hardened and her arms around his neck bringing him in. There were freckles on her chest and her arms, a smattering of darkness on skin so pale he could see the blue blood lines upon it.
Differences.
The want in him built and breached like waves inside, a need that was so foreign it made him disorientated, the cool controlled world he’d always lived in shattered into pieces and falling to his feet like snowflakes.
Drifting.
If he lost her...
His finger came up to the mark under her eye, the dark bruise lighter now.
‘Je te veux plus que je ne veux la vie elle-même.’
The words were said before he knew it and he wondered if she had any fluency in his language. He seldom spoke during lovemaking and rarely used French while in England, but Violet took away logic and replaced it with a desire that came from within and unbidden.
God, he was becoming a man he hardly recognised and she most certainly had never given him any troth of permanence. She’d refused his offer of marriage, after all, and insisted only on lust.
His mouth came down more roughly than he meant given his recent thoughts and he made himself slow down. She had been honest with him and that was all that he could ask. Now he needed to be honest, too.
He felt her breath hitch as he stroked her and understood that in lust there also lay pathways to something more. Her fingers dug into his back and he revelled in the pain of them for a slack response would allow him nothing.
Bringing her under him he came in with intent, no question in what he wanted, what they both wanted, the intimacy cleaving them as one. The past and the future disappeared as their blood beat in unison, cancelling out all that they lost when alone.
Faith, he thought, and tried to find the edge of something else, as well. Truth was there, as was relief. Relief that he should have had the luck to be found by a woman who completed him.
He broke away after their release, lying on his back and looking up at the ceiling laced in shadow. He could no longer pretend that she was only a companion in the pleasures of the flesh. It seemed wrong and belittling in the face of all that was unsaid.
‘I want you more than I want life itself.’ Her voice came through the silence, a word for word translation of what he had said before.
‘You speak French?’
‘Fluently.’
