“Do you need assistance with your buttons?” he queried through clenched teeth.
Her knees quivered, but not for the reason one might have assumed. “No. I can manage.”
Nora turned away from him, back toward the window, and lifted her fingers to the buttons of her bodice. Even though she still wore her sling most of the day, he’d encouraged her to use her arm to strengthen it, including getting dressed in the morning. She’d abandoned the sling for tea with Morley, and still felt fairly well off without it.
She’d only sent for dresses that buttoned up the front and—since she’d thought it unfair to ask a lady’s maid to hide away with her—generally prevailed upon one of her sisters to arrange her hair in a loose braid down her back.
As she gingerly shucked the bodice down her shoulders, she felt more exposed in her chemise and loose, low-slung corset than she had certain times when she’d been nude.
It might have been the way Titus’s gaze snagged the edge of her corset, where it barely came high enough to cover her nipple. He immediately looked away, his gaze affixing to some distant point behind her as a vein appeared on his forehead.
“You’ll excuse me for not attending to this earlier. I was escorting Mrs. St. John to Lady Trenwyth’s.” He made a terse gesture for her to sit on the chaise before him, which she did. “Higgins is still there getting her settled,” he offered by way of explanation as he rummaged in his bag for a minuscule yet wickedly sharp pair of scissors.
He pulled the table in front of her forward and perched on the edge. Their knees had to mingle in between each other’s in order for him to get close enough to reach her stitches.
She tried not to notice the outline of his thighs against the fabric of his trousers.
Despite his apparent ire and sharp, jerky motions, he was infinitely gentle and precise as he snipped through the stitches on her shoulder and plucked them out with clever metal tweezers.
He’d brought the scent of the city indoors with him, soot and the hint of crisp air as summer gave way to autumn. The aromas underscored other fragrances she was beginning to associate with him. Something sharp and clean, like stringent soap softened by the camphor-like essence of his aftershave.
He was fastidious with his hygiene, his teeth clean and cared for, his thick hair tamed by pomade, at least in the mornings. By this time in the afternoon, that wicked forelock, the color of burnt caramel, escaped to brush his eye, making him appear even younger than his thirty years.
Her fingers itched to smooth it out of his warm whiskey eyes. To trace the topography of his stern features with a cartographer’s fervor. To rediscover terrain she’d mapped just over a decade ago. Not just with her fingers, but with her lips, as well.
She wondered if he tasted like he used to.
Her mouth watered so violently her cheeks stung with it.
“Thank you for seeing to Mrs. St. John with such alacrity.” She lowered her chin, tilting her head as if she might catch his gaze.
It remained firmly upon her shoulder as he worked.
“It is my responsibility to look after my patient’s wellbeing. Your gratitude isn’t necessary.” He discarded the last of her stitches onto a tray and stood, stepping around to stand at her back, where he expertly went to work on the exit wound.
A rebellious ire welled within her breast, overflowing until she thought she might choke on it.
What had he to be so annoyed about? He’d the perfect chance to be rid of her, and he’d insisted she stay. She’d not embarrassed him in front of his paramour, which had been utterly well done of her, considering that she’d been tempted to scratch the woman’s eyes out. So, what had ignited his remarkably long fuse?
With each stitch he pulled free, that much more of her self-containment was likewise undone, until, when he set his instruments down on the tray with a clatter, she could contain herself no longer. “I’m enjoying your hostility today. It’s quite naked.”
His exhale contained the long-suffering of every man who’d ever been trapped alone in a room with a confounding woman. “I’m not hostile. I’m aghast. For the past decade, I’d accepted that I’d been thrown over so you could be the woman you were portrayed as in the society papers. The ideal aristocrat. The ton’s true beauty. Woodhaven was your cousin of some distance. Did you not realize what kind of man you were marrying? Did you understand what being a Viscountess would cost you?”
For reasons inexplicable, his questions enraged her.
“I didn’t marry William to be a Viscountess. I married him because—” She couldn’t say it. Even when they were angry with each other, she couldn’t lay the blame at his feet. Because it didn’t belong there. Not really.
She’d made the choice, even though she’d done it to save him from her father. She burned to tell him that. But what good would that cruelty do now?
“I married William because he was chosen for me. And we got on nominally well at first. He didn’t show me his true self until a year had passed, and by then it was too late. He was a small, bitter man. And so, yes, I resigned myself to my fate as his wife. I endured his tortures and his spite. I advanced his position in society as hostess. I covered up his indiscretions—”
“Not without committing indiscretions of your own,” he muttered.
Antagonism drove her to her feet, and she whirled to face him. “How dare you condemn me for that. You haven’t exactly been a monk, or have you already forgotten your time alone with the shapely widow, Mrs. Annabelle Rhodes, just last night?”
His frown deepened to a scowl, but he remained silent as he gathered the paper he’d placed her stitches on and folded it, presumably for the rubbish bin.
Her eyes narrowed. “I’ve known a few hypocrites in my day, but I’d never imagined you were one of them.”
He dropped the paper on the tray, shadows gathering on his features like ominous storm clouds. “I didn’t touch Annabelle last night. I ended it with her.”
