Page 173 of Her Beast

“My room is right across from yours.”

“Is itreallyyour bedchamber this time?”

He couldn’t help laughing. “Yes, it really is.”

“And you’ve been sleeping so close to me all this time?”

“It has been… torture to be so close and yet not look at you or touch you.” Malcolm gestured her inside. “After you.”

He crossed his arms and leaned against the panel she’d just shut, watching her inspect his private domain. Malcolm was unsurprised when she stopped in front of the portrait that hung opposite what he thought of as his reading chair.

She stood in front of the painting and studied his dead wife. Her throat flexed as she swallowed once and then again, before turning to him.

“Your wife?”

“Yes.” And because that seemed too abrupt, he closed the distance between them and said, “It was painted shortly before her death when we were in Antwerp on business. We met a painter there, a man named Alma-Tadema at some function or other and he asked if she would sit for him.” He snorted. “Well, I suppose lie for him would be more accurate.”

They both turned to look at the nude. It wasn’t large—perhaps ten by twelve inches or so—but it was magnificently potent.

“It’s calledCaldarium, which is an old Roman bath, apparently.”

Sukey had never looked more attractive—lush and ripe and alive, posed on a marble dais covered with an animal hide and overflowing with pillows in luxurious silks and velvets, holding an ancient grooming tool called a strigil. Whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.

“The artist hadn’t yet delivered it, which is why it didn’t burn up with everything else in the fire.” The photographs of them together, the letters they’d exchanged when he’d had to travel on business. Everything else was gone.

“Does it bother you to have it hanging in here?” he asked her.

∞∞∞

Oddly, Julia found that she didn’t mind the thought of a naked painting of his dead wife. The woman in the portrait looked like somebody she would have liked to know, her eyes wicked and laughing.

“No, it doesn’t bother me. I like it.” She turned to him. “Does it make you feel guilty to be with me?”

He looked startled by her question. “You mean would she be angry to know I’ve moved on?”

“Have you moved on, Malcolm?”

He lightly traced her cheek and Julia pressed her face into his palm, thrilled that there was no barrier between them.

“I’ll always love her, Julia. But I no longer yearn for her. I yearn for you.”

She turned her lips to his palm and kissed it, her tongue darting out to taste salt and the faint smell of leather.

He growled, his eyelid drooping.

Julia pushed him back lightly. “Sit,” she ordered.

His eyebrow lifted in surprise, but he lowered onto the settee.

Once again, she straddled him.

“What are you doing?” he asked when she reached for his placket. “I thought you wanted the bed?”

“I want you, Malcolm. Every single time we come into a bedroom you make me delirious with pleasure and then leave while I am sleeping.” She unbuttoned the entire placket and then pulled the flaps apart, hissing with pleasure when his thick member thrust up through the open trousers, the mushroom head wet and almost purple he was so hard and engorged.

She stared at it, her mouth flooding with anticipatory moisture as she recalled the taste and feel of him.

“Julia?”

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