She let out a very unladylike snort. “The idea of compelling someone to keep me company with coin never appealed to me. Besides, then I’d be responsible for them, wouldn’t I? And, if I’m honest, very few would consider an association with one as besmirched as I a very desirable position. No one would consider my references a boon.”
The look on his face caused her own to fall. She couldn’t bear the tenderness. Or the pity.
“It is not so much suffering,” she all but whispered. “When there are so many in the world who know such pain, my bit of shame and isolation seems rather small in comparison.”
He dipped his head, his lips hovering above her forehead. “Suffering can be profound or prosaic, but it is suffering all the same. Yours is not inconsequential.”
His words melted her like honey decrystalizing in the summer heat. His presence washed over her like silk flowing in a breeze. Insubstantial, sensual, and yet compelling.
“You’re not broken,” he said. “You’re not ruined. Not to me.”
“You’re being kind,” she choked out over a lump of emotion lodged in her throat.
“I mean it,” he said fiercely.
She ducked away from him, turning to hide the burn of tears, pinching the bridge of her nose against their ache. She was too proud for this. She could not come apart in front of a veritable stranger.
“What?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
“You—have a ruthless side,” she admitted breathlessly. “It—um—it makes my blood rush around a bit.”
He was close again. Right behind her. His presence a relentless affectation. “I frightened you?”
“No! I mean. Not entirely. You’re the only person who has ever stood up for me before,” she admitted, moving toward the fire and smoothing her dress down her thighs in a nervous gesture.
“Then why retreat from me?” he persisted.
She could tell the flames nothing but the truth. “When you touch me I…Well, actually, you don’t touch me. But you were able to hold on to inanimate objects. To do a man violence.”
He let out a long breath. “I’m little better than an awareness most of the time. Something I could slip in and out of at will at first, but the longer I tarry, the more I spend in the void. But there are holy days—solstices and equinoxes where, if I concentrate very hard, I can become something like corporeal. At least, for a moment. I can will things to move, but it depletes me. On nights like Na Fir Chlis I am the most visible, but I cannot sustain contact for long.”
“I see,” she whispered.
His voice ventured closer, until she could almost feel his warm breath against her ear. “When I reached for you in the bath, my hand went through you… You felt that?”
“I feel—something. Not your skin, per se. Something else. It’s like…” She cast about for the word. “A tingling. No, stronger than that. A vibration, perhaps.”
He made an amused noise deep in his chest. “Really?”
“It’s disquieting.”
“Does it cause you pain?”
“No. No, quite the opposite.”
“The opposite?” He drifted around her, standing so close to the flames a normal man would have caught. “The opposite of pain is pleasure.”
She retreated a step. “So it is.”
He advanced, his eyes liquid pools of carnal promise. “Does my touch pleasure you, Vanessa?”
“I don’t—I don’t know how to answer that.”
“Why?” he pressed. “Why after being so fearless, is it pleasure that scares you? Do you fear your desire for it?”
She swallowed. “Yes. Maybe. I couldn’t say.” She feared the ruin it had already brought her. The derision of another lover. Another man she thought she might care for. Who might profess to care for her. She feared the strength of her feelings, her desires, after only knowing this man for the space of an hour.
His hand reached out, a tremor visible in the long, rough fingers. His palm caressed her face, but not in the way she wished it would. It was there, but it wasn’t. The warmth of his touch lingered; a callus might have abraded her soft cheek. There. Right there. But also, just out of reach.
It was both bliss and torment. The vibrations of his energy, of the very striations etched into the palm of his hand, were tangible. But whatever touched her was not flesh. Not exactly.
It was enough to make her weep, the longing she sensed in the gesture. The cavernous pain she read etched into the grooves branching from his eyes, and in the tension of his skin stretched tight over his raw, beautiful bones. “I haven’t touched a woman in a lifetime. In a handful of lifetimes.”
“Do you want to?”
“Is that an invitation, Vanessa?” His voice was like liquid velvet, his eyes twin azure flames. “If I could, would you let me?”
“I—Um…” She was a quivering, boneless puddle of sensation. Of desire. Her loins ached, moistened, bloomed for him. Her lips plumped and her skin burned to be touched.
Her entire body was one thrumming chord of need.
Was she the only one undergoing this torture? “John?” she whispered, turning her head out of his palm, if only to spare them each more impotent longing. “Can you feel desire as you are?” she queried. “Can you—erm—manifest it? Physically?”
His lips actually stirred her hair as he growled against her ear. “I’ve been hard as a diamond since the moment I watched you undo your buttons.”
CHAPTER 5
John leaned back and let his admission crash into the space between them, overflowing it with heady, carnal, unspoken reveries. His. Hers. All amalgamating into one frustrated frequency of need.
All the chaos of the common room had gone quiet, no doubt Bess had kicked everyone to their beds. In this abandoned corner of the structure, he and the comely Miss Latimer might have believed they were the only two people in the whole of the Highlands.
John watched her intently as she stared—or rather—glared at him. Unblinking. Her chest rose and fell beneath the high-necked blouse as she very distinctly did not allow herself to look down.
She’d have found the answer to her question if she had, straining against the placket of his trousers.
However, after what he’d just discovered about her, he realized he might have been too forward. Might have overwhelmed a woman who’d only just been harangued by undesirables.
He closed his eyes and stepped back, allowing her space. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
Squirming with shame and regret, she instantly buried her face in her hands. “No. That is—the fault is mine. I asked you the vulgar question. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
“I order you to stop feeling shame,” he said with a stern frown.
She looked up at him askance. “You can’t command emotions, that’s not how they work.”
“I can and I will,” he shot back, looking to goad her past her mortification. “I insist the blame for our—indelicate interaction be placed on my shoulders. I’ve forever been a man too plain of speech. Too blunt and coarse and forbidding. It made for a successful Lieutenant Colonel, a mediocre nobleman, and well… ripe shit at relationships.”