Page 36 of The Wolf and the Wildflower
Jules stilled.
“There was a time, in those first few months when all I had were memories. Of my family, my friends, the life I lived and loved. Those memories became dangerous.”
“Why dangerous?”
“They were a taunt.”
“Could you…elaborate?”
“Those memories were a painful thing I would never again enjoy, a reminder of all I had lost and might never regain. The hope…the endless hope that I might see my family again was the worst. It is such an ugly feeling—hope. I cannot fathom why anyone believes it a good thing. It is merely endless wishing. I learned to discard those useless emotions like hope,” he said, his tone indifferent. “I did a good job. I can barely recall my father or what it felt like to love him.”
Something cracked inside her chest. Jules recalled that his father had died seven years past, yet the duke would have only learned of it a few weeks ago. Had the duchess realized everyone had received the chance to grieve that loss, but her son had not? “You miss your father.”
He said nothing, merely contemplated the night sky for long moments. “He died not knowing his son lived.”
Jules lifted her face to the sky as well. She wanted to offer him comfort, even though she did not understand how to. Would he even accept it? Her father would have known the right words to say. She frowned. Would they have been honest words from her father? Or merely methodical science to allow the duke to open more to him?
“I miss the feeling of someone touching me,” the duke said. “That is what I longed for the most when I lay awake in the dark.”
“You have not been touched in years.” The sense of loneliness and isolation would have been brutal to endure. Yet he had not been broken from the ordeal. A hunger to know everything about him curled through her, and she wondered if the need only resided in professional curiosity.
“Not by another person.”
She thought about the careful way he kept others from coming close, even his mother.
“Though I crave it, I do not like being touched by others,” he said, tone low and introspective. “It is an inexplicable feeling…this terrible want yet to also be repulsed by the notion.”
“Do you worry about what it might be like to…woo a lady, to eventually marry her and the intimacy required in such a union?”
The duke went astonishingly still. For some odd reason, Jules’s heartbeat had accelerated. “Pray do not distress yourself,” she said, sensing the biting tension climbing within him. “An answer is not necessary. My question was more to encourage retrospection than anything else.”
The duke turned to her, and to Jules’s surprise he took her chin in a firm clasp. Herpulse tapped briskly in her ears, and she affected a calm composure as theirgazes collided. The sharp angles in his face were arranged flawlessly and so beautifully, she was tempted to touch her fingers to his jawline.
“By what strange process of reasoning do you derive that I might be distressed?”
Such arrogance. Jules lifted a brow. “An erroneous conjecture on my part, I surmise. Do you feel odd to be touching me now?”
“We are not skin to skin. This is different.”
“Is it?”
His gray-blue eyes gleamed with harsh amusement.“Yes. There is a barrier, a distinct lack of sensation.”
“Have you willingly touched another recently?”
“No.”
Though he had given his word to be truthful, his honesty was painfully jarring. How far would he expose himself to her and she to him? Indefinable needs shifted in his gaze, burning the cobalt in his eyes to a brilliant hue. That peculiar ache tightened her throat. “What are you thinking now, James?”
“That I want my Wildflower to touch me and that perhaps I wish to touch her as well. Skin to skin, without any gloves on our hands.”
Jules’s heart stuttered inside her chest.His wildflower?Somewhere the professional wall between them had cracked, and Jules suspected it was from as early as the promise of an exchange of truth. Honesty revealed vulnerabilities and pain and hunger and fear. To be truthful revealed the part of oneself that is kept hidden and that they would give this caveat to each other surely exceeded any professional relationship she had been foolish to think they would have.
A touch.
Such a simple request yet so complicated. The duke’s eyes gleamed with sudden humor, and it rendered him most charming.
“Would you be willing to, Wildflower?”
