Mercy discovered she rather liked him like this.
Silky hair mussed by her fingers in the throes of pleasure, hazel eyes at half-mast and a drowsy curve softening his hard mouth. Even his jaw had relaxed, the cords beneath his ears and next to his temple released.
The damp chill of the late-winter night lurked just outside of where their cobalt coverlet and gold lamp ensconced them in a decadence of warmth and flesh and velvet.
Though he’d pulled the blanket to their waists, she could still consider their differences with idle curiosity. Decide what she liked and what she had to accustom herself to...
If that were an option.
The steely muscle beneath his marble-smooth skin mesmerized her as she let her fingers wander the peaks and valleys of his geography. She appreciated all that he was, the dusky hue to his skin. The warm fragrance of him, like cotton and salt.
Crisp hair on his leg tickled the inside of her thigh, and she drew her appendage over the abrading stuff, letting it scratch away the irksome itch.
His breath evened. Moving from the chest beneath her cheek down to his stomach. The hammer of his heart slowed to a thump, and he was silent for so long she thought he might have fallen asleep.
She lifted her head to check and found him staring—unblinking—into the middle distance as his fingers toyed with her hair.
“Is something troubling you?” she asked, pretending not to be anxious as she perched her head on her palm.
He was not quick to reply. “I don’t know if it’s the darkness of the hour or of the situation, but I can only think it is a cruelty of fate that I found you.”
“Well...there’s a thing to say.” A frown tugged at her mouth, at her heart, and she pushed back from him, offended in the extreme. “When I was feeling just the opposite. Thinking how fortunate I was to have spent such a time with you. To have enjoyed myself so thoroughly. Did I..um... Have I misunderstood your seemingly enthusiastic responses?”
“No, no, sweet Mercy, that is not what I meant.” He cupped her chin, cradling it as if it were made of spun glass. “It is cruel to have a night like this, knowing I cannot have another. It tinged this incomparable pleasure with exquisite pain.”
“We could do it again.” She brightened, his words a balm for her bruised heart, even as she lamented the idea of losing him. “My parents have extended their stay on the continent another month. And even after they arrive home, I could finagle a way to occasionally meet you at the Savoy or—”
He shook his head, his eyes abysmal wells of bleak despair. “Mon coeur, you mustn’t care for me. You mustn’t become attached.”
Mon coeur. My heart. How could he call her something like that and then insist there was nothing further between them?
Was the endearment just a sweet and flippant nothing to him?
She cocked her head. “Do you care for nothing? For no one?”
He drew in a long breath through his nose. “It has been my secret all these years. I have gained so much because I didn’t care if I lost it. I risk everything when I take a gamble, and I have not lost for so long...until now.”
“What do you mean?”
He speared her with a gaze so intense she felt as if it punctured her all the way through. “I told you I only love one person on this earth, and I referred to Gabriel, but...I am in danger of falling for you, Mercy Goode.”
She blinked at the immediacy of his confession. He hadn’t said love, though the word lingered on the periphery of their conversation. “I’ve heard it said that men in bed are often men in love. You do not know me enough to fall—”
He coiled at the waist, levering to a sitting position so as to bracket her cheeks with his hands, capturing her face in a gentle prison so he might bore the truth of his words into her. “I want you to know that I have been unable to stop thinking about you since the moment we met. That is something—”
“Yes,” she clipped. “That is something I’ve heard before. Is it not easier to imagine that you are infatuated with my youth and beauty than with me?”
“I cannot contest that you are the loveliest creature, but your sister is equally handsome and stirs me not at all. It is not only this chemistry between us that draws me