But his heart was wanting. It had been forever blackened at seventeen.
No, he couldn’t claim youth as an excuse. Now he had only to confess the very worst of it—the very worst of him—and alienate her forever.
“He was a young man, about my age, out for trouble, just as I was. We dared the other to strike. Two stupid young cocks trying to sharpen their spurs on each other.” The bitterness of the memory seeped into his tone.
He rubbed at his forehead, at the memory of what fools the both of them had been. “I struck him until he went down, until he went still. But… it wasn’t enough. The rage, it just grew hotter with each swing of my arm. So I kept striking him. Even when he wouldn’t move. I struck him until his face was nothing more than fragments of bone and bits of brain.” At the memory, his knuckles ached, but not as much the hollow space behind his breastbone. “After, without a thought, without a care for him, I went home.”
He’d no idea what had become of the young man—whether he had family who keened their sorrow at his demise, whether he had a sweetheart left bereft at the loss of him—he didn’t even know his name.
Sebastian looked at the knuckles that had done that terrible thing, watching the scars stretch and pull as he flexed his fingers.
He’d never again see those hands fasten on her flesh, would never hear her soft sighs as he ran those hands along her skin.
Because these were the hands of a murderer.
Easier to look at those hands rather than her expression, coward that he was.
“My mother was entertaining one of her friends, Mrs. Hathaway, when I returned,” he went on. “I overheard them discussing my wildness and my mother’s worries, and Mrs. Hathaway said very clearly, ‘Well, Sebastian’s blood is finally showing.’” He tried to swallow past the dryness in his throat, feeling as if he’d eaten a full bucket of ash. “I knew what she meant. She meant my Mexican blood, that I was only living up to the heritage of our people.”
He tried to swallow again, but it was too much, his throat too tight.
He distinctly remembered his mother’s reaction to those words, the way her chin had dipped low—dragged down by the weight of him and his madness.
“She was right,” he said. The words were coming with difficulty now, each one pulled from somewhere far past his throat.
He hadn’t been free to comfort his mother—because he was covered to his forearms in another man’s blood.
“She was right,” he repeated, “but not in the way she thought. It was my father’s blood that was showing, not that of my mother.”
What’s bred in the bone will come out in the blood.
The rest came in a rush, his throat somehow unstopped. “I was killing my mother, just as my father had, only with my wickedness rather than my fists. I resolved then and there to spend the rest of my life doing penance for it. And for every evil thing I’d done before then.”
Her eyes, her posture, the very essence of her was still and solemn. There wasn’t a hint of give in her frame. She ought to be running screaming from the room to hide behind her mother’s skirts, especially after what that animal McCade had done to her.
But she remained. She was so quiet, so somber, as he bared the worst of himself to her, as he flayed himself before her.
“I didn’t know how, at first… how to eradicate the evil within me.” He gestured to the books surrounding her. “That’s where the notebooks came from. Each time I had any kind of sensation, good or bad, I put it in there. Eventually, I stopped experiencing most sensations.”
“I noticed that. From the entries.”
Had he imagined the softening of her voice? He must have. She wouldn’t show mercy to a murderer like him.
She was rising, the books falling from her skirts like so many dead leaves as she came toward him.
Knowing she would have to sweep past him as she made for the door, he held himself stiff to keep from reaching out to her.
But she didn’t leave.
She wrapped her arms around him instead.
He stood rigid in her embrace, not daring to believe this was real, that she could be doing such a thing after everything he’d told her.
The scent of her surrounding him, the press of her chest against him, the bands of her arms along his back, the silk of her hair against his neck—it was all the product of his fevered brain.
It couldn’t be real. He didn’t deserve it to be real.
“Sebastian,” she said quietly, and he ached to hear her say his name, “you said that only two people use your given name. How many people touch you?”
He closed his eyes against the sweet pain of that. “None.”
“Well, now there is one person who touches you. Me.” Tender enough to slice straight to his heart.
He’d been correct at their first meeting. She would draw his blood, but he’d had no way of knowing it would be his heart’s blood, that she would set him to inwardly bleeding with her softness.
Her forgiveness.
He put an arm around her, pulling her deeper as he tipped her face toward his, her skin yielding, supple.
“Why?” he asked. “What I’ve done…” He faltered under the press of her against him, the knowledge she had not left. “It’s a mortal sin.”
“It is. You will have to do penance your entire life for it.” She raised her little hand to his cheek, the weight of it surprisingly heavy. “And you will do penance. You already have. You are even now. An evil man would never go to such lengths to make amends for what he’d done. An evil man wouldn’t deserve this.”
She raised herself to brush her lips to his.
He closed his eyes against the unfamiliar burning there, a prickling he hadn’t felt since before his father died. Her mouth was whisper-soft against his as her hand cupped his cheek.
Something wetly hot traveled down his face to graze her fingers.
Sebastian wouldn’t have been more surprised had rain fallen from a clear, blue sky.
