The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(47)
He twisted his torso to spear her with his frigid glare. “But it is. I was hoping you’d understand.”
Her distress increased, and she loathed the tear that escaped her. “As a girl I thought … I knew … Ash would be the man I offered myself to when I came of age. I hate that, in the end, you’re going to be the one who hurts me. Who treats me like Mortimer treated Veronica. I never thought in a million years you would cause me that kind of pain…”
“I won’t!” he hissed vehemently. “Don’t you fucking dare compare me to him.” He slammed his lips shut, as though his outburst surprised even him. Frowning, he seemed to consider something for a long while. So long, in fact, her nerves stretched to the breaking point.
“What do you mean?” she prompted. “Are you saying you won’t require me to … we won’t consummate…” Lord, the heat of her blush could have immolated her right where she stood.
“Oh, we will,” he vowed as the dawning of an idea swirled behind those dark, wicked eyes. “But what if I offer you a reprieve of sorts? A pirate’s promise.”
“Are pirates any good at keeping promises?” she breathed.
“I suppose we’ll find out.”
Why the change of heart? she wondered. “What are your terms?” What was his objective?
Her question seemed to encourage him. “I will not take you. Not by force. Not until you ask me to.”
What? Considering the stance he’d taken since he returned for her, this didn’t make any sense. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you?” he challenged. “You were always a curious girl. I don’t imagine that’s changed. What if, instead of making you my offering, I offer my body for your use?”
Mouth suddenly dry, Lorelai stood. “What if I don’t want it?”
Wings flexed as he stood and turned to her, revealing all of himself. His skin like molten gold shaped over the cold, tempered steel of his chest and decorated with brilliant color. The flare of his shoulders were molded into the fascinating mounds of his biceps before tapering down to sinewy forearms laced with thick veins.
Lorelai did her level best not to follow the obdurate ripple of muscles down his torso, arrowing right to the lean hips and his—
Eek. She slammed her eyes shut. That had definitively grown along with the rest of him in twenty years.
“Tell me you do not, and I’ll tell you you’re a liar.”
Her lips parted to deny it, but not a word escaped.
“You may do what any other has died a torturous and painful death for even attempting.”
“What is that?” She blinked up at him, resolutely watching his eyes and never drifting lower.
“Use me.” He held his arms out, hands up like a pagan sacrificial offering. “Wield me, Lorelai. I am at your discretion. I am at your disposal. Whip me, bind me, torture me, degrade me. Any need you have, I will fulfill. Any curiosity you can conceive of, I will provide the answer.”
The first smile she’d ever witnessed spread over his fiendishly sensual lips. It was the smile of a shark, all teeth and temptation. “Out there, I am captain and I am king. In this chamber, you rule me. You command me.”
His eyes captured hers, and where she’d seen voids before she now saw nothing but opportunity. And something else. Something … she might have once called yearning.
“You own me.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
He’d have done it all again, the Rook decided.
He’d have waded through twenty years of hell and oceans of blood to get to this moment. To see Lorelai’s eyes glitter like the most precious gems in the Amsterdam markets. They sparkled with the cerulean agony of indecision.
Reality touched her with more beauty than his memory ever could. Even as tenaciously as he’d clutched at the memory of her visage, twenty years had dimmed certain details in his mind’s eye. He’d remembered the unruly tendrils of gold at her temples, but not the matching flecks of gold in the azure of her irises. Likewise, the brilliance of her smile had benighted many of his dreams, but he’d forgotten that beloved dimple in her cheek. Just the one.
Time and melancholy had robbed some of the hope from her eyes, and the light from her smile. But none of her beauty.
If there was a better word for perfection, he would have used it.
The years, the sun, and the sea had been far unkinder to him.
Touch me. He didn’t ask. He didn’t beg.
Not out loud.
The Rook begged no one. He asked nothing. He commanded. He ordered. He decreed.
He used his cunning and ruthlessness to get what he wanted. He’d used it to get her here, into this room, in fact. He was the kind of man that ruined people. One way or another. And something had whispered to him that the moment he’d found his way back to Lorelai, he’d ruin her, too.
But for twenty long years she’d been the grit in his oyster. The one memory he could not be rid of. The obsession that had kept him alive. Had driven him to survive what so many had not.
He’d had his weak moments, of course, where he’d wondered if she was some halcyon specter of the past. Unreal and unattainable. He feared he’d find her a figment of perfection his defective mind had somehow enshrined as a mechanism for survival. His memory was faulty, after all. His brain seemed to work differently than others’. When men became impassioned, hot, and angry, he became cool, remote, and unfeeling.