Dorian couldn’t recall the last time someone had shocked him. Years. Decades, perhaps. He’d seen so many variants of naked women, so many other things that would break most people, and over time the ability to feel surprise had abandoned him.
Or so he thought.
His thoughts became as scattered and aimless as the rivulets sluicing down her lush curves. She was a goddess rising from the water. Like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, except with heavy silver hair darkened by her bath that, unlike Venus, she didn’t use to hide her feminine secrets. She stood with her chin held at an obstinate angle, her shoulders straight in an observance of good posture, those soft gray eyes staring at him with a mixture of resolution and expectation.
Farah was offering her body to him. She wanted him to say something. To respond to her demands. But how could he, when all that glorious skin was bared to him, flushed pink with heat and not a little shyness? The condensation in the atmosphere blurred any sharp lines or bold colors with a dreamlike ambiguity that drew him closer to the bath.
Struggling to maintain his mask of nonchalance, Dorian pulled himself up short, gluing his boots to the marble and refusing to take another step. Wasn’t there a saying about losing control of situations like this? Moth to a flame? Flying too close to the sun?
Those breasts, that was what. Silken globes of pale perfection tipped with tight nipples the most flawless shade of pink. The delicate dip of her waist, the small divot in the center of her stomach that seemed to draw his eye ever downward to the thin nest of golden curls between her—
“No,” he declared through teeth that would not unclench no matter how much he ordered them to.
“No?” she echoed, her light, delicate brows drawing together. “Don’t you want me?”
“No.” It wasn’t a lie. It wasn’t exactly the truth, either. From the moment he’d entered the room and seen the way her hair brushed her bare shoulders, his body had betrayed him. As she washed for him, his cock had become heavy, full, and hard. And now? Now even the lightest brush of his kilt caused him inconceivable pleasure and agonizing pain.
Her lashes fluttered down, her expression the only thing hidden from him. “What about me do you find distasteful?”
“It isn’t that.” The instinct to protect her from hurt was a hard one to smother.
“Then…” Her gaze bounced to the side, her arms inching up to cover her breasts, now quivering with a chill. “Are you and Mr. Murdoch somehow involved—”
“Christ, no!” Running frustrated fingers through his hair he paced away from her, needing to fill his eyes with something other than the bounty of her glorious skin, and then back toward her, already craving the sight of it. How often since they met had he secretly fantasized? How much torment had this woman already caused him? How much more could he take?
“Then … why?” she asked, the boldness seeping out of her voice.
Another man, a better man, would have covered her to spare her modesty. Would have warmed her from the chill now visible on her delicate flesh. Would have swept her slick body into his arms and carried her to the bed, sinking into her softness before the moisture on her skin had time to dry.
But the only man here was him, and he was incapable of giving her what she asked for because …
“It’s simply out of the question,” he insisted, through teeth still ground together.
Her eyes softened and she cast a surreptitious glance at his kilt, and Dorian had never been more grateful for his sporran to shield what his manhood was doing. “Is it that your body is not—able?”
The noise his throat produced sounded more cruel than he’d meant it to, but he couldn’t explain that he’d meant to direct it at himself. “My body…” His body wasn’t the problem. Even now, as he forced himself to look at her, a wave of aching pleasure made an agonizing journey down his spine until his every muscle clenched and the tip of his cock wept a tear of yearning. “My body could take yours until you begged me for mercy.”
Her full lower lip dropped open, and the silver of her irises overtook the green as he knew it was wont to do. “Then do it,” she whispered in a quivering voice. “I’ll marry you, and you have my permission to—take me however you’d like, until I am with child.” She blinked often as she said this, and held her tiny fists tightly at her sides, but her posture, her expression, remained resolute.
To any other man, her offer would have been like receiving the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. To Dorian, it was like being thrust into the deepest pit of hell.
He fought to retain his composure, to tear his eyes away from her, but the feat proved biblical. His eyes had never feasted like this. His body never responded to any sight like it did to her.
And why wouldn’t it? She belonged to him.
Only him.
All this time, a part of him had expected that little silver-haired fairy whose stories still haunted his every night. Dorian hadn’t prepared himself for the bold, elegant woman who stirred his blood and inflamed his body.
No, his body wasn’t the problem.
It was his mind.
The flames that had licked at the ice encasing his heart were quickly doused in a rush of frustrated fury and self-disgust. “We will not lie together,” he enunciated darkly, red beginning to seep into the periphery of his vision. “I decline your conditions.”
Eyes narrowing, Farah turned, giving him a view of her heart-shaped rear before she lifted her leg and stepped out of the bath.
If a man like Dorian Blackwell whimpered, he would have then. Could fate be any more cruel?
She reached for her robe and belted it over her lovely nudity. “If you decline my condition, then I decline your proposal.” Grabbing a towel, she began to work the excess water from her luxurious curls.
“You forget, it wasn’t a proposal,” he reminded her. Dorian also hadn’t expected her to be so strong. So willful. As a child, wasn’t she the sweetest of cherubs?
She cast him an irritated glance, still ministering to her hair. “Regardless of what you call it, I’ll refuse. I’ll marry Inspector Mor—”
“You will not!” he roared, stalking toward her. “You don’t love him.” Crazed, he reached for her shoulders, to shake some bloody sense into her, but before he could bring himself to do it, his fingers curled in upon themselves, the joints cracking with the force of his rage.
Fear flared in her lovely eyes, but she didn’t back away from him. “I don’t love you, either,” she reciprocated. “That isn’t part of this discussion, is it?”
