In the Dark with the Duke by Christi Caldwell Page 0,64

failed to pull off in the room they’d just cleared.

Hugh sat on the edge of the narrow mattress, angled with his back to her, and she gave thanks that she couldn’t see his face. The disgust. Nay, what was worse, what she could not see from this man—pity. He stretched a hand out and lightly ran his callused fingers over her leg. She recoiled, curling into herself, but there was no escape as he stroked his three middle digits from her knee down the length of her calf, where some soldier had marked her with his sabre, leaving that scar as a reminder.

As if the memories and nightmares hadn’t been token enough of that day.

Nay, she’d had to bear some physical imprint that she had to see day in and day out, so she could always recall the day the world had turned upside down.

Hugh traced his index finger along the puckered flesh. “You’re beautiful.”

“I know what I am,” she said, directing her gaze over the top of his magnificent curls. Even his hair was deucedly perfect.

“You think this somehow makes you less beautiful?” His low murmur resonated in the quiet. Sliding onto a knee, with a tenderness that threatened to shatter Lila, he ever so gently gathered her leg in his hand, as if it were . . . as if she were, in fact, the person of beauty he spoke of.

And everything within her that had spent the past nine years hating her flawed mind and body wanted to scream for him to release her, but the part of her that had yearned more to be seen and be touched reveled at the glide of his fingers along her leg.

Sweeping, delicate glides of his fingers. He moved them in slow, smooth arcs over that puckered flesh.

Collapsing back onto her elbows, Lila trembled as his caress eased the tension within her.

Hugh lowered his mouth, and her breath caught in anticipation as he brought his lips closer and kissed her leg.

And she’d now been wrong two times before. Each kiss had felt more special than the other, and yet still there was nothing that could ever compare with this brush of his hard, perfectly formed lips upon her marred skin, bringing her eyes shut once more as his kiss penetrated through the ugliness of Peterloo and pierced her soul. A shuddery little sigh spilled from her lips.

“Look at me, Lila March.” His was a harsh, graveled command, more captivating for the coarse roughness of that order. She brought her gaze to his. “Don’t you ever doubt your beauty.” His eyes pierced her. “I forbid it.”

I forbid it.

Who could imagine those three words strung together should snap free a piece of her heart for this man so arrogant as to issue that command?

Climbing to his feet, Hugh pulled his shirt out from the waistband of his trousers and tossed it aside, and just as the sight of him had knocked the breath from her lungs that day in his fighting arena, she found the earth kicked out from under her once more.

Beautiful.

That word had been created with this man and his perfectly formed physique in mind. He wore the scars and ink upon his frame like an artist’s canvas.

“You are magnificent.” She exhaled those latter four syllables.

He chuckled, and resting a knee on the edge of the bed, he curved his body toward hers. “This from the same woman with but a mark upon her leg.”

And her head. “This is different.”

Hugh captured her left leg and angled it about his waist, so that his scarred forearm kissed her scarred flesh. “This? Is the same, Lila.”

This is the same.

And with those words, she at last understood her connection to Hugh Savage.

They were the same in so many ways.

Whatever secrets they carried had shaped them both; their lives had left them scarred, and somehow, from two entirely different worlds, they’d found one another.

Lila wound her fingers through his, twining her slightly bent digits with his flawless ones, and then drew them over the mark at the center of her forehead. “Beautiful together,” she whispered.

Passion darkened the sapphire of his eyes. Releasing her leg, he hurriedly shucked off his trousers; he kicked them aside, and her breath hitched.

He was masculine beauty personified: his stomach was all taut, ridged muscles . . . and in ways that would have horrified any proper lady of the ton, she dropped her gaze, unapologetic in her study of him.

Oh, my.

Had she spoken aloud? Everything beyond the rapid cadence