Gideon stared at Charis in helpless wonder while his gut churned like a millwheel. She was the most exquisite creature he’d ever seen. His hunger was a raging storm.
The shift bunched under her breasts, but he clearly saw the rich pink of her nipples. Nipples that peaked like ripe raspberries the moment he touched her.
Her swift response was just another of fate’s mockeries. She was formed for pleasure, but she’d find no pleasure with the man she married. Nonetheless, his eyes feasted on the treasures of her body. The delicious inward curve of her waist. The flare of her hips. The long, coltish legs.
His cock was hard and swollen and pulsed against the front of his trousers. If he took her now, he’d rip her to pieces. His mind might deem touching her as torture. His prick didn’t care.
Dazedly, she stared into his face. She was white as new snow. She’d hardly looked at his body, although if she dropped her gaze, she couldn’t miss his arousal.
He gritted his teeth and stroked the smooth skin of her thigh. For one heady moment, even through his glove, he felt her enticing warmth.
Then, as always, his mind went black. Screams echoed in his ears. Her flesh turned to rotting carrion. Her peppery carnation scent became the stink of death.
He fought back the shrieking demons. Wrestled them until they lay supine and silent. The battle left him shaking. He sucked in a breath that reeked of decay. Slowly, as if he pushed a massive weight up a steep and jagged path, he traced a tentative path to her hip.
He wasn’t a small man. He needed to prepare her. But time was his enemy. The longer he waited, the more likely his demons would master him.
She was rigid with fear. The uncertainty in her beautiful eyes broke his heart. Her breath emerged in unsteady gasps. Not, he was grimly aware, of desire. The air bristled with tension.
He placed both hands on her thighs and carefully spread them. In a room lit only by firelight, her body’s hollows were dark and mysterious. He knelt between her legs, and his nostrils flared as he caught her scent.
With clumsy fingers, he undid his trousers. His cock sprang free. When her eyes fastened on his organ, she made a muffled sound. Her hands curled into the sheet beneath as if she physically stopped herself leaping from the bed.
He hooked his hands under her hips and angled her up. Slowly, he pushed forward.
As he breached her body, she whimpered but didn’t recoil. He pushed again, feeling the tissues give way.
To his grateful astonishment, she was damp. Damp enough to ease his entry.
Even so, she was damned tight.
He paused and sucked in a deep breath redolent of Charis.
She’s alive, she’s alive, he chanted in his mind as he eased into her. She’s alive, he told the ghosts in his head, blocking his ears to their panicked clamor.
She whimpered again and shifted, drawing him deeper.
The voices grew more insistent. He couldn’t hold them off. Cold sweat prickled his skin. His grip firmed on her hips. As his vision faded, he inhaled. The world shrank to one spark of light.
He had to do this now or fail utterly.
“Charis, forgive me,” he said in a strangled voice. He tautened and thrust.
Pain shafted through Charis with the vivid, immediate brightness of lightning. A scream welled in her throat, but she bit it back.
Still, a choked moan escaped. She felt like she’d been split in half with a blunt ax. It was excruciating. Blinding.
She squeezed her eyes shut and prayed for it to be over.
Breathe. She needed to breathe.
She gasped for air, but Gideon’s weight crushed her into the mattress. He was bigger and heavier than she’d realized. His height and superb coordination disguised how well muscled he was.
Frantically, she dug her fingers deeper into the sheets. He’d done what he needed to. Why didn’t he pull out and leave her be?
Breathe, Charis, breathe.
The part he’d pushed into her chafed tender flesh. He was hard as granite. But unlike granite, he was hotter than a furnace. Stupidly, she’d imagined he’d feel cool, even cold, because of his reluctance to touch her.
His smell, familiar yet unfamiliar, surrounded her. She knew the clean scent of his soap and the essence of his skin. She guessed the extra spice in the air was male arousal.
His breathing was ragged, and he trembled. She raised her hands to grip his back, then remembered he hated to be touched. He wouldn’t want her embrace, even as he lay buried inside her in the closest connection she’d ever known.
