Page 68 of When You Are Mine

“Kerris.”

His breath on her fingers and her name on his lips made her tremble. She saw it too late. Saw his will to resist topple and fall around them. Before she could say another word, he pulled her thumb into his mouth. Past the knuckle and up to the base of her hand. He feathered kisses across her palm and suckled the pulse that pounded in her wrist, laving the raised daisy-shaped scar with his tongue. He dropped her hand only to reach around to her nape and bring her forehead to rest against his own. He fisted his hand in the luxury of hair spilling across her shoulders and down her back. They were silent, both with eyes closed and every cell, every fiber, fixed on the other.

“If anything had happened to you…” She didn’t finish the thought, starting another. “I was so scared. We didn’t know if…if…All I could think about was how we argued the last time we saw each other.”

“I know.” He barely moved his lips, but she tasted his minty breath feathering across her mouth. “The thought of seeing you one more time was the only thing that kept me sane. I know this is…nothing, but it saved my life. It was my lifeline when I wasn’t sure I’d make it.”

Kerris bit her lip until it hurt. This was notnothing. It was a betrayal. It was more intimate than anything she had ever shared with anyone, and it shamed her to acknowledge it. Cam had been inside of her, had been her only lover in life. And this was deeper, closer than that? She reached for Walsh’s hand, entwining their fingers for a stolen moment before pulling away, guilt ripping through her.

Her husband was down the hall. Shedidlove Cam. This was…she didn’t knowwhatthis was. Didn’t have language to articulate this desperation, this recognition she had never asked for nor been able to escape. Her emotional lexicography was limited, stumped by the depth of her response to Walsh from the moment they’d met.

“I should go.” She glanced up, pulling back. “Good-bye, Walsh.”

She leaned in to drop a chaste kiss on his cheek, with every intention of walking through those French doors. But he turned his head, brushing his lips across hers, and they both went still. The sweet, hot memory of the one kiss they had shared paled beside the reality of his lips against hers. With a groan, Kerris pulled the curve of his bottom lip into her mouth, the taste of him a forbidden pleasure she promised herself she would never know again.

His large hands wrapped around her jaw and the delicate bones at the back of her head, thumbs pressing against her chin until her mouth dropped open. He hovered there for seconds, savoring her breath flowing in his mouth in sharp pants before leaning forward. He sucked her bottom lip as she had done his, the kiss an illicit covenant between them. She groaned, pulling his top lip between hers. His tongue plunged in, frantically exploring the roof of her mouth, running over her teeth, bathing the lining of her cheek. It was mere seconds, but the outside world seemed to freeze, allowing them this slice outside of time.

The bright overhead light flaring the room into unnatural brightness shocked them both. Kerris pulled back abruptly, but not soon enough.

“Get your damn hands off my wife, Bennett!”

* * *

Cam crossed the room in a few steps, manacling Kerris’s wrist and roughly jerking her behind him. Walsh heard her moan.

“You’re hurting her,” Walsh said, keeping his tone even.

He could still hear laughter down the hall from the few guests who remained. He wanted to spare Kerris the scene their raised voices would cause.

“Ease up, Cam. It’s not what you think.”

“Oh, that’s good to know because IthoughtI saw your tongue down my wife’s throat.”

Grit and anger littered Cam’s voice. He looked only at Walsh, not even glancing at Kerris. Cam’s fury encompassed the three of them, squeezing the air from Walsh’s lungs until he wasn’t even breathing.

“It was a kiss, Cam.” Walsh’s calm tone belied the quickened beat of his heart. “It meant nothing.”

“Nothing!” The word torpedoed from Cam’s mouth. “It’s been ‘nothing’ since the day you met her, hasn’t it, Bennett? You wanted my girl that first night and ever since, right? You think I didn’t see it? Thateveryonehasn’t seen you making a fool of yourself over her?”

There was nothing Walsh could say. It was true. That first night he had been bowled over. Enraptured. Practically oblivious to everyone at that scholars’ ceremony except the slender woman Cam still held in a painful grip.

“Nothing to say?” Cam sneered, eyes slitted by anger. “All your life, everything’s been handed to you on a silver platter, and I get this one thing. This one thing you want more than anything else and can’t have.”

“And you made sure you capitalized on that fact. Didn’t you?” Walsh unclenched his fists at his side, forcing his breathing to slow. “How’s it feel to have guilted your wife into marrying you? You knew how I felt, so you rushed to get her to the altar because you were afraid I’d do something about it.”

“Maybe I did,” Cam said. Walsh saw Kerris’s sharp glance at her husband. “She was mine, Bennett. The only thing I ever had of my own, and you thought you could have her like you have everything else.”

“That’s not true, Cam.” Walsh shook his head slowly. “I knew she was yours. I was attracted to her. That’s all.”

“Liar!” Cam dropped Kerris’s wrist to lunge toward the man who had been like a brother to him.

Kerris quickly slipped between them, taking the brunt of Cam’s weight, which knocked her back against Walsh and sandwiched her between them.

“Cam, Walsh still has a concussion.” She held him back with her hand on his chest. “Tonight was…wrong, but it was just a kiss. We were talking about the kidnapping, how close Walsh came to dying, and just got…emotional. Nothing more happened and nothing ever will.”

Nothing ever will.

The words reverberated through Walsh like a benediction. Though true, it rocked him to the core. Of course she would choose Cam. Her life was here with him. It was the only choice, but it snuffed out an unspoken, impossible hope that had hidden in his heart. That one day, somehow, she would be his. But no. She would do what was right. That was what he loved about her. That line of integrity that ran through her as surely as the river cut through the earth. A force, compelling and pure.

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