As the Devil Dares (Capturing the Carlisles #3)(78)

This was what attracted him to her, that the same beautiful woman who could be so prickly and distant held within her a fierce passion waiting to be unlocked and a vulnerable heart that she’d now placed into his care. So many facets to her that every moment brought a new discovery about the woman beneath.

“But I won’t…surrender,” she panted out, her voice full of resolve even as she arched herself against him. “No matter what…happens between us…”

“No matter what?” Devilishly, he slipped his hand between her legs. “Even this?” He stroked his thumb across the little nub buried at the top of her folds, and her hips bucked.

She tightened her arms around his shoulders and buried her face against his neck. “Even that,” she forced out. Then she inhaled sharply and shivered. “Oh, Robert, do that again!”

Biting his cheek to keep from laughing, he did as she bade. This time, a whimper of need fell from her lips.

“You’re not my enemy, Mariah,” he murmured against her temple as he slowly withdrew his hand. Making love to her again was so very tempting. But it was too soon, and she would be too sore. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her, in any way. “You mean so much more to me than that.”

She pulled back just far enough to look up at him, and her eyes searched his face, as if she couldn’t quite believe him. “Do I?”

“A great deal,” he assured her, tenderly brushing an ebony curl from her cheek.

Yet her face fell as she whispered, “But you don’t trust me.”

“I do,” he insisted, having given her no reason to doubt him in that.

But she slowly shook her head, and sadness darkened her face as she whispered, “Not about your father. You still haven’t told me everything about the day he died.” She hesitated. “Or why your mother thinks you blame yourself.”

He froze, his hand stilling against her cheek. The soft accusation in her words cut into him like shards of glass, and he hesitated, needing a moment to steady himself before explaining, “I don’t want to burden you when you won’t understand.”

Her eyes softened as they searched his face, her fingers combing tenderly through the hair at his temple. “Are you so very hard to understand, Robert?”

His chest squeezed painfully, not to hold in the anguish he’d suffered for the past two years but with a desperate desire to share it. Perhaps she would understand the horror of that day and the weight of the blame he carried. After all, she knew the frustration of trying to please a father, just as he did, and she knew the loss of a parent.

“Richard Carlisle,” he offered cautiously, carefully testing the new trust forming between them, “was a good man and a kind husband, a concerned father…” He sucked in a deep breath. “And I disappointed him.”

She rested her palm sympathetically against his cheek. “You didn’t disappoint him.”

“A great deal.” He shook his head in self-recrimination. “I was always the one who caused the most trouble, thought up the pranks, planned all the games and wagers. Quinton would agree with whatever wild scheme I’d concocted, and Sebastian would go along to keep us from harming ourselves too badly. But I was the ringleader, the one who kept thinking up even wilder antics for us.”

“You were young,” she whispered. “Boys are often wild and uncontrollable.”

“But it didn’t stop when we grew up. It became worse.” At the somber darkness that flashed across her face, he turned his head to kiss her palm. He appreciated her concern, if not the pain she was forcing him to dredge to the surface. “I was a grown man and old enough to know better, yet I kept partaking in the same wild debauchery as I did at university, racking up huge gambling losses, and damaging the family’s reputation. Finally, Father had enough.”

A knowing empathy lit her green eyes. “He spoke with you about it?”

“More of a lecture, in public and with every intention of trying to bring me to my senses.” Even now he could hear his father’s deep voice speaking the words as clearly as if he’d said them only minutes before rather than two years ago…I raised you to be a man. But when I find you like this, behaving as you are, I am disappointed in you.

She asked softly, “Why did he lecture you?”

“Because I’d launched into a spree of drinking, gambling, and whoring of such infamous proportions that it threatened the reputation of the Carlisle family and the new title.” He wasn’t exaggerating, and he could tell by the emotion in her eyes that she realized that, too. “I’d been missing for three days when Father came after me. When he found me, I had just lost five hundred pounds in a game in which I’d been too foxed to see the cards clearly and was attempting to assuage the grief of my losses by letting the barmaid…comfort me in the back room.”

She swallowed hard at that bit of news, the only outward sign that his actions shocked her. “He was worried about you.”

His chest tightened with guilt. “And what kind of son makes his father worry about him?”

“Every son,” she whispered.

He shook his head. “Not like that.”

She knew not to press the issue and turned her attention instead to caressing her thumb across his chin. “What happened then?”

“He’d pulled me out of the hell, stumbling drunk and furious,” he explained, his voice raspy with emotion. “He ordered me back to Park Place with him, but I had every intention of finishing my spree.” The bitter taste of grief rose in his mouth. “After all, I wasn’t a child to be ordered about by his father. I was a man, and I was going to prove it by gambling away even more money and tupping as many women as possible.” Then he added quietly, “An hour later, he was dead.”