She sucked in another breath. An easier one. Where they joined, she still hurt, but the fierce agony faded.
He shifted with a soft grunt. The pressure changed, became less excruciating.
Charis waited for him to pull away. But his muscles tightened, and he thrust again. She bit back another moan and gripped the sheet to stop sliding up the bed.
She’d imagined this would be quick, over in seconds. But he was still inside her. He moved once more, and released a deep groan.
Another thrust. His hips pumped several times, and she felt a liquid heat deep inside her. He groaned again and slumped over her. In a cruel parody of tenderness, his head came to rest on her shoulder, his silky hair tickling her neck.
After all the hardness, the fleeting softness seemed alien, wrong.
After an endless time, Gideon withdrew and carefully pulled down her shift, hiding the tops of her thighs. Then he rolled onto his back to stare at the ceiling. His shirt was twisted and flapped free of his gaping trousers.
After one brief glance at him, Charis concentrated on the dark beams crossing the ceiling too. She didn’t want to see the organ he’d pressed into her body.
She supposed she should say something, but she wasn’t certain her voice would work. Her throat clenched so tight, it hurt. Although she was cold, she couldn’t summon energy to reach for the covers.
Who knew how long they lay alongside each other? Not long, she guessed, although every second felt like an hour.
Where he’d taken her, she stung, although the piercing pain had subsided to a constant throbbing. She felt lost in a vast emptiness, as though the world had been destroyed in some unimaginable cataclysm. How odd that this most intimate act of all left her feeling like the only human left on earth.
Slowly, stiffly, he sat up. For one intense second, she felt him study her. She kept her eyes fixed on the ceiling.
Like distant thunder on a summer’s day, devastation nudged at her awareness. But for the moment, exhaustion kept it at bay.
Jamming her eyes shut, she willed herself not to cry. She was much better hiding in this numbness. Given her way, she’d lie here forever.
Charis listened to him move about the room. Water splashed into a dish. Perhaps he meant to wash. Perhaps he was desperate to rid himself of every trace of her disgusting person.
She recognized she tortured herself and scotched the thought before it went any further. Instead, she sought that cold empty space in her heart where nothing could hurt her.
The rug muffled his footsteps as he moved closer. She couldn’t help tensing at his approach. He stopped by the bed. Unthinkingly, she flinched.
Although he wouldn’t touch her. He’d never touch her again, now she was his wife in fact as well as law.
He didn’t say anything. There was a soft clink on the bedside cabinet. He shifted away, his footsteps deliberate but somehow defeated.
There was a click as he opened the door, then another as he closed it behind him.
She opened her eyes. The blazing fire still lit the room. The whole episode had probably taken less than half an hour.
Half an hour for her world to change.
She turned her head to see a blue-and-white china washbowl on the nightstand and a pile of towels. He’d seen to her comfort, then he’d left her in peace.
The tears she’d fought since he’d come to her bed overflowed.
Eventually Charis roused to go looking
for her husband.
It wasn’t in her nature to avoid difficulties. Lying in the rumpled bed, surrounded by the unfamiliar smell of sex, she had time to gather her courage.
And time to start worrying about Gideon.
As shock and discomfort receded, she began to think what price that joyless coupling had exacted from him. She needed to see him, to reassure herself he was all right. She needed to see him because the moment when she’d wished him to Hades had been brief indeed. Now only his nearness could soothe her aching sadness.
She rolled out of bed, the abrupt movement setting up a host of unfamiliar twinges. Reminder, should she need it, that nothing would ever be the same after what had just happened.
Wrapping a blanket around her trembling shoulders, she trudged across the floor. She pushed the door open and stepped through. The parlor was quiet and dark except for the low glow of the fire.
Had he gone out? After what they’d done, sleep would elude him. She ventured closer to the Stygian corner where he’d sat last night. Then she realized he sprawled in a massive wooden armchair in front of the hearth.
