Page 83 of Seducing a Stranger
“I understand,” she murmured, as a sense of sympathy infiltrated her gloom. Such a life was not easy, such a mindset awfully arduous and burdensome. “You’re telling me this is why you are unable to trust.”
He gathered her hands to his chest as he brought their gazes even. Anchoring them against his pounding heart, he placed a fingertip beneath her jaw, nudging her to look up at him. Something shone in his gaze she’d never marked before. A gentle contrition. The glimmer of vulnerability. “Sweetheart. I’m telling you why I’ve been a fool. An unmitigated bastard. Prudence…I’m sorry.”
She would have sworn her heart ceased beating if not for the thrumming in her ears. Had she heard him correctly? Or was she fantasizing this?
Had she fainted again?
Her gaze flew to his, searching for signs that she was truly going mad.
“You…don’t have to—”
“I do,” he insisted, his visage claimed by an emotion both desolate and resolute. “The truth is, I don’t know you like a man should know his wife, but that is my failing, not yours. Beyond that, I think you are an honest person, possessed of integrity I’ve only ever pretended to have.”
She stalled, blinking over at him in wonder. “You do?”
His features softened as he regarded her with such infinite tenderness, she felt as though it might melt her completely. “Yes. You’re so open and vulnerable. You tell me everything you’re thinking. You tell me what you want, and what you feel and what you know to be true. Hell, that very first night, your shocking candidness was the first thing that drew me to you. From the beginning of it all…I’ve been inclined to believe every word from your mouth.”
The mouth he referred to fell open in abject incredulity. “Then…why?”
“Because everyone—literallyeveryoneelse—is a liar, including me, and with that, I have made my peace. But Prudence,” he brushed his thumb up her jaw, his eyes touching her face everywhere, searching for something. “You are the one person who can truly betray me, do you understand?”
She tilted her neck, pulling away from his distracting touch to shake her head with incomprehension.
“You’re going to make me say it,” he realized wryly, giving the impression of a boy squirming beneath a scolding adult’s insistence he explain himself. The electric blue of his eyes disappeared as he hid his expression behind his lids. “You are the epitome of every desire or dream I’ve conceived of since before I can remember, and that is a very specific kind of torment. An unparalleled beauty, a superb lover, a woman of grace and kindness and intellect whom I can only respect and admire. A fantasy in the flesh, here in my house. Withmyname.”
He lifted his empty hand to swipe it through his hair. “Christ, sometimes I have to just stand in the hall and stare at the door you sleep behind because I cannot believe my luck, my undeserved good fortune. You arehere. You are real. And so is our child.”
A sob escaped her. Not one adorned by tears, but disbelief. “But…” She didn’t even know where to start. A part of her had awakened at his words, the part made of need and love and hope and happiness. “But…only this morning you thought that I—You said—”
“I know what I said.” His jaw tightened before he continued, his brow crimping with earnest anguish. “Trust is not a word I understand. Faith is a foreign concept to me. Despite that, my instincts have screamed at me to trust you.” His gaze cast down as his jaw worked over powerful emotion.
“And then that insidious voice inside of me warns that if Ididbelieve you, and then discovered you lied? That you’d somehow swindled me, possibly the most incredulous man alive. Well…I’ve survived any number of disappointments, treacheries, and sorrows. But I don’t see the way back from that. You could break me, Prudence, don’t you see? It’s why I’ve been pushing you so hard. Why I almost needed you to be guilty, so the terrible truth—if it was a truth—would be out. So it was safe to fall for you because you were just as dishonest as the entire world. Just as deceitful as me.”
Prudence yearned to say so many things. To ask so many questions. To soothe him and set his churning mind at rest, but now that he’d begun, his torrent of words tumbled out in escape, like the freed captives of a heavily fortified prison.
Her hand stayed against his heart hammering beneath the hard muscle of his chest as he released his grip to tenderly cradle her face in his palms. The spark of warmth he’d ignited within her bloomed to an incandescent radiance, reanimating the spirit within her.
“I meant what I said earlier,” he whispered, his gaze searching hers, beseeching her. “Even though I was being an inconsiderate ass when I said it. I don’t care about scandal in the paper but for the fact that it distresses you. I’ll send anyone to the devil before they hurt you. I am a knight. A man with a code. A warrior with a creed. I vow, from this moment onward to beyourknight, wife. Someone who is honor bound to protect your name, your life, and your soul. I swear to you, that before this child is born, the world will know who did this. And they will know you didn’t.” His voice grew in fervency until he finished with the one thing she’d yearned to hear. “They will believe you, as I believe you.”
His words eroded any thought of erecting barricades between them. Her next sob was filled with joy as she flung her arms around his neck, pulled him toward her body, and brought his lips down to receive her kiss.
The kiss that contained her heart.
She was lost. She’d been lost to him since the moment she’d tumbled into his lap. A fated fall, she realized, as if destiny had pushed her over.
And he’d caught her, as he ever would.
The moment tilted from overly emotional to intensely erotic in the space of an instant as he gathered her close and crawled up onto the bed, pulling her beneath him.
He was a remarkably self-contained man, her husband…until he wasn’t.
His kisses began as soft as prayers and then built in power and demand as his grip on his own control became less tenuous. Hot glides of his tongue became deep, mating dances with her answering passions.
She melted beneath him, and he filled her spaces with the force of his ardor.
A voice inside urged her to let go of the brittle, desperate edge she’d been clinging to, realizing it was safe. She wouldn’t fall. No, she’d join him here, to dance among the clouds.
His kiss contained so many things they’d still left unsaid. So many parts of his fractured being. He was at once the Knight of Shadows. A man possessed of unmerciful darkness, devouring her with breath-stealing intensity. And so, too, was he the Chief Inspector, assessing and observant as he brushed his lips across hers, creating delicious friction with his mouth, evoking an ache in her sex that demanded satisfaction.
