How to Woo a Wallflower (Romancing the Rules #3)(54)
“I’m neither,” Clary said, unable to resist pointing it out.
“And I’m not a waif to be redeemed.” He came to stand before her and smirked. “There were nights I loved fighting, Clary. The shouts of the crowd, the sawdust under my feet, the iron tang of blood on my tongue.” He shoved a hand through his hair, disheveling the perfect waves. “Some nights, I still hear and smell and taste those moments, as if they’re calling to me.” With a hard jerk, he squared his shoulders, as if he could shake off the past. “But I don’t want to go back. I want to make a different kind of life.”
“Gabriel, you have made a different life.” Clary offered him a rueful grin. “One in which you’ve been burdened with mentoring me.”
He stepped closer, bracing a hand on the patch of tree trunk above her head, another planted near her waist. “I don’t want to mentor you. I want to—” He swept a hungry gaze across her lips.
“What?” Clary lifted onto the toes of her boots. “Don’t you dare stop now.”
With agonizing care, he slid his fingers along her jaw, caressing her cheek with the pad of his thumb. Then he slid his fingers into the pinned hair near her nape. He tilted her head and lowered his own until he was a hairbreadth from claiming her lips.
“I want what I should not. To touch you. Kiss you.” He feathered a tantalizing kiss at the corner of her mouth and then bent to whisper near her ear. “Have you for my own. I want you.” The heat of his mouth against her ear set off goose bumps across Clary’s skin.
“Yes,” she whispered. She couldn’t manage more because Gabriel bent to kiss her neck, and she could only feel. Could only relish the strange elation of having him against her, his hands on her, his breath heating her skin. Strange, the odd combination of comfort and agony she felt in his arms. She wanted more, always more. To get closer, to know him deeper, to get past the maddening control he imposed on his emotions. Especially now that he’d shared his past, when it clearly pained him to do so.
When he lifted his head, she tugged at his lapel, pulling him down for a kiss. One deep, tempting taste of him, and he straightened.
“I’ll ruin you,” he said in a low, husky voice that did nothing to encourage her to think of propriety or etiquette or a thoroughly compromised reputation.
“Take me home,” she urged him.
“Where your brother can challenge me to a duel?”
“Duels are outlawed, and Kit is only familiar with theater weaponry,” she teased. “Besides, they’re not at home. They’ve gone to visit friends and plan to attend the opera this evening.”
His gaze burned even in the dim afternoon light, and she longed to wrap herself in that heat. She’d meant what she’d said to him at Ruthven’s. She wasn’t afraid of him. Not of how much she wanted him or of the hunger with which he seemed to want her. For once her in life, she wasn’t alone in feeling too much, wanting too much.
“If I take you home”—he dragged a thumb across her lower lip—“there won’t be any turning back from this.”
“Turning back has never been my way.”
“I don’t deserve you.” He drew one finger down the row of buttons on her shirtwaist, and Clary gasped. Her body was sensitive, attuned to his touch, throbbing for more. His hand stilled when he reached her belt; then he stretched his fingers, flattening his palm across her waist. “There’s more you don’t know.”
“Tell me while you’re walking me home.”
He chuckled again, a low rumble that echoed with a pleasant tickle in her belly. “I do adore your tenacity.”
“Then let me demonstrate for you.” Clary latched her hand with his and started off toward the edge of the park. When she glanced back, he cast her a gaze of such naked admiration the quivering in her belly turned to anticipation.
Clary Ruthven rushing off to her ruination was a magnificent sight. She seemed to have no notion or care that her hair had slipped half its pins and that he’d loosed a quarter of the rest with his eager fingers. She looked wild, like a woodland sprite, and a wanton one at that.
Then the rain started. A few intermittent drops at first, and he shucked his overcoat to hold the fabric above her head. She merely laughed and bolted ahead, tipping her head up to the sky, as if the cool drops were a gift from heaven.
Even when the rain began bucketing down, she seemed content to allow the shower to drench her hair and clothes. She was truly unlike any woman he had ever known, and he had no idea how he’d been lucky enough to win her affection.
Rain fell harder, faster, until the downpour made it hard to see. Gabe led Clary to a row of shops along Marylebone Road, and they ducked underneath an obliging awning. “We should wait until the rain lets up.”
“Shall we get a cup of tea to warm up?” She stretched onto her toes to scan the various shops along the road, and then her eyes ballooned wide.
Gabe knew the very establishment that had caught her notice. “Have you ever been?”
“Never, though I’ve always wished to go.”
Curling his hand around hers, he said, “Then let me make at least one of your wishes come true.”
They waited until the line of pedestrians passing had thinned and then started back out into the rain, picking up their pace to join the growing queue outside of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks. One umbrella-carrying lady nearly poked Gabe in the eye, and a gentleman tried to steal their spot in the queue when the newspaper he held over his head melted in a heap of soggy paper pulp around his shoulders.