He set his forehead to hers, his breath stuttering through his chest. “I don’t deserve this.”
“None of us do.” Tinged with exquisite sadness. “That’s the beauty of forgiveness.”
Forgiveness. He didn’t deserve it. Yet he found, as with her kiss, he could not refuse what she offered. Could not refuse her.
Perhaps his mother was right. Perhaps the time to unbend had come. To unbend to Isabel.
He could already feel himself doing so, the core of him leaning into her. Violence had made him what he was, violence had set her in his path.
Yet perhaps there was hope. Was this sensation hope, this lightness? This wonder within him that bent him toward her? He wasn’t certain.
He only knew he could no longer suppress any emotion she called forth from him.
Chapter Seventeen
Isabel lay with the sheets twisted round her waist, listening in the dark as the clock struck two.
Her mind was too much occupied to sleep, but she didn’t dare leave her room. She knew, just knew, her mother was listening from the room next door.
She also knew Sebastian was awake, somewhere in the house.
The air fairly hums with it.
The air around her was humming right now, snapping and crackling against her skin. Her legs ached with the urge to find him. She kicked the sheet away in frustration, the cool of night washing across her skin as the nightgown bunched at the tops of her thighs.
Those notebooks had been revelatory. His confession had been heartbreaking.
He might look as she imagined St. Ignatius did, but it was St. Augustine’s words that echoed as she read those books.
I confess.
The words written there had been both penance and confession, as he worked to make amends for what he had done. It didn’t lessen the severity of his crime—which was severe, make no mistake—but the effort behind those amends!
All those pages and pages as he eradicated his emotions, his very self. She wanted to weep again at th
e memory. She’d held her tears until after she left the library, not wanting him to see and think they were meant as censure of him.
He had censured himself more than enough.
She wept for him, for the young man whose life he’d ended, for his mother, and finally for herself.
Because tomorrow the trial would resume. She’d play the part she’d been assigned in all this, play it as best she could, then return to Cabrillo.
She’d never wished so hard that things could have been different. She could have met him years ago, on a trip to visit her cousins, met him quite naturally. They could have courted as normal people did, as she and Joaquin had. Such a meeting wouldn’t have been choked with these forced confessions and this strained intimacy.
But without that force, would either of them have cracked?
And, oh Lord, when he cracked…
I want.
It was only the smallest part of what he’d written in that last entry, the one that sent a fire through her, but it was the only part she could whisper, even in the privacy of her thoughts.
If she imagined the rest of it, those crude words would bring to mind in stark detail all the carnal things she wanted to do with him in the dead of night, and she would melt right into this bed.
She threw her head back into the pillow as she imagined finding him tonight, undressed as she was and aching, aching for him. The pleasure that hit her was so sharp, she rolled her fist into her belly for relief.
Lord, grant me chastity and continence. But not yet.
More words of St. Augustine’s. But the saint had been a coward compared to Sebastian. The marshal hadn’t asked for continence—he had seized it himself, with both hands, holding it as tightly as…
As tightly as she wanted him to hold her.
Lord, grant me chastity and continence.
But not yet.
She kicked her legs over the side of the bed. The floor was cold and hard under her feet as she slipped as quietly as she could from her room, her ears straining for any sound.
She hardly breathed as she went past the bedroom doors, her lungs burning and her ears near to bursting with the silence. When she made it to the stairs without incident, she sucked in sweet, cool air as a reward.
I want, I want.
The beat of it drove her all the way to the library doors.
Where she stopped.
He was there, she knew—his vitality, his bulk, radiated through the very walls. If she put her hand to the door, the wood itself would breathe with him.
She held up her own hands for inspection, spreading the fingers wide. Thin and long, too stretched to be dainty or ladylike, the skin there smooth.
His hands were large, scarred—the hands of a murderer.
She wanted those hands over every inch of her skin.
She’d had a murderer’s hands on her before. Hands bent on murdering her.
Her entire self, every atom of her rebelled at the memory, fought to throw off the phantom image of McCade’s hands on her.
Yet at the thought of Sebastian’s hands on her, those same atoms arched towards the door, toward him, bowing her back as they did. His hands had never brought her pain—only pleasure. And comfort.
Always, comfort.
After what had happened to her, after what she’d learned of him today, what did it mean to desire Sebastian so fiercely?
It meant… nothing.
Nothing at all. She hadn’t been damaged or broken by McCade’s assault. Wounded, yes, and she might always shy from hands at her throat, but she was still intact. She was hanging by her heels, but she was still herself.
Sebastian, no matter what his offenses, was no McCade. Hadn’t she known from the very first, no matter what darkness peered out from within him, that she had nothing to fear?
There was no fear between them—only desire.
Now she would finish turning him upside down.
The door swung in with only the slightest pressure, as if it had been waiting for her fingertips all along.
He was there, as she had known he’d be, sprawled in a chair in the most shocking state of undress. He wore nothing but trousers and a shirt unbuttoned to the waist, his hair in disarray, as if he’d been running his fingers through it while waiting for her.
