at the windows, rattling softly in their frames. She’d wounded him. He wanted the possibility of love, of a life together. She didn’t have it to give.
“But,” she said, “selfishly, I do want you to love me. Is that enough?”
He looked at her again, and he smiled the same way he had when the dove had taken flight. “Just hearing you call me Brat again is enough.”
“Enough for now,” she said. “I can’t love you, and I can’t have your children. And here you are, the heir to one of the last titles in the kingdom that means something. You know how it works—even if we adopted a son, he couldn’t inherit your titles.”
“I don’t give a damn about my titles, Regan. I never have.”
“I care about dying and leaving a child motherless,” she said. “God, Arthur, don’t you understand I am literally the last woman in London you should be falling in love with? I thought you were the smart one in the Godwick family?”
“Maybe.” At least he admitted it. “Maybe you are the last woman I should love, but you’re the only one I want.”
The lights flickered. And during that flash of darkness, she wiped the tears off her face. When the lights came on again, her cheeks were dry.
“You beautiful fool,” she said, then laughed coldly at herself. “Do you want to know something? After Sir Jack died, I told myself I wouldn’t date anyone at all ever again. No dating. No remarrying. No sex even. I couldn’t bear to think of someone caring about me and then finding out the truth…except you. I liked the thought of hurting you. That’s why I made that stupid bloody offer. You were the one man in the world I hated enough to sleep with, because I didn’t care at all how badly I hurt you.”
“I’ve never been so happy to be hated in my life.”
She stood up and Arthur looked at her. “Are you leaving?” he asked.
“I can’t. It’s raining, and I didn’t bring my umbrella.”
“Then you should stay.”
“You have a bedroom in this house, I assume,” she said.
“I do. Do you want to sleep in it tonight?”
“Yes,” she said. “With you.”
Arthur rose from the sofa and just as he was coming to her, the lights flickered again and went out.
She reached for his hand in the dark and found it. The wind gusted. The house shook. His hand was warm and steady and strong.
Something thumped on the floor close to them in the dark. The lights flickered on again.
They turned and saw a book on the floor, fallen off the shelf. It had landed face down, the pages open.
Both she and Arthur stared at it as if a snake had suddenly slithered into the sitting room to warm itself at the fire.
“Leave it,” Regan said. “We’ll look at it in the morning.”
Arthur took her by the hand and led her into the entryway, to the stairs and up, up, up to his bedroom. As they ascended, the wind grew louder. Leaves blew past the windows and cast strange shadows on the walls like a thousand shadow birds.
When they reached the landing, the lights flickered off again. Arthur was able to guide her to his room in the dark. Inside the doorway, he said, “Stay here. I don’t want you to trip over anything and hurt yourself. I’ll find candles.”
He started to leave her and she grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him back to her. On the threshold of his bedroom, in a house gone dark and the storm suddenly quiet, their mouths found each other in an electric kiss. It was a kiss on the edge of a knife, a kiss at the edge of the world. His mouth was hot and hungry and charged with meaning and need. She opened her lips to his tongue and tasted him, the taste that was just him, only him.
“We don’t need candles,” she said, “if we stay here.”
Arthur reached under her dress, lifting it to her waist to find her knickers. He hooked his thumbs under the lacy edges and pulled them down her legs and over her boots. Where they landed, she didn’t care. On his knees, he lifted her dress higher, kissed her stomach, quivering and taut, then her naked hips. His lips brushed over the sensitive skin, teasing and tickling. His hands cupped her bottom and kneaded her there.
His head came to rest against her stomach and she found his hair, black silk, and wound