Remember Love (Ravenswood #1)(70)

“And you will live unhappily ever after,” she told him. He was not sure, because he stood some feet from her, but it seemed to him that her eyes were bright with unshed tears.

“Happiness is an emotion, Gwyneth,” he said. “It is only women who assume that life can be lived from that unstable base. It cannot. I have lived for six years without emotions and I have been perfectly satisfied with their absence.”

She surprised him then. She left the gate and came toward him and did not stop until she was against him. She pressed her face to his chest beneath his chin and wrapped her arms about his waist. His own arms came reflexively about her back and shoulders.

And . . .

Ah, hell!

His mind went to the women with whom he had lain on the Peninsula. To how they had felt. A variety of physical types, some taller than others or more slender or more curvaceous. Some were more passionate or more skilled than others, or more talkative, or more quietly alluring. He had enjoyed them all, and he had enjoyed making them enjoy him. It had been a pleasurable, satisfying pastime, and it had kept him sane. Or human, at least. He would be able to put names to them all if they came before him now. He had always tried to see them as persons, never simply as bodies presented for his pleasure.

But none of them, held to his body, had felt like Gwyneth. Because with them it had all been about physical satisfaction and sexual enjoyment. A shared enjoyment, yes—he could not remember a reluctant woman or one who went away unsatisfied—but no more than that. With Gwyneth it had never been just about the physical. The yearning for it, yes. But not the yearning for sexual pleasure alone. With her it had always been the longing for Gwyneth herself—for the beautiful, wild, free girl with the light of life in her eyes and music in her fingers and her voice and passion in her soul. And the lilt of her slight Welsh accent. And . . . Well. And that unique essence of her that could never be put into words.

And here she was now again in his arms. And with her the threat and the danger of everything he had felt with her before. She was wearing a thick pelisse over her dress. He was wearing his greatcoat over several layers of clothing. It did not matter. She was Gwyneth. He would know her if several layers of down blanket were added to everything else between them and he was blindfolded.

It was not a physical knowing. He had never known her in the biblical sense and did not want to. He dared not even think of it. Please . . . He dared not.

She tipped back her head after a while and looked into his face, her eyes troubled. He kept his arms about her, but he held himself rigid and kept his expression blank. He had had long practice at both. Her warmth seeped through to his body. He ignored it.

“Kiss me,” she said.

He gazed into her face. Soft, parted lips, cheeks flushed with cold and perhaps something else besides, blue eyes looking very directly into his. Eyes to lose himself in.

“I have always made it a rule not to kiss other men’s women,” he said stiffly. “Or fornicate with them,” he added for good measure.

“I am not any other man’s woman,” she told him.

“Morgan?” he said.

She shook her head. “Aled and I are not betrothed,” she said. “He has never asked me to marry him.” She closed her eyes, and he watched her inhale slowly and let the breath go before she opened them again. “I would not say yes even if he did.”

No? Had he misread the signs yesterday?

She gazed at him for a few moments before half smiling and removing her arms from about his waist and dropping them to her sides.

“Let us go back to the house,” she said. “Mam and Idris will probably be home soon. I am sorry, Devlin. I ought—”

But he had drawn her close again and spread one hand over the back of her head to angle it and hold it steady. She stopped talking abruptly and he kissed her.

The shock of it went through him like a shaft of pain. He had kissed one woman once in his life before now, and that had been more than six years ago. He had taken the bodies of many women for pleasure since then and given his body in return. He had never kissed any of them, though. For a kiss was not about sex, or never had been for him. A kiss was . . . personal. It was intimate.

And he was kissing Gwyneth again. Hard and fiercely. His lips ravished hers as his tongue probed her lips and her teeth and plunged into the heat of her mouth and withdrew and plunged again while he felt himself harden into arousal and knew that a kiss could lead to sex. It would be violent sex if he continued and if she did not stop him. But even sex without love never called for violence. Never. It was one cardinal rule of his that he had never broken. There had been too much violence in other aspects of his life. He let go of the fierce urge inside himself and explored her mouth more gently with his tongue, using the tip of it, feeling her shiver and arch inward against him and grip his greatcoat on either side of his waist and moan with what he recognized as desire. Even through the layers of both their clothing he could tell that she had grown hot. She must be able to feel the hardness of his arousal.

Desire engulfed him. It pounded through his whole body and throbbed in his temples. But she was Gwyneth. He withdrew his tongue into his mouth and played her lips softly with his own before drawing back his head and looking into her face.

She had been in his dreams, the only part of his consciousness he had not been able to control. But dreams were easy to quell once one was awake—that jumbled mass of unrelated, incomprehensible, often bizarre thoughts and images that passed through the unconscious and unwary brain when one slept. She had been there—as had all of them. His family. And sometimes he had loved her, while at other times he had hated her. Undisciplined emotions, which had been easy to squash as he awoke, for emotions have no basis in fact or reason and no place in the waking world.