Nora expelled a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding since meeting the woman. But the information, welcome as it was, didn’t douse her ire. “Well, I haven’t touched a man for ages, and yet you’re still obviously upset.”
“Not about—that isn’t what I—” He broke off with a growl, wrapping his instruments in cloth and tossing them back in his bag. “I don’t condemn you for having…needs. But the Stags of St. James, Nora? You would pay prostitutes?” He squared his shoulders to her, his chest heaving as his volume increased. “For Christ’s sake, you carried on an affair with the man who would become your sister’s fiancé—”
“Only because they looked like you!”
He froze.
She clapped her hand over her mouth. But it was too late.
The truth had already escaped.
“What…are you saying?” His broad shoulders were bunched, straining against his shirtsleeves, his skin white over clenched knuckles. He was assembled like a sleek and predatory cat, his muscles gathered as if he might lunge.
Or flee.
Nora’s own breath sawed in and out of her as if she’d run a league, but now that it had been said, the rest of it tumbled out of her like an avalanche of truth. “They were all tall, strong, and brutally handsome, with umber hair and…coarse hands. That’s what I looked for when I selected a lover. Square, capable hands like yours, rough from working. It didn’t matter what color his eyes were because I would… turn out the lights. Would make them be silent. Like we were the night we were together.”
“Nora.” Her name escaped him like a warning. Or a plea. His expression caught somewhere in between torment and relief. He shook his head, slowly, but she didn’t know what he meant by it.
And she couldn’t seem to stop herself now.
“You said nothing that night,” she marveled, much as she’d done so many times in the years since when she’d taken the memory of their first time together to cherish. “You asked no permissions and you offered no effusions. You just knew what I wanted, an
d you gave it to me. We just…existed. And it was perfect. So, every man I paid, any lover I took, any time I found completion beneath someone’s body, I—” She broke away, her jaw working to the side as she grappled with emotion too powerful to suppress any longer.
“It was all a parody. A shadow of what we’d done. Of what I wanted—yearned for—every night of my life, thereafter. I took others to my bed to erase the memory of what my husband did to me, but in my mind. In my heart. I never made love to anyone but you.” She ventured forward, reaching out for him. Feeling bare and raw and exceedingly vulnerable.
“Don’t.” He held up a hand, effectively freezing her in place with her arm still outstretched. Her silent plea for comfort unheeded. “Don’t you fucking dare,” he seethed, pinning her with an accusatory glare before storming past her toward the window. “Don’t take my anger from me, Nora; it’s all that’s kept me sane. The only thing that stopped me from blasting down the door at Cresthaven, throwing you over my shoulder, and abducting you to some place they never would have found us.”
If only he would have. If only…
She turned to find his back to her, so broad and straight, the striations of his muscles visible even against the silk of his vest. But it was his reflection in the window that arrested her gaze. The agony in his eyes that broke her heart.
“God, all I can think about is the hell of your wedding night. I’ve never been so bloody drunk. I couldn’t endure the fact that you belonged to another man, that someone else was inside of you.”
“It was no picnic for me, either, if that helps ease your mind.”
“Of course, it bloody doesn’t!” he exploded, slamming his palm on a table beside him before whirling back to her. “And yet you chose him, Nora. After I gave you pleasure. I worshiped every inch of you until you were begging for me. I loved you, goddammit. You know I did. And you chose that…that…” He couldn’t seem to land on a word foul enough to encompass her late husband.
And she couldn’t blame him.
“You can’t know for sure that you loved me,” she whispered.
He pinned her with a glare that would have made the devil himself cower. “How could you dare doubt it?”
She shook her head, aching for him, but also realizing something for the first time. “I do not doubt that your feelings were pure. But like everyone else, you loved a construct. An image of perfection manufactured by your own desires and my fabricated behaviors. You loved your idea of who I was. Because you didn’t know me, Titus. No one ever has.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Who are you then, Nora?”
At that, she stalled. “I—I…” She could not give him a complete answer, because she didn’t know it herself.
Who am I? Shouldn’t someone know that by two and thirty? When everything was stripped away. The title and the artifice. The scandal and the secrets.
What was left?
“You think I didn’t see through you, even then?” he challenged, visibly struggling to regain his composure. “That I didn’t know exactly who and what you were. You were never faultless, but Christ, to me you were perfect. I loved you for your flaws, not because I was blind to them. And I never would have punished you for being who you are.” He stared at the puckered skin where the bullet had pierced her, and it throbbed in response to the pain underscoring the fury she read in his expression.
“Everything he did to you. Every way he made you suffer. Holy God, Nora.” He laced his fingers in his hair and pulled as if he could tear a thought out of his mind. “I would have…I would have killed him for you, you know that? The moment he touched you, at the first cruel word. If you would have come to me, I would have broken every oath I’d taken to do no harm, and I would have butchered the man.”
