Page 321 of From Rakes to Riches

“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.”

“Wecoulddo 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’tcare 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 to you. It is everything. Your entire bold, adventurous, domineering, warrior’s spirit. It is the life that spills from you, that radiates like a star in the middle of your own solar system. You don’t just tempt me, youfascinateme—obsess me—and no one has managed to do that in a very long time.”

“Then...” She cast her gaze down and schooled the longing from her voice. “Why not continue this while we are inclined to do so?”

“Because the moment I care for something...someone...it gives them power over me.”

“Your enemies?”

“Yes, but I was referring to...my men.”

At that, she sat up straighter, folding her legs beneath the sheets to face him fully. “I don’t understand.”

His face softened and his gaze touched every part of her face, as if committing it to memory. “That is because you are not part of this brutal world in which I exist, and I would not have it touch you. I will—die first.”

Mercy’s brows crimped as she did her utmost to puzzle him out. One thing missing from the mysteries of Eddard Sharpe was this vagary of fate. The villains were dastardly characters motivated by hatred, greed, or any number of ugly impulses belonging to man.

Rarely—never—were they noble or tender with predispositions toward generosity and kindness.

This man, this wicked, rakish criminal was possessed of a conscience. A code.

And yet...

“Why did you become a Fauve?” she asked, knowing she tread on dangerous ground. “Furthermore, why lead them if they would so easily turn on you? What sort of life is that?”

“It’s the life Gabriel and I inherited,” he answered simply, as if he’d resigned himself to such a disappointment long ago.

“Inherited?” she echoed.

“Fromle Bourreau.” He muttered the name as if it tasted of ashes in his mouth. “The Executioner.”

He slumped against her headboard, the covers sliding around his lean waist. Broad shoulders rolled forward a little as if Atlas himself could not have contained such a burden. His eyes unfocused slightly, as he looked into the past.

“He was an Englishman who married a Monégasque girl—my mother—leveraged by the debts her father owed him,” he explained in a voice devoid of emotion. “He kept her—us—in a villa in Monaco where he ruled the underworld there. Gamingestablishments, brothels, and smuggling ships...” His fists curled in her bedclothes as his eyes glittered with a hatred so cold and absolute, she shivered with it.

“Fighting rings.”

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