The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(45)
What else had changed in twenty years? She’d peeked where she ought not to have done when they were young. Did men change … intimately as well as they matured?
Stop it! she admonished herself. These treacherous thoughts didn’t bear consideration. She must keep her wits about her, if she were ever to survive this ordeal.
“You couldn’t be more wrong.” She replaced her wicked thoughts with traumatic memories of Veronica’s pleas echoing through their wing of Southbourne Manor as Mortimer violently forced himself upon her. Lorelai would tremble in her bed, helplessly weeping for her. And she’d often go to her after, helping the injured woman off the floor, or from wherever she’d been discarded, and into her nightgown.
Every time we’re broken, we get back up and limp along.
“Wrong? About what?” he queried.
“A man can absolutely rape his wife. Legally or no, there is no mistaking the sound of the deed. The terror, the pain, and the…” She swallowed vehement emotion. “The irrevocability of it.”
He met this with another of his infuriating silences. The sloshing sounds of displaced water drew insolent pictures in her mind of what she might find when she turned around.
Unwilling to do so, Lorelai drifted closer to the table and inspected the food laid out artfully upon it. She could have been at the sideboard of any royal, all told. Not only did she find croissants and apricot marmalade, but Devonshire cream, various tarts, thick slabs of crisped bacon, flat, round foreign cakes soaked through with melted butter. Next to these she found a syrupy amber liquid darker and less thick than honey. Little coils of steam rose from silver coffee and teapots.
Suddenly she felt faint with hunger.
She supposed that obstinately starving would serve no purpose at all. If she were to escape her fate, she’d need the strength a hearty breakfast and some strong coffee would allow her.
With her unsteady gait, she made her way around the table and daintily claimed the green chair, which placed the copper tub in her periphery. She stubbornly avoided looking at the dark head and wide shoulders above the rim as she slathered a croissant with a generous portion of marmalade and tucked into it with more relish than she allowed herself to display.
If she had to look away from her plate, she made a point of staring out of the windows, as more and more of the mist dissipated, unveiling an emerald sea.
“You know.” His cavernous voice broke the silence, causing her to start and nearly choke on a splendid bite. “If you weren’t so fixated on the physical aspect, you might bring yourself to consider that marriage to me could be the best thing that ever happened to you.”
Though she’d promised herself not to look, he’d stunned her enough to evoke an openmouthed gape in his direction. He scrubbed his long, decorated arms with some sort of pumice stone lathered with soap. In complete contrast to his back, colorful tattoos wended their way across his chest, his shoulders, and stretched down the swells of his arms all the way to the wrists. Lather covered some of their particulars, and she snapped her eyes back down to her plate before she became completely transfixed by the shapes and forms.
“How could it possibly?” she marveled. “Other than your infamy, what do you have to offer me? I’d be the wife of one of the most wanted men in the world.”
“Granted, but you’d be the wife of one of the wealthiest men in the world.”
“Your wealth means nothing to me,” she said tartly. “I’d rather starve than remain married to you.”
“You say that because you have never starved.”
Something about the way he stated this left no question that he had.
Her next bite tasted sour rather than sweet as an unwanted twinge of regret twisted in her stomach.
“I can offer more than money, you know.” Casually, he lifted his arms to scrub at his hair.
Lorelai made a rude noise. “You have no past, no country, no family, no compassion. No kindness. You won’t even claim a name. Just what do you have that could possibly entice me?”
“A kingdom.” He gestured to the window where the panorama stretched endlessly now, until it disappeared around the curvature of the earth. “I rule the seas. I wield more power over innumerable leagues than your so-called empress could even begin to fathom.”
“But you are ever at the mercy of those seas. Of the tides. No mere mortal can claim to control them,” she argued, astonished by his arrogance.
He dunked his head beneath the water and rose again. Rivulets sluiced from his hair and chose distracting trails down the cords of his neck, the groves of his clavicles, and between the swells of his chest. To look at him, it was easy to forget that he was a mere mortal. That he’d not been crafted of clay and iron, fortified by volcanic stone, and tempered by unimaginable storms.
“The sea has no mercy. Upon that I can rely.” He wiped a hand down his face, swiping away excess water, and Lorelai did her best not to notice that it still spiked in his dark lashes and gathered like gems on his skin in the invading sunlight.
“We are alike in that respect, the sea and I,” he rumbled. “Mercy serves me no purpose. I have learned to become as devastating as any storm. I can count upon the tides. They ebb and flow by the will of the moon and stars. I can time my life to their pull.” He studied her with such alert vigilance, she might as well have been crushed beneath a chemist’s microscope. “It is people who are more difficult to predict. They are the indefinable variable.”