The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(29)

So many questions stung like vicious wasps behind her lips, but she was too much a coward to give them breath. Ash would have patiently answered each one. But the Rook?

Who knew the depravity of which he was capable?

A hoarse gasp of shock escaped her as he roughly bent her over the bed, imprisoning her with his hips as he unlaced her gown with rough tugs against her ribs.

It was the thickening shape of his sex against her backside that finally galvanized Lorelai from panic into action. She clawed her way up the counterpane, kicking out at him from behind with her ineffectual leg and scrambling across the bed. It was an undignified retreat, to be sure, but an effective one.

Lorelai thrashed and struggled against her unwieldy skirts, but finally gained her feet by way of a clumsy roll. Now she stood against the terror of the high seas with only a bed between them. Blinking rapidly, she found him staring across at her with a possessive savagery she’d not expected from a face that had thus far been so carefully expressionless.

And yet he made no move to follow her.

“I’m not yours,” she declared, rather courageously, in her opinion. She’d meant to say more, to talk sense into this barbarian, but a tightness in her chest stole her capacity for breath, and thereby, words. Her vision began to blur, distorting his brutal visage and clarifying the motes of dust sparkling in the dim silver light of the storm, aided by a few flickering lanterns.

Lorelai had never known true fear before. She’d lived her life under the thumb of a cruel and intemperate bully. But the trepidation and anxiety she’d considered a part of her every interaction with Mortimer ill prepared her for this pure, mortal terror.

She’d thought she understood what helpless was.

She’d had no idea.

A detached part of her marveled at it. At him. This man crafted of lethal strength and absolute Cimmerian ferocity. She had held him so long ago while he trembled in pain and fear as a boy. She’d brushed that inky hair away from those austere eyes and coaxed reluctant smiles from his hard mouth.

In this moment, no one would believe such a thing possible. Were her memories a lie? Had he never touched her with gentle deference? Had he always been this callous, violent beast?

Where are you, Ash?

For he was not here. Not with her in this room. Not inside the sinister villain who wielded his muscle and sinew to devastating effect.

Lorelai’s chest burned and her heart hurled itself against its cage. Finally, her body forced her to expel a breath she hadn’t realized she’d kept trapped in her lungs.

The movement drew his gaze to her bosom.

Glancing down, Lorelai found that her loosened bodice had drifted to her waist. Her corset pinched her breasts high enough that the shameful pink crescents of her areolas crested above the contraption, the abundant flesh quivering in time to the trembles of her body. If she’d been wearing her own cotton camisole, it would have shielded her flesh from his view. But Veronica’s gauzy French chemise, so iridescent it barely deserved the name, shimmered like gossamer hummingbird’s wings, revealing more than it concealed.

With an indecorous squeak, she yanked her bodice up to her shoulders, clutching it to her décolletage.

A flash of lightning turned his eyes into silver embers, glinting every bit as hard and hot as tempered steel. “Come here, Lorelai,” he ordered. Was his voice less steady than before? Or had she imagined it thus?

“I am not your wife,” she hissed. “You may not simply order me about like one of your crew. Just because I’m here against my will doesn’t mean I belong to you.”

His head made a serpentine motion on his neck. “That is where you’re mistaken, Lorelai.” He spoke through his teeth, reaching for a post of the bed as he carefully navigated around it.

“I—I won’t like it,” she threatened, taking an infinitesimal step backward.

Would he make a liar of her?

He advanced to the foot of the bed, and only one corner separated her from her fate. And then he stood before her once again, a dark tower of saturnine grace. A man who moved with such finesse, she’d not marked his footfalls. It seemed his shadow reached her before he did, and now here he was, close enough to share breath.

“I can promise your screams will be of pleasure, not of pain.”

Lorelai found herself once again unable to move as his words evoked a quiver somewhere south of her belly. She became mesmerized by something both foreign and familiar in his dark eyes. He didn’t blink. Never once did he break eye contact as both human and nature’s laws dictated he should.

“Is there no kindness left in you?” A muted whimper escaped her as hot tears burned her temples. “Do I mean so little to you?”

“So little?” He spirited away a mystified expression as quickly as it appeared, replacing it with his maddening inscrutability. “I survived…” He paused. Blinked. Then seemed to change his mind. “I crossed horizons for you, Lorelai.” He reached out to trace her jaw, her cheekbones, her trembling lips. Pausing at the river of moisture at her temple, he swiped at a tear, rubbing it between his thumb and finger and examining it like one would a foreign substance. “I’ve been watching you for several months, you know.”

“Several … months?” She gasped, her mind swimming with implications she couldn’t reconcile.

“I came for you the moment I made my way back to England.”