Elias’s lips relaxed into their usual fullness. “I misread, then.”
He hadn’t misread anything. Watching him speak in the reception room had been devastating. She hadn’t realized how much she fancied him until she had felt hidden hopes shatter inside her chest. Even numbed by Scotch, she still felt the sting of the cuts. She had misread him—he was nothing like the crushes of her past. He wasn’t just layers of sunshine. He knew pain, and he articulated it. Behind his easy smile lay the vast landscape of a serious, inquisitive disposition, and an urge had gripped her to crawl into him to see . . . everything. She suspected he could follow into the black depths of the human mind but withdraw again before he became lost. A unicorn, light and dark, humorous yet sincere. Sadly, he had spelled out in brutal clarity how much divided them: nothing short of the current world order. Did he loathe being here? Did he loathe her?
Any moment now, he would turn around and leave the library. In a few weeks, he would leave the country and she would never know him. She would never know what if. A twinge of panic stung behind her ribs.
Elias stepped around the sofa. “Would you accompany me back to the drawing room?”
She could do that. Or she could drink more and fall asleep in the armchair, head spinning.
“Very well,” she said, and came to her feet slowly. She had poured her drink rather too generously.
He was by her side. “Allow me.”
When she placed her fingers onto his arm, his gaze flicked over her and briefly lingered where her red dress molded snugly over the swell of her breasts. Her exposed skin prickled in response. He had already averted his eyes again, his jaw set in a tight line. Beneath the fine wool of his sleeve, his muscles were hard under her palm. She let him guide her into the dark part of the room, holding on unseeing, delaying him with small, slow steps. Her heart beat a painful, heavy rhythm: Say something, say something. Anything.
At the door, he purposefully found lock and key in the shadows. She slid her hand down his arm until her palm was flat against the cool wood of the door. She was dizzy with daring.
Elias kept looking straight ahead. He didn’t seem amused.
“We could stay awhile,” she said thickly.
His hand was still on the doorknob, so close to hers that her little finger felt the warmth of his.
“We can’t,” he said. His voice was rough.
He didn’t withdraw his hand.
“I should like to talk,” she said.
He faced her with a sardonic glitter in his eyes. “Talk, my lady?”
He had leaned in and his stirring scent enveloped her, rich cologne and cotton warmed by his body.
“Yes,” she choked.
On the door, he spread his fingers, just a fraction. Enough for the tip of his little finger to touch the side of hers. Her breathing hitched. All her attention pooled in the spot of sensitive skin heating against his.
“I’m listening,” he murmured.
A soft roar filled her head. I’m drawn to you when I shouldn’t be. What is in your heart? Do you ever think of us?
“When we first met, at the loch,” she said. “Did you like what you saw?”
Silence.
Still, she felt it, how something in him shifted. It felt elemental, like a sudden calm in the air, like a lull in the waves crashing against a shore.
Heart hammering, she lifted her gaze to his. His eyes were dark, and he held her gaze steadily. Then he lowered his head. A paralyzing heat flooded her.
His cheek was next to hers, and his warm breath fanned intimately over the side of her neck.
“More interestingly,” he whispered against her ear, “did you like that I was watching?”
A pulse began to throb between her legs.
She turned her face toward his, slowly, slowly.
“I wanted to hit you with my book,” she breathed, her lips an inch from his mouth.
A glint of teeth as he smiled. “Good.”
He let his thigh press casually against the front of her skirt.
Her lips parted on a gasp.
“When I first saw you,” he said, “I thought you were a goddess. I would have worshipped you, on my knees.”
His voice came from a distance. The luscious pressure of his leg between hers heated her blood, turned her sweet and liquid like melting sugar. Their noses were almost touching; they were breathing each other’s breaths, liking it, and shivering from the significance of it. They fit. Intimacy would be instinctual, their hands, bodies, lips, sliding and locking together smoothly even in mindless erotic urgency . . . Elias made a low sound in his throat. She registered it almost after the fact, when the fleeting, soft contact had already left her lips again, that he had kissed her on the mouth. He faced the door, his chest rising and falling as if he had exerted himself.