Trial by Desire (Carhart #2)(44)

He pulled away. “No, Kate,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to intimidate you. I don’t want you to fear me. I want to look at you and finally see what I’ve been missing these long years. You’re a damned Valkyrie.”

He turned her back to the mirror. Kate felt almost on the edge of tears.

She didn’t want this—didn’t want her secret dreams to come true, didn’t want to hope again. But it was too late. She was already yearning for this. She was already yearning for him.

“It’s not quite true. I am afraid,” she stated baldly. “If I were a Valkyrie, I would not be. I wouldn’t feel a thing.”

“In the stories,” he said, his voice a dark rasp against her skin, “the heroine always slays the dragon and lops off his head. The villagers rejoice and build a bonfire, and darkness never again falls on the land.”

She could feel his hands at her side, warm and powerful. “But those,” Ned continued, “are only fairy stories. In reality…”

He smiled at her in the mirror, a lopsided smile. There was something faintly wicked about that expression, as if he were about to impart to her a great secret, one that had been closely guarded by a centuries-old society. She swayed unwittingly against him.

“In reality,” he whispered, “the dragons never die, and the big sword-wielding buffoons in unwieldy armor cannot slay them. Real heroes tame their dragons. Your fear, my—” He cut himself off, and that sad half smile burst into an incandescent grin. If she had not been awake to the flitting expressions that passed his face, she wouldn’t have noticed the suddenness of the change.

“Your what?” she prompted.

“I went to China to slay dragons. Instead, I tamed them.”

“I thought you went to China to examine the Blakely holdings in the East India Company, to see if the rumors you had heard were true.”

He shrugged, and in that instant she remembered what he’d said. Your feelings are yours. And what were his feelings in all of this?

“Does it matter why I went?” he asked. And he must have intended the question rhetorically, because before she could answer, he continued. “I can’t change the past. All I can do, Kate, is try to make up for it. And that means that if you still flinch from me—if the memory of the pain I’ve caused you is still too strong—I won’t get angry. You deserve my patience.”

“And where will you be?” Kate’s voice shook. “All this time, while you’re waiting in patience for me to trust you. Where will you be?”

“Where will I be?” She could feel his breath whispered against her. “I’ll be right where I should have been this whole time. When you think your castle walls will fall, I will shore them up. When you are afraid you cannot stand, I will hold you upright. I ought never have left. And when you understand that you need do nothing but lean…”

His hands clasped her waist, strong and gentle, holding her up without restraining her. She might have leaned back then.

She didn’t.

“When you lean,” he whispered into her ear, “this time, I will catch you.”

Oh, she was as dangerously vulnerable as ever, and as like to fall against him.

And that she believed him, that she believed he would be there to catch her, believed that this time he wouldn’t leave her…that, perhaps, was the greatest danger of all.

THAT, NED DECIDED after Kate left, had been idiotic.

It hadn’t been idiotic to look at her. It hadn’t been stupid to pledge himself to her. And the kiss had been every kind of clever, even if it had been her idea to begin with.

No, the foolishness had been when he’d forgotten himself so far as to let that admission slide off his tongue.

Your fear, my—

He’d cut himself off, not out of intelligence, but for want of an adequate word. He’d been saved by his lack of vocabulary, not any sense of propriety or self-preservation. Her fear, his… What was it, then, that dark thing that belonged to him? He thought of it more as that moment, sun striking metal, with him feeling bereft of every other option. He carried it with him even now. Not anything she needed to know about.

Foolishness might have done. Stupidity, as well. But neither of those words captured the height and breadth of the beast that Ned had tamed. And neither conveyed the sheer darkness that resided in him. It was foolish. It was stupid. But then, he’d learned that if he held the leash on his own reactions tightly, they could do him no harm. It was his own private madness, his own hidden dragon. Kate had single-handedly stymied the Earl of Harcroft. She would never trust Ned if she knew the extent of the beast he’d kept hidden from her. She had no idea how useless he had once been. But he would prove to every one of them that it didn’t matter any longer.

But so long as he remained in control, nobody else would ever need to learn about it.

CHAPTER TWELVE

IT WAS AN ODD little evening, Kate thought after her maid had undressed her and left her to her own bed.

With Lord and Lady Blakely departed, Berkswift seemed even emptier than it had when Kate had the manor to herself. Perhaps it was because Kate was the only lady in residence, and she had spent the remainder of the evening in isolation. Perhaps she felt alone because she knew that for one night longer, Harcroft was still in her home, and he had spent the last hours before retiring browbeating Ned with the details of his irrelevant search.