He closed his eyes for a long, silent minute, then turned to face the open windows. She waited, wondering if he was about to slip away once more. Thunder cracked and the rain sleeted. Reaching behind her, she closed the door with a soft snick. That sound seemed as if it echoed inside her chamber.
She toed off her shoes and padded softly…silently across the carpet. Her courage deserted her along the way, and she faltered. The small space between them felt like a vast chasm. A powerful need to touch him seized her, stealing her ability to breathe.
“Ah, Maryann, I wonder why there is nothing in this entire world but you that makes me happy?”
She grabbed that soft whisper and stored it in her heart.
He closed the window, shutting out the cold and the outside world. Then he faced her and held out his hand. Maryann stared at him, the dichotomy of such aching wants and fear freezing her in place. She looked up at him, and in his eyes she saw a beguiling mix of tenderness and savage desire that stole her breath.
A sudden blinding realization pierced her like a well-aimed arrow. “You waited for the day…you waited for yesterday to end.”
A glance at the clock revealed it to be six minutes after midnight. He had only come to her room after the new day began.
“I wanted no past between us when I take you.”
Her entire body vibrated with the awareness of him. “Take me?”
“Yes.”
“Take me where?”
Silence…such wicked silence.
“The instant I touch you, you’ll know.”
Oh God. He was planning on ravishing her, and she knew with every fiber of her being that she would allow him everything. A thrill coursed through her at the thought.
Maryann licked lips that suddenly felt dry. “Arianna is not here in your thoughts now?”
“Whenever I am with you, she… Revenge does not exist.”
Maryann’s heart cracked at the rough guilt heard in that admission. She overshadowed Arianna in his thoughts, and Maryann could find no joy it in, not when it seemed to wreck Nicolas. “I am sorry,” she gasped hoarsely.
“Do not be.” He took a step toward her. “It is a struggle to recall anything else that exists in my mind once I am with you. In truth, I am lost in you.”
“The prospect sounds terrifying for you.”
He cupped her cheeks with his powerful hands. “You obliterate even my darkest thoughts and replace them with sunshine and want and hunger and dreams of things I’ve never thought about. I do not like it.”
“I do!” she assured him, gripping his wrist and feeling the tripping of his pulse underneath her thumb.
He tucked a strand of wet hair behind her ear, his knuckles barely grazing her cheek. “It was a matter of honor and willpower to hold Arianna in my thoughts and speak of her yesterday when I was with you.”
Only a few minutes after midnight had passed but everything felt changed, as if they had entered a different world with unlimited possibilities. “And yesterday ended.”
He dragged her closer to him and dropped his forehead to hers. “The feelings I have for you, I’ve never had them before, and I do not understand them.”
She pushed the glasses atop her nose and stared at him wordlessly.
“Whenever you fiddle with your spectacles, while it is a most charming oddity, it tells me that you are nervous,” he said, touching the bridge of her nose and then her glasses.
“I…I…being with you sometimes makes me feel nervous,” she said with a shaky laugh.
“Why?”
“The feelings you rouse in me are so… I…I am not sure what they are.”
“They are visceral, unforeseen, and hungry,” he murmured. “They are so intense, you lie awake at night wondering at the madness of it. You are almost afraid to get close, to delve deep and understand what you feel because you are not sure what you will find. Yet there is something there luring you closer still, every day, every minute…this very second, and when you try to understand the nature of the piper…you realize it is the very one who caused that raw, chaotic need.”
She swallowed, and answered the raw desire peeking down at her, “I wonder what the craving low in my belly is, and this unrelenting ache in my heart.” Maryann lifted her hand and brushed a wet tendril from his forehead. “It is more than an ache…there is excitement, a sense of