Lounging there, with his chest and feet bare, he looked a perfect beast. Every erg of power in him was openly, nakedly, displayed for her.
She shivered at the sight of him, but not with fear. Never with fear.
His eyes were silver with hesitation, rather than dark with certainty. For all of the brutishness he was parading before her, he was undecided still.
Well, she would have to convince him, now wouldn’t she?
Time for one more confession from him.
“What you wrote in your last entry,” she said, heat flooding her cheeks as the words danced before her. “Did you mean it?”
He shifted in the chair, spreading his legs wide as he leaned forward. “Yes.” His voice was all rasp and file now, not a hint of gold left in it. He crooked one heavy finger at her. “Come here.”
She gazed at him sitting there, crouched like some great beast about to devour her. The illusion held until she saw his eyes.
Those eyes never would obey him—and now they betrayed his unease at this flaunting of himself.
“No.” She lifted her chin. “You come here.”
His smile was all the more wicked for being so unexpected. “You are magnificently difficult.”
He rose from the chair, the heat of him buffeting her as he reduced the distance between them to mere inches.
The silver of his eyes had gone to pewter, but they could be darker yet.
“What now?” he asked. “Shall I kneel before you?”
Desire moved low in her belly, sharp, insistent, at the thought of him on his knees before her. “Yes,” she breathed.
He lowered himself before her, his hands gripping her thighs for balance, staring up at her in near-worshipful reverence. His eyes were onyx now, glitteringly black in the paleness of his face.
Her head spun with the sensation of having this man supplicant before her. This must have been how the great Queen Isabel felt after the last battle of the Reconquista, as her general knelt before her and informed her all Spain was hers to command.
But she, Isabel Moreno, had something much better than Spain under her command.
She had him.
She sunk her fingers into his hair, watching his eyes slip closed as she did. He was so beautiful, the male power of him in thrall to her, gentled only by the thread of her hand through the silk of his hair.
“Take off your shirt,” she ordered.
He released her to do so and she swayed; he’d been bracing her as much as she had been him. With a flick and a shrug his shirt was gone, the entirety of his torso bare to her. His hands came back to clasp at her thighs and she sighed at the rightness, the surety, of his touch.
She took in his unclothed chest, unable to do anything but look for long moments. He might fancy himself a Stoic, but his form was pure barbarian, hirsute and scarred.
The scar she had found but not seen lay stark before her eyes, running all the way from his left shoulder to carve around his rib cage, halting on the right side of his navel. She let her hand hover above it, waiting for him to stop her—because while she was in command, he had the right to refuse.
Her fingertips settled on the ridge of it, his hands remaining firm on her legs.
“How did this happen?” she asked.
“A knife fight.”
She shook her head as she followed the line of it down his torso. Only an inch more to the right and he wouldn’t be here. Her fingers tingled at the potential loss of him from under them. He gasped as she reached the end of the scar, the muscles of his belly pulling into tight relief.
“I feel I should warn you—” He cleared his throat in an odd manner. “I should inform you it has been quite some time…”
&nbs
p; She frowned. “Quite some time?” Comprehension dawned. “Ah. How long is quite some time?”
“I haven’t been… intimate with a lady since I was seventeen.”
She blinked. Of course, she should have known that, since it would have been in the notebooks if he had, but even so. Over a decade of chastity made him practically a virgin once more.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll be gentle.” Her smile turned sharp. “This first time.”
He smiled with his entire face at that, and her heart seized. She would give anything to possess all this man’s smiles.
“Well, then,” he said, “let’s finish this. Because I want to get to the part where you turn fierce.”
I want.
The words sank into her very bones, until she was nothing more than want herself.
“Kiss me,” she ordered.
He did, putting his mouth right on the quivering skin of her belly, a tongue-slick caress that made her knees crumble, even with the barrier of her gown between them. But his hands were there, holding her oh so tight and keeping her upright. She leaned her head back, closing her eyes to savor the press of him against her, his hot mouth sending shockwaves to buffet her from head to toe. Most especially in the core of her, right under that wicked mouth of his…
One of his hands traveled down her leg, sliding through the ticklish hollow at the back of her knee, curving around the line of her calf, before halting at her ankle and seizing a fistful of nightgown.
“May I?” he asked against her.
She ran a hand through his hair, savoring the sleek pull of it between her fingers. So polite.
Such politeness should be rewarded.
“Yes.”
He drew the fabric up her body with exquisite slowness, as if he were unveiling a priceless statue and wanted to prolong every drop of revelation.
She raised her arms to allow him to pull it over her head, after which he dropped it carelessly to the floor. His entire length was drawn taut with hunger.
He moved to grab her.
She held up a hand. “Wait.”
He stopped dead and his breathing went harsh. He was enjoying this game immensely, she realized, the lines of his neck and shoulder stark with anticipation rather than frustration.
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