Page 99 of The Wolf Duke's Wife
“It is not my house you need to like,” he said without turning, “it is me.”
The words landed between them. He had not meant to say them aloud. Tristan reeled, clamping his lips shut and gazing out of the window as though the Regent were parading through the green. Christine set the Reeve’s list down. They whispered against the wood.
“Then we have no problems to resolve,” she said quietly.
He faced her. She looked very much herself again now. Color had returned to her lips. Her eyes were bright with argument, the stubborn intelligence that made him both admire and want to conquer her. She had been nearly stolen from him within the hour. That fact still sat in his chest like a stone. He crossed the room in two long steps before he could think better of it.
“Do you know what it does to me,” he asked, quietly, “to imagine you in a cart with a rope on your wrists?”
She did not retreat. “I walked down a lane in the sun. A lane in England, close to the heart of civilization.”
“Better to wander the Highlands of Scotland. London’s roads are dangerous. You werehunted,” he said, and the word was a splinter in his mouth.
“By fools,” she said.
“By someone’s order,” he countered. “Which is worse. You will not take foolish chances again.”
Christine rose, chin lifting. “I did not think that I had.”
“I am telling you, you did!” Tristan snapped, stepping closer.
“No, you are shouting at me.”
“I am not!” Tristan shouted.
Her eyebrow twitched. Her lips twitched. Tristan heard himself. He laughed, pinching the bridge of his nose, lowering his head. Christine’s arms went about his head and shoulders, pulling him closer. He let his forehead come to rest on her shoulders and felt her breath against his neck. Her scent was maddening. Nothing he had ever smelled could inflame his senses like that.
She touched the side of his face. Tracing the contours with quick, dancing fingers. Teasing and ghostly. He turned his head and felt the quick flutter of her pulse under the delicate skin of her throat.
“I brought you here,” he said, the words rougher than he intended. “I should have taken you home. I did not because you asked me not to. I am discovering that this is how you win every battle.”
She does win every battle because I give in before those eyes that melt my resolve.
“It is how I win the only ones that matter,” she said.
Her mouth tipped, defiant and tender all at once. “The ones I can share.”
He did not kiss her then. He studied her as if he could memorize the arrangement of light on skin, the way the glow of lamplight caressed the curves of her face. She had a way of meeting him without flinching from the worst of him. It made him want to do things with his hands that had nothing to do with pens, coins, or ledgers.
“Lock the door,” he said, and the sound of his own voice raked along his spine.
I nearly lost her. I might never have seen her again. I will make the most of her when I have her. Damn it all!
Her eyes widened, not in fear, but in thrilled excitement. He did not move until he heard the clean, decisive sound of the bolt. That mundane noise had never sounded so wicked. Inside him, something stirred, a thing he had not known in years.
“You will be angry by supper,” he said, remembering Mother Hobb’s prescription, “and tired by night.”
“Then we must make profitable use of the noon,” she answered, and there the last of his good sense took a brief holiday.
He edged the table aside with his hip so it would not bruise her, slid an arm around her waist, and felt the warm give of her as she came up against him. There was no startlement now, only the quick intake of breath that told him she wanted and dared. He kissed her, slow enough to taste the honey on her tongue, deep enough to banish, for one suspended moment, the picture of her in that damned cart. Her hands found his shoulders, then the line of his jaw, mapping him as if she were learning him by touch.
“You always smell of the woods,” she whispered when she surfaced. “of rain and bark. And…” she buried her face in his hair and inhaled deeply, “leather and coffee.”
“And you,” he returned, mouth at the curve of her neck, “like a garden that refuses to be pruned and tidied.”
“Good,” she said, a little breathless, “because I do.”
He laughed softly, an unfamiliar sound in his own mouth, and pressed his forehead to hers to steady himself. He had intended to be careful, to be the man who remembered doors and the village below and the mayor who had just earned his respect. Instead, he found himself greedy for the proof that she was here, alive, stubborn, warm.
