Page 36 of A Dark and Stormy Knight
“That is counted among the many misdeeds I committed that night,” he acquiesced with a heavy breath as he released her one hand and reached for the other. For a moment, the only sounds in the dank room were the drops of water into the bucket and their uneven breaths.
“I know who you are.” Her whispered words fractured around him, barraging him from all sides.
He looked up at her sharply.
Her eyes stayed locked on where the skin of her hand emerged from beneath the blood.
“I worked it out while I was reading the paper some weeks past. You were no Stag of St. James. You told me you were a shadow. In fact, I believe you are the Knight of Shadows.”
“You’re clever,” was all he replied.
“I’ve been trying to figure all this time why the much-touted savior of the city, this moral vigilante with a reputation for protecting innocence, would relieve me of my own.”
She still wouldn’t look at him. And he didn’t blame her.
Her narrow nostrils flared with breath, and the hand in his trembled.
She was afraid.
“I only accepted what you freely offered.” It was the truth. Not a defense. He was a blackguard for doing so. A moral reprobate and a scoundrel and the worst kind of bastard. But he didn’t steal her virginity. He didn’t take her. He claimed the prize she handed him wrapped in such a lovely beribboned package. He’d given, too. He gave her pleasure. He gave her gentility and deference.
He gave her a child.
Shit.
“Under false pretenses.” She finally speared him with a wounded, accusatory gaze. “You let me think pleasure was your vocation. Everything about you that night was a lie, even your voice, your accent.God.I dishonored myself with a man known to my father. Did you know who I was?”
“No,” he stated firmly, dipping his cloth back into the bucket and running it between her fingers. “You know we’ve never met, and you’ll forgive me if I don’t keep up on society weddings, even that of my superior.”
“Then…why?”
Her question stilled his hand, and this time it was he that could not meet her gaze.
“Why did you make love to me?” she pressed.
He’d been asking himself the same question for weeks.
“I didn’t make love to you, I fucked you. I did it because you asked me to.” He’d done it because she’d possessed something few women did. An indefinable allure that made him forget anything resembling reason or thought of consequence.
He’d done it because he’d been hungry and desperate for so many things in his life, but no privation had torn at him with such strength until she’d offered herself as a banquet.
She flinched as though he slapped her, and he instantly regretted his harsh words. But he’d be damned if he’d take them back. If he’d allow her to think she had any kind of sexual thrall over him now. Or any power at all.
Because the precedent had to be set if this was going to work.
Morley remained silent. Waiting for her next move. He expected her to make demands. To use that night as blackmail and threaten to tell her father.
“I wanted so desperately to find you,” she murmured, as if in disbelief. “And here you were all this time, a charlatan charading as a gentleman.”
She didn’t know the half of it.
“A gentleman is nothingbuta charade,” he said stiffly, returning to his vocation of scrubbing her hand.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The million rules a gentleman lives by, or ladies for that matter, it’s nothing but pretense, is it not? A construct to hide who we truly are. What we think. What we want. We are naught but artificial beasts.”
“No…” Her little nose scrunched as if he’d stymied her. “Our rules of civility separate us from the beasts.”
