Page 15 of Miss Barton's Mysterious Husband
He swallowed again. Speaking was so damned difficult. More difficult at this moment, when he had to lay his cards on the table and sacrifice all the protection of his pride.
“I want you back. I’ve always wanted you back. Never, not even one day during all these endless months and years, have I woken without wishing you were in my arms again.” He waved toward the satchel. “If you doubt me, there’s proof. I don’t knowwhat you wrote in those letters, but mine are nothing but a plea for you to see me, to speak to me, to live with me again.”
She was so white that her rich red hair formed a shocking contrast to her translucent skin. “Some of mine are pleas. Some of mine are angry. I was hurt, too. You were always a better person than I was.”
“If you thought I’d made no effort to get you back, you were entitled to hate me.”
She bit her lip and sent him a questioning look. “I never hated you either. But I feared that you’d stopped loving me.”
“Never,” he vowed, before he could remind himself that it might be more tactical to play those cards a little closer to his chest.
A light sparked in her eyes, a light that he’d last seen the morning she left him. The morning before they had that horrible, destructive argument. Roland’s aching heart surged, as he waited for Charmian to say that she loved him. Then dipped again when she subjected him to a lingering scrutiny. “There was a reason why I got so upset when I thought you didn’t love me anymore.”
“Because we were tied together for life?”
She shook her head and stepped closer. “No, because I never stopped loving you. The idea that you’d forgotten me broke my heart.”
There had been too much misery for him to greet her declaration with unconditional happiness, but something black and sour and festering in the depths of his soul faded away. He felt lighter, as if someone had lifted a heavy stone that had been crushing him into oblivion.
Roland couldn’t resist touching her, although he was aware that this reconciliation was too new to support the weight of desire. He felt like he coaxed a wild bird to accept food from hishand. One false move and she’d flutter away up to the sky and he’d never find her again.
He held his hands out, not surprised to notice that they shook. The second it took her to reach out for him seemed to last an eon. Then for the first time since she’d turned his life to endless frost, Charmian touched him of her own free will.
As her fingers curled around his, her breath caught. Her touch felt frantic, as if she, too, feared that this reconciliation might shatter if mishandled.
He stared into her eyes, seeking the truth of her avowal. She’d once regarded him like a hero who could do no wrong. He couldn’t expect that again. He didn’t even want that. If they’d been a little older and wiser when they’d married, they’d have known enough to recognize that they were meant for each other, whatever temporary friction might trouble their match.
Although he’d always known that she was the only woman for him, hadn’t he? He just hadn’t known enough to plead with her to stay before she left him.
“Roland,” she said in a thick voice. “If you don’t kiss me in the next minute, I might just explode.”
His grip on her hands tightened, as he stared at her in shock. The heart that he’d feared dead expanded with a piercing emotion that could only be hope. When hope had been a stranger for so long. “Kiss you?”
Her smile was shaky, and her eyes shone with longing. “Don’t you want to?”
“Hell, Charmian, I’ve waited to kiss you ever since you went away.”
Tears choked her laugh. “Then I don’t think you should wait another second.”
“My darling…” He released her hands and caught her face, tilting her up toward him.
He read a similar fragile hope in her eyes. Her lips parted as she snatched a breath. He’d thought that if ever he had the chance to touch her again, he’d fall on her like a ravenous lion. But so much depended on this tremulous moment that he needed to be careful. He’d frightened her away once. He couldn’t bear the thought of frightening her away again.
Because that was the problem with hope. It could lift a man up so high that if he fell, the drop was likely to prove fatal.
So he didn’t grab her up against him in a fury of possession. His head started a slow descent toward hers. He paused a breath away from touching her lips with his.
She closed her eyes and strained upward. “Please,” she whispered. “Don’t make me wait. I’ve waited so long already.”
He couldn’t say who closed the final distance. When their lips met, Roland felt the contact like the blow of an ax. Heat shuddered through him, and a roaring cascade of sensory impressions. He thought that he’d remembered every detail of their time together. Reliving each second over and over had been both pleasure and torture. But this was like kissing his wife for the first time.
Her scent was rich in his nostrils. Her skin was warm and smooth beneath his palms. For a breathless moment, he sipped delight from her lips. She made an incoherent sound. Protest? Encouragement? Surrender? Perhaps all three at once.
She stretched up to deepen the contact and sucked his lower lip into her mouth. Desire shuddered through him as he opened his mouth over hers. She let him in and for the first time in years, he tasted the sweetness that he remembered. Except that Charmian seemed in many ways a stranger. A beguiling stranger. A gift from a capricious fate.
His hands firmed on her cheeks, as he pulled back to tease her with a rain of quick kisses. Tender kisses that verged oninnocent. With a wordless complaint, she nipped at his lips in a silent plea for more.
He kissed her nose and her forehead and her closed eyes and the sweet space between her eyebrows. Another of those incendiary little murmurs brought him back to her lips. This time, he plundered their wonders. Using teeth and tongue, until her tongue ventured out to meet his. She shifted closer and threaded her arms around his waist. He angled her head and kissed her fully, glorying in the hot honey taste of her mouth.
