“Shut up,” Cole commanded, as he crowded her back against the door and captured her mouth again.
He wasn’t finished with her.
Cole made his kiss everything hers hadn’t been. Wet, probing, and utterly wicked. Though he had to brace himself against the door so his weakened knees wouldn’t have to support them both, he summoned all the skill and expertise she’d accused him of having and wielded it against her lips.
He licked at the seam of her mouth, more of a warning than an inquiry, before he claimed it with his tongue. In truth, he half expected her to bite him.
But she didn’t.
The moment a dark groan manifested in his throat, she came alive in his arms, clinging to his shoulders for stability. As he drank deeply from the well of shocking pleasure in her kiss, he found with sinister delight that her tongue tangled with his instead of retreating. Her mouth was hot and her lips so infinitely soft, he almost couldn’t believe they were real.
A part of him realized he’d conjured a firestorm in that moment. That everything that had been shattered and cold within him melted in an instant inferno, becoming liquid and incomprehensively hot. Ready to be molded into a weapon. Made to thrust. To penetrate.
And here was an opponent worth the battle.
With a ragged sound, she broke the kiss, ripping her mouth from his and surging to the side, out of his grasp. With clumsy, shaking hands she wiped at her mouth as though to erase any trace of him.
She stared at him in open accusation, her features twisted with dire anguish. “Why did you come here tonight?” she demanded with a half-sob. Her eyes, though suspiciously bright, remained empty of tears and full of antipathy. “Do you enjoy tormenting me so, that you would dedicate an entire evening to my humiliation?”
Cole pushed away from the door, turning from her and taking the time it took retrieving his prosthetic from the bench to collect himself. Why had he come? Why was he acting like this? Why, when his mind recoiled from her, did his flesh seem to crave her? It was as though his body betrayed him in her presence. He’d never had such a strong physical reaction to a woman he hardly knew. At least not since …
“Ravencroft wanted me to attend, and since I owe the man my life, I find it hard to deny him anything.” He answered her question with as much nonchalance as he could muster.
“Need I remind you that I also saved your life,” she railed. “And yet you have no compunctions about degrading me and threatening to take everything I have.”
Was that how she regarded his kiss? As a degradation?
“What have I done to you?” she cried. “Why must you be so beastly?”
We must be what we are, he thought. Beasts.
“I don’t like what you are doing here.” He turned on her, summoning his reserves of malice to coat the nerves that had become raw and exposed by their interaction. “I don’t like the noise of your renovations. I don’t want to live next door to whores, vagrants, and pickpockets. I don’t want to deal with the risks their associations bring into this neighborhood. I want peace, woman. Why can’t you understand that?”
“Is your peace and quiet worth a beaten woman’s life? Or a frightened child’s safety?” she asked, once again impassioned.
“Whatever it’s worth, I’ve paid twice the price. I’ve earned it.” He brandished his prosthetic at her. “You want to save all the whores in London, fine, just do it elsewhere.”
“These women, they’re not just whores, not merely a collection of orifices for your amusement. Some of them are mothers. Or daughters turned out by the very family who was supposed to protect them. They’re human beings.”
“You don’t think I know that?” he bit out.
“Do you? If you truly believed in their worth as women, you’d treat them with compassion instead of contempt. With affection rather than acrimony.”
“You know some big words for such a small woman.”
“And you have a small mind for such a big man,” she volleyed back, raking him with a disgusted glare. “I can’t believe I ever—” She pressed her lips closed, her little fists balled with fury.
“You ever … what?” he finally asked when the silence stretched longer than he was willing to bear.
“Nothing,” she breathed, turning against the door to open it. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to return to my guests.”
Like hell would she escape him with this left unfinished. “You can’t believe you ever what? Kissed me? Saved my life?” he demanded, seizing her arm.
She looked at his hand with sufficient contempt. “I can’t believe I ever welcomed you into my home. In the future I’ll make certain the door is barred to you.”
He released her immediately. “No great loss.”
“To either of us,” she agreed, and escaped into the house.
It took Cole a full minute to find his breath again, and another to gather the strength in his legs. He shook with so many fragmented emotions he couldn’t even begin to identify them.
Imogen Millburn, Lady Anstruther, was more dangerous than he could have ever imagined. For she brought out something in him he’d promised he’d left in that prison cell along with his hand.
That wild, primitive beast. A starving, wolfish creature who wanted to do nothing more than stalk and prowl. To leap and snare. To feast and fuck.
This beast was no duke. He was no man raised with genteel civility, with a care for the expense of things or the consequence of his actions. This beast was no longer dormant within him, but prowling beneath the surface of his skin, wanting to mark his territory.
And he’d found a delectable morsel just now, one he was in danger of acquiring a taste for.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It wasn’t a long walk from Mayfair to Belgravia, but Chief Inspector Carlton Morley went on horseback, his haste due to the brutal murder at the Anstruther manse. The fact that the Anstruther residence abutted the Grecian-style monolithic dwelling that belonged to Britain’s former most prolific assassin, Christopher Argent, didn’t at all set his mind at ease.
Just because Argent worked for Scotland Yard now didn’t mean the man had stopped killing.
Spilling blood became a delicious addiction if one wasn’t careful, Morley reflected.
He should know.
Argent clattered up to the Anstruther gate behind him on his own bay steed. The strident assassin-turned-lawman having fetched him at dawn, a mere hour after Morley had collapsed into bed.
He would like to have claimed that something common like a woman or a troubling case had kept him up into the wee hours of the morning. But he couldn’t. It had, in fact, been the spilling of blood. His new and dangerous addiction. These nocturnal goings-on would put him in an early grave, of that he was certain.
But there was no help for it now. No stopping him.
“You look like the devil used you for his mistress last night.” Argent slid off his bay and tossed the reins to the same footman Morley had. “Have you taken to some new and dangerous vice?”
The observant assassin’s insight was his greatest asset in the investigative field, but Morley cursed it this morning. “If I believed in the devil, I’d think you his bastard, Argent,” Morley quipped.