Page 72 of Tempting Fate
He took one threatening step toward her, jabbing a finger in her direction. “You can’t evenimaginewhat I want.”
She stepped down again, on the thin line of dry cobbles beneath the eaves. “What if I could?”
“Don’t.” He swiped a hand in the air as if to erase the sight of her. “Don’t follow me.” He turned and strode into the shadows between the courtyard gas lamps.
In what might have been her first impulsive decision of her lifetime, Felicity plunged into the frigid downpour and ran to catch up with him.
Seizing his arm with both hands, she spun him back to face her. “I’m not letting you leave like this,” she cried over the storm. “What if I never see you again?”
Something in the grim set of his jaw told her that’s exactly what he had in mind.
“Goddammit, Felicity, get inside where it’s warm.”
The rain drenched her almost immediately, gathering her hair into soaking strings. Plastering her nightgown and wrapper to her skin.
The drops stung, but she barely felt the pain.
“Come with me,” she tugged again.
His gaze dropped to her body for only a moment as she stood blinking against the drops that ran down the surface of her spectacles, obscuring some of his expression from her view.
Swearing in his native language, he shrugged her away, only to rip his coat down his shoulders and thrust it around hers. It engulfed so much of her, it might as well have been a cloak.
“It’s not safe.” He jerked away once she was swaddled. “Don’t you understand? Thirty years.Thirty yearsI’ve never— I’m simply not meant for a girl like you.”
“Woman,” Felicity corrected. “I’m awoman.I want you to acknowledge that, Gabriel Sauvageau. I am a woman, and just because I’m innocent does not mean that I am incapable of desire. Of understanding and expressing it just as well or better than you.”
She swallowed as a familiar shy mortification crept into her cheeks, and she fought the instinct that screamed for her to sink into the coat and disappear.
No more.
She was tired of being invisible. Insignificant. Silent. If she didn’t say her piece now, she might never get another chance. “I— I think about you often. In that way. All the time, in fact. And… when I’m in a room with you, I can look at no other man. For none compare.”
She ventured forward on feet threatening to go numb, encouraged by the answering color of his own drenched skin. “When other men gleam brilliantly in the light, I look for you in the shadows. I yearn to join you there. Because you are beautiful.”
He whirled away from her, giving every indication of a stallion about to bolt.
Rushing around him, she reached up and cupped either side of his jaw in her hands. Forcing him to face her, extraordinarily aware that he could toss her aside and disappear into the night should he take it in his mind to do so.
It didn’t matter, she had to bare her heart to him or she’d never forgive herself.
“I am not being kind,” she insisted, reading the admonishment in his eyes. “To me, you are the only creature worth looking at. Yours is the only body I want to discover. The only touch I’ve ever truly desired.”
His nostrils flared.
His jaw flexed and shifted beneath her hands, and his entire enormous frame shook as he stared over her shoulder at the door to Cresthaven.
“I’m not like them,” he spoke in a tight whisper, barely audible over the rain. “I’m not like the men in your books.”
“You are better,” she insisted, caressing at his scars with the tender pad of her thumb. “You are real.”
Finally becoming a casualty to the cold, she shifted on her bare feet, the numbness giving way to pain as a violent shiver overtook her.
He blinked down at her feet, then with several dark and foul curses, he swept her into his arms and carried her inside. He didn’t stop until he’d climbed all three flights of stairs and shouldered into her bedroom.
Appointed in white and gold, the only other color in the room was that of the massive blue Persian rug in front of the fireplace. Gabriel took her there in three long strides, and she slid down his body as he set her on her feet before the roaring fire.
It was like standing on a bed of pins and needles at first, and she gritted her teeth against chattering as he disappeared into the adjoining washroom.
