Beauty in Spring (Beauty #1)(12)

“And I carried you down to the solarium.” Feeling like a hero…and hating myself for letting her be hurt in the first place.

“Then refused to race me again,” she says with her eyes narrowing on me—then she abruptly stops at the entrance to the chamber, wonder filling her expression.

For an endless time she does nothing but look, her bare feet carrying her farther into the chamber, slowly turning so that she can see the canvases hanging from every wall.

“Gideon,” she breathes in awe. “Did you paint these?”

“I did.”

In disbelief she shakes her head. “You were never this good before.”

“I’ve had more opportunity to practice.”

She pauses in front of a landscape—the gatehouse, as it had looked when she and her father had lived there. Before the gates were closed and chained. “So this is where you spend most of your time?”

“Yes.” This chamber soothes me…and soothes the beast. For he is often content to be surrounded by reminders of the love I’d known instead of searching for what is no longer here.

Not content today, though. Not with Cora here. Instead our need for her rages hotter than ever, the scent of her filling this chamber, the sound of her soft breaths in our ears, the taste of her skin only a step and a lick away.

She smiles over a portrait of herself, looking fierce and determined, a cricket bat at ready in her grip. And another of her bulging cheeks full of Mrs. Collins’s stolen scones, wide-eyed and tight-lipped from the effort of trying not to laugh, and with crumbs clinging to her shirt.

“Was that the day we received The Great Lecture?” she says it in the same manner the lecture had been delivered, as if state secrets were hidden in the scones we’d stolen.

“It was.”

“Oh,” she exclaims quietly, standing in front of another painting. “Your dad and mum.”

As I remember them best—walking hand-in-hand through Cora’s garden, with the sun upon their faces.

She glances back at me, at my face and lower, then quickly away—and abruptly stills with her gaze arrested by the large painting on the east wall. As if in a trance, she moves closer, whispering, “What is this?”

“A dream,” I tell her.

Unlike all of the others, not something from my past. Simply Cora, lying upon a bed in a room filled with sunshine, her body soft and supple…and waiting for me.

“This is in your bedchamber—as it used to be?”

“Yes.”

Puzzlement creases her brow and she glances back. “Why was your bed not destroyed? Everything else was.”

Because the bed was the only thing in my bedchamber that she’d never been in. Everything else, she’d touched—the desk, the chairs, even the wardrobe, on those days when our adventures would leave her in desperate need of a clean shirt to borrow.

She does not wait for my answer but studies the painting again. “Have you watched me sleep?”

I have. But—“This was painted before you came.”

A bitter smile curves her lips. “So that is why you do not show me chained to that bed.”

A growl rises from my chest. “And because the woman in that painting has already given herself to me with love in her heart. So I would have already released her.”

“Then how can you be certain it was love and not desperation that drove her to accept you?”

“Because she stayed,” I tell her. “Would you?”

“You’ll have to release me first to find out. Will you?”

“No.”

Eyes glittering, she turns away from me—away from the painting. She pauses over a portrait of herself, standing in the moonlight, her lips freshly kissed. A new diamond pendant shines from the hollow of her throat. Her blue eyes glittered with tears then, too. But they were joyous, hopeful.

Cora’s breath shudders and she moves quickly on. The silence between us deepens as she continues studying each painting, yet her attention on them seems more and more unfocused as she goes—her gaze straying to me often, the flush never leaving her cheeks.

Because I’ve been aroused since hearing her first step at the bottom of the tower stairs, and I hardly bothered to zip.

“If you want to look at my cock, then only say so,” I tell her. “And I will give you a better view than this.”

Her blush deepening, she freezes in place—her eyes closing.

That won’t do.

I stalk closer. Her eyes fly open again at the short rasp that sounds as I unzip the few inches I’d fastened in haste. She takes a quick step back. Not far. Her shoulders press up against a painting of her garden, a canvas bursting with light and color.

She goes utterly still as I take the aching length of my cock in my right hand, her gaze fixed on my fist. Bracing my left palm against the wall beside her shoulder, I watch her face and slowly stroke my straining shaft, a rumbling groan reverberating in my chest.

“Gideon,” she breathes. I cannot tell if it is supposed to be a protest or shock or encouragement, but the sound of my name upon her tongue is like fire over my skin.

In a voice roughened by need, I tell her, “Did you think I would react in any other way when you are so close? Just as your cunt blossoms for me when I am near.” And she has been near me so long, the scent of her arousal is in full bloom. “Now watch me come for you.”