“Gideon?” She hitched the blanket up and stepped around the chair’s looming bulk to stand before him.
He didn’t look at her. Instead, he stared at the fire. Something told her he’d stared into the fire for a long time. His gloved hand curled around a half-filled glass that dangled on the verge of spilling. Brandy, she guessed.
“Go back to bed, Charis.”
The boneless curve of his long, lean body echoed the despair in his voice. His legs stretched toward the grate, and his shirt hung loose as it had in the bedroom. A frisson ran through her as she looked at his bare chest, gold in the flickering light.
A shiver, astonishingly, not of revulsion.
Charis beat back the cowardly urge to obey him and flee. Instead, she fixed an unwavering gaze upon him. “We need to talk.”
His face tightened. With a savagery that made her wince, he lifted the glass and pitched it into the fire. There was the sharp tinkle of shattering glass and a brief flare as the brandy caught.
“Christ, no.”
The eyes he focused on her glittered with anguish and a loathing that made her cringe.
“Do you hate me now, Gideon?” She didn’t recognize the shaking voice as hers. She’d tried so hard to make the act easy for him, but to her shame, she hadn’t succeeded in masking her discomfort.
His face contorted, and she stared aghast into naked torment. Only for a moment. He swiftly pulled the shutters over the turbulent depths.
“Of course I don’t hate you,” he said impatiently.
“But…”
“Go, Charis, now.” His voice fractured.
She couldn’t mistake his desperation to be alone. Although selfishly she wanted only to stay with him. The tumbled, lonely bed in the next room loomed like a gallows.
“Good night,” she whispered, her shoulders drooping.
He didn’t answer. Slowly, reluctantly, as if her feet were blocks of stone, she turned toward the door she’d left ajar.
One step. Two.
She didn’t want to leave him. She never wanted to leave him.
She was almost at the door when she heard a muffled sound behind her. An unfamiliar sound although she immediately identified what it was.
Stifling a horrified cry, she turned. He pressed gloved hands to his eyes, and his broad, straight shoulders heaved as he struggled for air.
Hands that itched to comfort him curled into fists at her sides. She longed to succor the man she loved with the warmth of her body. But that was impossible. Touching her body had driven him to this extreme.
She darted across to him, and, as she had last night, she knelt on the floor beside him. Unfamiliar discomfort stabbed her as she curled her legs under her.
In painful suspense, she waited for him to send her away. He was a proud man. He’d hate to know she witnessed this.
But he didn’t speak.
Perhaps he wasn’t even aware of her presence. It was torture to listen to him struggle against his weeping. He hardly made a sound. Only the thick, uneven rasp of breath betrayed his agony.
The iron control that had sustained him through Rangapindhi and beyond disintegrated. How blind she’d been not to realize the universe of pain he contained. She should have known. She wasn’t stupid. She claimed to love him. He’d told her about India. She’d seen what his ordeal cost his gallant spirit.
But only now did she truly understand the devastation that haunted him. His inhuman strength had delayed this moment too long. So when he finally broke, it was like a mountain cracked before her eyes.
From the first, she’d cherished a childish, flawless image of him. In this shadowy room, that image crumbled to dust. Gideon Trevithick wasn’t Galahad or Lancelot or Percival. He wasn’t an invincible guardian angel who appeared from nowhere to rescue her. He wasn’t indestructible and powerful and immune from weakness.
Helpless, hurting, guilty, she listened to the sound of his heart breaking. This man who battled so hard to dam his tears was all too human. He could shatter and fall and fail. He was fragile flesh and blood, and he’d suffered more than any mortal should.
Wrapping her arms around her raised knees, she stared sightlessly at the fire, the only light in the dark room. This wordless vigil was all she could offer. She was guiltily aware that what they’d done had initiated this excruciating outpouring. Her penance was listening to him struggle to smother his sorrow as if it were shameful or unwarranted. She wanted to beg him to stop resisting, to give in, to let the horrors of his Indian years finally receive their due.
