Or suffering with a loneliness that would drive her into someone else’s bed. Somehow he knew she would find no solace there. Some types of loneliness had only one cure. He was hers.
She was his.
But the notion of that was unbearable.
God help him. He just wanted to keep her.
Chapter Seventeen
Their last four nights together featured few words. Occasionally the sensual demands they made on each other in bed were nearly punishing in their ferocity, as if they were furious that life was parting them. As if in colliding, nipping, pinning, hair tugging, they could brand each other.
And other times, their hands and lips traveled every part of each other’s bodies as though they could transfer the memory of each other through their fingertips right into their souls. Every texture, every curve, every bump and hollow and angle. The whorl of an ear or the space between fingers or toes, the crease of an elbow or knee, was found and caressed and loved. They played with the elasticity of desire, whipping it into a wild peak, drawing it out again until they were utterly netted in it, until the shattering release inevitably came.
Mariana knew she ought to have gotten used to goodbyes, and to paying attention only to each moment, and drawing a tall wall between the moment and anything that might follow. It was the only way she would ever be able to part with him. She didn’t want the thought of a tomorrow—of a forever—without him to steal a single second from their last moments together. When there was time, when she was alone, she would sit and, with as much pragmatism as she could muster, have a look at the condition of her heart. The way one might check to see what was left after an explosion.
Tonight he hadn’t said a word, apart from her name when his release took him. She loved knowing that she was the one who could make him, in that moment, forget who he was. Take him utterly out of himself.
She felt it when his breathing went shallow, since she was using him as a pillow. It was her first clue that he was about to break the long, fraught silence.
“Mariana . . . what if you don’t go to Paris?”
Her heart gave a jolt. Her languor was officially shattered, and her heart began to slam as though it were running. From or to something, she could not say.
“Stay here in London? I made a commitment to Signor Roselli. And I’ll need to earn a living, of course.”
She could feel his body tensing with the words he was about to say.
“I wondered if you would like to discuss a more formal arrangement.”
She was afraid to breathe. Her entire being felt balanced on a wire. The moment was both exhilarating and terrifying.
“If you would . . . like to stay in London and continue to enjoy . . . our time together . . .” His words were gruff. “I can arrange for an allowance for you, and we can find an apartment to your liking, where I can”—he took a breath—“discreetly visit.”
The wire snapped, and off she tumbled into the abyss.
She slowly pulled away from him. Sat up and stared as if he was a stranger.
Her hands went to her face in shock.
He sat up, too. “Mariana?”
“Oh, my God . . . all this time . . . you did think I was a harlot,” she breathed in horror.
He visibly reeled. “What on— No. Dear God.”
“You think I aspire to be a harlot, then? Hence the offer of money, to fund my aspiration,” she countered. She could hear the increasingly dangerous brightness in her own voice.
Her lungs felt like a furnace. She suddenly could not pull in full breaths.
He was watching her warily. “I feel,” he said carefully, “that the word ‘harlot’ as you’re using it is a pejorative, that you’re putting the word in my mouth, and that you’re furious, but I’m not entirely certain why. And no to all of it.”
Every astonishingly reasonable word he uttered was like kindling heaped upon her temper. And she didn’t know what the bloody hell “pejorative” meant, but she could surmise.
Damn all reasonable men to hell. Damn all carefulness, all strategy, all heroes. Damn society. Damn his ignorance of the cruelty that was his offer.
Damn her bloody heart, which he might as well have plucked out of her chest on a spada.
“I suppose I should consider it a compliment to my services that you wish to pay me for them. Your Grace.”
And even as she said this, she saw herself hovering outside his door with a candle. All but quivering with desire. She had come to him. Who did that but someone determined to be a whore?
Someone in love, of course.
An idiot, madly, helplessly, hopefully in love.
An idiot who seemed destined to always, always learn things the hard way. If only she’d had a book on the subject ahead of time.
She could feel her heart coming apart into shards, jangling about in her chest.
“Please listen.” His voice was infuriatingly steady. But she knew, because she knew the bastard now, that inwardly he was roiling. The tension around his eyes, his jaw. His hoarse breathing. He was upset, and good. She wanted everyone in the room to be upset. “What I want is to take care of you, Mariana. What I want is to take your worries away.”
“I know what you want, Your Grace. Mi vuoi scopare. When it’s convenient for you. And you’re generously willing to pay me for that.”
“Yes. I want to fuck you when it’s convenient for me. That will never not be true,” he said coldly. “On my deathbed, that will no doubt be true. It is perhaps . . . the truest thing I’ve ever known.”
God help her, even now that bald statement just made her want to lie back and let him have his way with her.
Oh, but now he was angry. It was both delicious and frightening.
And he was suffering.
She was furious that it mattered to her. That she was such a fool that even now, she wanted to do something to ease his suffering.
“It would not be convenient for you if I was in Paris. It also would not be convenient for you if I were a famous diva, known to all, with my own money, because then you would not be able to keep it a secret. Because that’s what you really want, isn’t it?”
He didn’t answer. She suspected that this was the first time in his life he had no idea what to say.
She knew she wasn’t being entirely rational. Why didn’t he know how this would destroy her?
And if she was brutally honest with herself, it wasn’t the implication that she would happily take money for sex. She was fortunate life had not tested her to that extent yet.
It was hearing, definitively, that she wasn’t the sort of woman he would ever marry.
And suspicions and realizations began cascading, one upon another. The momentum was such that she could not stop them, could not filter them through sense, and for a change didn’t stop to consider whether it was wise to say everything she thought and felt. “You’re not an impulsive man. So you must have given it some good, quality thought and decided that I’m beyond respectability. And on the heels of that, you must have decided that I couldn’t possibly aspire to respectability ever again, because one just casts respectability to the wind when they’re a bought and paid mistress of a duke, don’t they? I’ll just take my place in the demimonde. Where idiot men shoot each other over women who wait about for men to appear and fuck them.”