His lungs emptied of breath as an exquisite ache speared them, and he had to struggle to fill them again.
“I want to give someone the childhood that was taken from me,” she said more softly. “And the man I marry must agree to that.”
“You. Don’t. Understand.”
“I understand that you are the boldest and most feared man in the realm. You can kill someone without a second thought, or ruin entire families with the stroke of a pen. If you are brave enough to do that, then you can summon the courage to lie with your wife the few paltry times it will take to get me with child.”
They glared at each other, their wills clashing with palpable force.
“Is your body promised to someone else?” she asked.
“God, no.”
“Is your heart?”
“I thought we’d quite established that I don’t have one.”
She was getting better at those irritated glances that conveyed her impatience. “Then explain this to me, if I don’t understand it.”
Dorian couldn’t put it into words. Not to her. “I already did.”
She studied him for a moment, then extended her hand toward him.
He retreated out of her reach.
Her brow furrowed in thought. “Dorian, how long has it been since you’ve allowed someone to touch you?”
His stomach clenched at the sound of his name on her lips. He couldn’t tell her, not without giving away too much. “A lifetime,” he answered.
“And honestly, is that why you cannot have—er—relations with me?”
He glanced away from her, regretting that he ever revealed such a weakness. When he’d avoided contact with others, he’d turned it into a power play, insinuating that he found them too beneath his dignity for a handshake or an offered arm.
That wasn’t so in this case. Not with her.
“How do you kill people if you do not touch them?” she asked curiously, then shook her head, a peculiar expression twisting her mouth. “I never thought I’d ask such a question.”
“I often wear gloves,” he answered honestly. “Also, not every weapon requires physical contact.”
“Of course,” she said automatically, though her brows furrowed as if puzzling out a problem. “But, with your gloves on, you have come into contact with others?”
“Rarely. If it can’t be avoided.”
She nodded, deep in thought. “Though I live as a widow, I remain a virgin. Despite the issue of a child, our marriage would need to be consummated in case its validity was ever called into question.”
Dorian’s mouth went dry. He’d thought he’d considered everything, but a sexual relationship had been so far out of the realm of possibility, this one detail had escaped him. Beneath the panic, a whisper of pleasure beamed at the knowledge that another man hadn’t touched her.
Tapping the tiny divot in her chin, she set her towel down and picked up a brush from a dressing table and began to work it through her curls. “I—suppose if I was being completely practical, I could take a lover. That would solve both of our problems, wouldn’t it?”
“I would kill any man who dared touch you,” he informed her coldly.
“Well, that isn’t being very solution-oriented, is it?” She sighed, exasperated. “Would it please you to watch? That seems to be a proclivity of yours.”
He took a threatening step toward her, smarting at her observant insinuation. He’d been nothing his entire life but an observer and manipulator of human will and desire. Should it be such a surprise that the inclination extended to his troubled sexuality? “I will force you to watch as I dismember whatever part of his body he dared to touch you with, and feed it to him,” he declared tightly.
“Then it has to be you,” she insisted.
They glared through another impasse for the space of a few moments.
The thought of another man touching her brought out his most evil, sinister impulses. He’d felt them when she’d kissed Morley, and had barely stopped himself from snapping the man’s neck in front of her.
Despite his anger, he loved looking at her like this. Flushed from her bath, her hair a heavy curtain of coils around eyes the color of moonbeams. How could any man deny her? He wanted to touch her. Craved it.
But he couldn’t bring himself to taint her like that. Why did she refuse to see it? How could she invite the Blackheart of Ben More into her bed? Marriage was one thing. Sex was something else altogether. Did she really want a child so badly that she’d lower herself to allow someone like him inside her glorious body? Did she not know who he was? Had he not painted a clear enough picture of what he’d done?
Of what had been done to him?
“Your gloves,” she murmured, as though struck with a bit of genius.
“What?”
The pink of her cheeks deepened and she visibly gathered her courage to explain. “I’ve spent a great deal of time over the last ten years in the company of street and dock prostitutes,” she began. “And I’ve learned from them that to conduct their business out in the open like they do they rarely have to disrobe. In fact, I gather that very little in the way of contact is required.”
The idea angered Dorian, because it tempted him. “You want me to treat you like a bloody dock walker?”
She leveled him a droll look, though her cheeks still burned with timidity. “Not particularly. My point was that I think we could achieve—intercourse—without a great deal of touching.”
His lip curled, but his thighs clenched in response. “You aren’t serious?”
“You could wear your gloves, your shirt, your kilt or trousers, indeed, your vest and evening jacket if you were so inclined.”
“And that is what you want? To be fucked like an East End doxy and then tossed aside? Because that is what I will do,” he warned, the darkness gathering in his heart as answering clouds gathered in her features.
Her eyes were liquid silver as they narrowed at him, swirling with as many mysteries as the stars in the night sky. “I want a family,” she murmured. “And I’ll do what I must to get it.”
The naked, aching honesty in her voice pierced him with a poisoned arrow, and he could feel the toxins spreading through his blood. Soon he would be completely paralyzed, a victim of the opposing forces now quarreling inside him like two wolves fighting for dominance. The two strongest emotions known to man.
He took in a deep breath, the scent of her honey soap and the lavender water invading his senses with the subtlety of a Roman legion.
“Then on your head be it.” He stalked past her toward the door. “We’ll marry in the morning,” he announced, then slammed out.