He shook his head, his gaze a well of fathomless misery. “Can you imagine how it feels to know the privilege of spilling his blood went to Morley when I would have bathed in it, Nora? I would have smeared it on my skin like some primitive, clannish ancestor, and torn at his beating heart with my teeth—”
“No.” She rushed forward, pressing her fingertips to his mouth, hot tears streaming from her eyes. “No, that isn’t you. That isn’t who you are.”
He caught her wrist but didn’t move it or toss it away. Instead he turned his cheek into her palm, the stubble of his jaw abrading her with vibrations she felt all the way up her arm. “It seems neither of us knows the other. Not anymore. But I know my mind, Nora. I always have done. I know what I am. I know what I want. And all I’ve ever wanted, was you.” His eyes hardened in tandem with his voice. “And you…” He released her hand, visibly locking down, pulling up the ramparts and closing the gate.
“No,” she cried, panicked. She wanted this. This honesty. His pain. She wanted him to lash her for what she’d done to him. If ever there was a punishment she deserved, this was it. “What? What? Tell me what I’ve done.”
“You fucked them!” he roared. “You fucked them when I was here all along. I was here, Nora… I was right. Fucking. Here!”
He seized upon a crystal paperweight and wound his arm to smash it against the wall.
But he didn’t.
He locked his long, talented fingers around it as if he could crush the crystal, filtering a snarl through a tight throat. After a few heaving breaths, he placed it back where it belonged.
Safe. Unbroken.
Just like she’d predicted he would. Because he was wrong about one thing.
Nora knew him.
He didn’t break things or people, he repaired them. He always had. He didn’t act without consideration. Even when every primitive instinct that made him so completely male, howled at him to rend and destroy.
He was better than that.
Better than any man she’d ever known.
Most certainly better than her.
“I had hoped you’d moved on,” she confessed woodenly. “I didn’t come to find you because I’d anticipated that you’d found a way to be happy. How could you not when you’re so easy to adore? I could not add interrupting that happiness to my list of many sins. I couldn’t do that to whomever loved you, any more than I could watch you love someone else. Or see the babies you might have put inside of her—”
He seized her then, tenderly, passionately, his hands bracketing her face, cradling it as if it were a precious, breakable thing, even as he delivered crushing blows with his words. “There’s no one. There has never been anyone else. I always realized it made me pathetic. That I couldn’t give the shards of my heart to someone else, knowing she’d never put it back together. Why inflict a broken man on someone undeserving? It’s not her fault I’m damaged… it’s yours.”
With a low moan, his mouth descended and claimed hers, cutting off any hope of a reply.
Answering Thunder
As Titus devoured her mouth, lightning struck, igniting an inferno that both humbled and terrified him.
The resulting firestorm herded every emotion toward him with all the galloping, thunderous peril of a runaway stagecoach. Desire in the lead, followed by possession, betrayal, hope, hunger, with the relentless lash of fury whipping the frenzy higher. Faster. Out of control.
The last time Titus had kissed this woman, she’d been Honoria Goode, a cossetted debutante who’d understood next to nothing about the wickedness of lust.
As shy and hesitant virgins, they’d swung like a wild pendulum between frenzied gropes and hot stolen kisses, to tender explorations requiring much encouragement and restraint. She’d been a tangle of insecurities and need, and he a machine of senseless desire tempered by blind, consuming love. Even still, she’d allowed him to lead her down the meandering paths of their mutual discoveries.
But now, it was Nora who held the reins in her elegant hands.
He’d been a fool to think he’d drive this interaction. That he’d control any part of it.
Nora had owned him from the moment he’d laid eyes on her twenty years prior, and even though he’d captu
red her lips, it was her tongue that first staked the claim.
The depths of hell he’d endured at the loss of her, of this, were matched by an indescribable height as she licked into the seam of his lips. Withdrawing, she left the taste of sweetened tea and buttery biscuits behind.
He chased the flavor into her mouth, where their tongues met and sparred for a heated moment before he coaxed her back with a gentle sucking motion. He drank in her husky moan with the thirst born of a decade in the desert.
An answering growl vibrated from somewhere so low in his chest, he wondered if it’d originated from the abyss where his heart had resided for so long.
Lured out of the dark by the woman who’d stolen it.
If I was so easy to adore, why was I so easy to discard?
He shoved the question away as their kiss became a living thing born of need and pain and pure reclamation. He learned his temper and his lust could immolate in the same blaze, and would only be doused by her. He suddenly didn’t care if the conflagration caught and cornered them. He would gladly burn to ash, if only to be sifted through her fingers.
Those fingers shoved into his jacket, tugging it over one shoulder in a one-handed attempt to sweep it away from him.
Her left arm remained folded in front of her as if she wore her sling, and that fact drew his head up to break the kiss.
“Help me, dammit,” she panted, tugging restlessly as she lifted on her toes to reclaim his mouth.
“No,” he groaned.
“I can’t bloody do it myself.” Her expression was a lament of lust and frustration.
As he already held her jaw in his palms, he tilted her face up, urging her to look at him. “Your wound, Nora. We can’t.”
This close, her disappearing irises were the color of ripe black cherries, gleaming with striations of amber and ringed with honey. Her pupils dilated so large and round they almost swallowed everything else with a well of black, fathomless need.
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