Page 77 of The Scandal You Started
It had taken an immense amount of reasoning with himself not to follow after Rayna when she’d left him. She wouldn’t have listened—he’d known that much—nonetheless, his heart had thrashed and implored and cried to convince her immediately.
Eventually, when he’d had enough of his emotions on tight leashes, he’d taken the bag and trunk she’d abandoned downstairs and left them outside her bedroom before heading to his own. Though only after he’d spent ten minutes fighting not to knock on her door.
Sleep had eluded him as he’d tossed and turned and thrown himself out of bed to pace repeatedly until finally exhaustion had snuck up on him and silenced his mind.
Come morning, Dominic went swimming in the river as he had been doing for several days, the exercise working to clear his head and tiredness. He returned to the farmhouse with determination and a touch of desperation driving his steps.
He couldn’t give her up now that he knew what she felt like in his arms, wrapped all around him. Not when her caressing fingers had struck his heart right out of his chest and into the palms of her hands. He needed to make her see that nothing about them together was improper.
Though the moment he went below for breakfast after showering and saw Rayna in the kitchen, the grating frustration and agitation that had gripped his heart the previous night smashed his carefully crafted argument like a nail through delicate porcelain.
When she uttered a flat, “Good morning,” with the quickest glance towards him, desperation crashed through him. He wanted to corner her, trap her, cage her in protest against her feigned indifference. It was ten times worse than how she’d been treating him already.
That whining restlessness only heightened as he made their morning coffee and tea while she prepped a fruit salad and sweet poor knights’ toast. And grew further as they ate breakfast in brittle silence. And further as they tidied up without her ever meeting his gaze.
Until Dominic’s teeth hurt with all the words he confined behind them, as much as his muscles ached from how tense he’d stayed to keep himself from reaching for her.
But when she tried to leave out the archway with the excuse of needing to check her emails, the wounded beast within his heart roared. The tattered pieces of how he’d pictured the morning would go scattered from his mind, and he snagged her around the wrist instead.
Rayna stuttered to a stop with a sharp inhale, and her charcoal gaze flew around to his. There was a moment, a second, where that panicked horror of the previous night returned with a flicker. But she blinked, and it was replaced by shuttered hardness.
“Let go,” she said firmly.
He tightened the circle of his fingers. “You cannot ignore me, Rayna.”
“I’m not ignoring you.”
“Then what would you call the way you are behaving at this moment?”
“I’m setting boundaries.”
He grunted sullenly, almost cruelly, by the way she stiffened. “Would you not agree it’s rather too late to set boundaries when you wear the mark of what we did on your neck?”
Rayna’s skin ignited to a hot red, nearly disguising the pink bruise just under her ear where he’d sucked a little too long and hard. Her left arm twitched as if she were fighting not to raise a hand to the mark, but at least the shutters dropped from her irises, exposing a humiliated rage behind them.
Somewhere in Dominic’s mind, he knew angering her wasn’t going to help him win her over. But if anger was the only reaction she’d give him, then he’d take it over no reaction at all.
“I can set boundaries whenever I want, Dominic,” she bit out.
“For what purpose? When last night you were—”
“Last night was a mistake.” The sharp snap of her voice rang through the thick silence.
There it was.
The words that had been printed in her eyes. What he’d feared hearing most.
“It wasn’t,” he muttered hoarsely.
Panic made her lashes give a subtle flutter, but it was enough to make Dominic realise something.
She didn’tthinkit had been a mistake.
She was trying toconvinceherself and him that she thought it was.
But she couldn’t persuade him, nor would he let her persuade herself.
“Last night,” he said, softening his tone. “It was what we both wanted.”