He’d fought so long and so hard, and still he fought. His valiant heart wouldn’t surrender.
Slowly, the worst of his grief passed. Or at least the outward signs. His breath emerged more normally and not in broken, choked gasps.
After a long time, he spoke in a constricted voice. “This isn’t fair on you.”
She didn’t look at him but continued to rest her cheek on her upraised knees. Weariness and sorrow weighed endlessly on her. “I can bear it.”
They didn’t speak again. She thought after a while he might have slept, exhausted by his travails. She didn’t. Instead, she gazed dry-eyed at the dying fire.
Charis had loved Gideon Trevithick from the moment she’d first seen him. She’d loved his strength, his honor, his intelligence, his beauty. She still did.
But he’d been right to decry that love as a dazzled girl’s emotion. It was a hothouse plant, green and lush but unable to withstand cold winds from the real world.
The last hour had changed that forever. The last hour had changed her forever.
The love she felt for Gideon now was more durable than stone.
Fifteen
The afternoon wind off the sea was so icy, even Gideon noticed its biting power. Unusual for this time of year, according to the porter at the hotel, who wished him and Charis well when they left on their walk.
Gideon wasn’t sure appearing in public was a good idea. Someone might recognize him. After the last days, he couldn’t bear fending off another crowd as he had in Portsmouth. More, there was a small but significant risk of word reaching Felix and Hubert that he and Charis were on Jersey.
But Gideon couldn’t bear being confined in their rooms any longer. The acrid memories of last night’s pain and disappointment weighted the air. Worse, that clumsy bedding had left a brooding sensual awareness in its wake. Living in close quarters with Charis and knowing he couldn’t touch her, would never touch her again, was slowly driving him out of his mind.
As the day progressed, he’d watched his own strain increasingly reflected in his wife’s pale face. The tension between them had stretched and stretched until it became intolerable. He’d heard her sigh of relief when he suggested going out.
Thankfully, it appeared the cold kept most people inside. The few hardy souls on the promenade paid Gideon and Charis no heed as they strolled a
long the seafront.
So far it had proven a mostly silent walk. As it had proven a mostly silent day.
Hell, what could he say after last night’s emotional storms? His gut clenched with humiliation at his behavior, both during and after their bleak coupling. How could he bear to revisit the black ocean of anguish? Or perhaps even more harrowing, how could he discuss his inept use of her body?
The silence was heavy as lead with what remained studiously unspoken.
Charis turned into the wind and paused to look across the gray rolling waves. The stiff breeze snatched at her bonnet, and she raised one gloved hand to hold it firm.
At least she was dressed suitably. He’d called in a modiste that morning and ordered a wardrobe for his bride. The charming yellow ensemble Charis wore had been hurriedly altered to fit. Other garments would arrive over the next week.
It was the only time Charis had smiled all day, when she saw the designs for her dresses.
Gideon came up beside her as she leaned on the stone parapet. Beneath the bonnet’s brim, her expression was pensive. Her lush, pink mouth drooped at the corners.
Ah, that soft mouth…
The continual low hum of desire made his head swim. Self-disgust followed fast.
Good God, he was a satyr of the vilest kind. After what he’d done last night, how could he think of touching her?
Turning, she caught his stare. From the color that invaded her pale cheeks, she guessed the heated direction of his thoughts.
She must despise him. She ought to despise him. He’d hurt her, then broken down and cried for the first time since his release from the Nawab’s dungeons.
Her eyes darkened to green with some emotion he couldn’t name. Although before last night’s debacle, he might have called it interest. Her lips parted on a soundless sigh.
He jerked back as if she reached for him. But her yellow-gloved hands remained safely on the seawall.
His heart thudded like a drum. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. To his surprise, she laughed softly. Surprise and chagrin.
That low musical sound slid along his veins like honey and made him want what he could never have. He should be inured to frustration, but somehow the damned torture never ended.
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