His prosthetic harness pinched at her shoulder as he stood behind her, pressing his chest to her back, holding her almost aloft before a canvas nearly as tall as herself. She barely felt it. Instead her body attuned to the man. To the conflagration of his rage that served only to melt the icy daggers of his pain.
He shook her, not unlike a mechanical toy that refused to work. “Explain yourself.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary, is it?” she replied to the painting in front of her. The Cole who looked at her like he had done in the past, with sensual invitation and gentle acceptance. Not the man of volatile fury he’d become.
He knew who she’d been. Who she was no longer.
“Say. The. Name. Say it!”
Imogen came to understand that the lower his voice became, the more dangerous he was. And still she refused. “You won’t find her here, Cole. Only me.”
He was not merely a man who held her locked in his clutches, but something almost thus. Something both human and inhuman. Much like the Minotaur, a creature with the body of a man, but whose head was ruled by a beast. A dangerous one at that.
With frantic, jerking movements, he yanked up the skirts of her nightgown, and Imogen let him. She knew what he’d find. Why he became so utterly still. There, on her buttocks, was the birthmark. The one he’d kissed and teased her about over three long years ago.
“Ginny.” Though a whisper, the word was neither invocation nor benediction. But a lament. A dirge.
“I’m not her,” Imogen said with strength she’d not realized she possessed. “Not anymore.” Ginny had been a victim. A young and vulnerable ingénue. Untried, ignorant, and ruled by the machinations of selfish and negligent men.
She was that woman no longer.
Imogen stared up at the painting she’d finished in the first few months after she’d been married. When she’d known the broken Duke of Trenwyth was recovering in the hospital. When she had to remember all of the many reasons she couldn’t go to him. Her sister, her dying husband, his faulty memory, her charity and reputation. The fact that she’d truly been nothing more to him than a whore he’d fancied one desperate, grief-stricken night.
That all seemed meaningless now.
His breathing roughened behind her, and the small hook of his prosthetic dug into the flesh of her left hip. It reminded her that they’d both become different people since that night she’d depicted in the crimson room.
She heard a rip. And felt the evening air kiss the small of her back as her nightgown became a casualty of his mounting rage. The atmosphere shifted, the whip of his fury lashing at her with velvet edges. She’d lied to him. For her crimes, a punishment was forthcoming, of that she could be certain.
Imogen knew that O’Mara and Rathbone still patrolled the premises in shifts. She opened her mouth to scream, but only a sob escaped. She squirmed in his unyielding grasp, and wondered why he did nothing but stand there. Holding her hostage.
The fingers of his right hand shook a little, his grip gentling from punishing to merely bruising.
Lord, he was so strong it sent little chills of fear stabbing at her, followed by thrills of heat. The muscles of his chest swelled against her back, and the buckles of a harness bit into her skin, so close were they pressed together. The sinew of his thighs beneath the soft linen of his trousers bunched against her exposed bottom. Nothing met the softness of her curves but an unending length of hard, angry male.
Lifting her arm in a panicked movement, she meant to strike at him, to poke or scratch at his eyes. Anything that would free her from his silent, terrifying grip. To attack someone behind her, she found, was nigh to impossible.
She encountered the lush hair behind his ear, threaded her fingers through it, and gave a desperate tug.
He snarled.
Then they were falling, but she didn’t let him go. Neither did he relinquish his hold on her. In fact, she realized, he controlled their movement to the ground.
The carpet abraded her knees, though the descent had been slow enough not to cause her pain upon impact.
He hit his knees behind her, his left arm stealing around her middle to pull her in, bringing her bare bottom to fit neatly against the front of him. A hot, hard length pressed against the cleft of her ass, impeded only by the thin cloth of his trousers. His grip was iron against her middle; his breath volcanic against the back of her neck.
Then he bit her.
Imogen opened her mouth to cry out, but he’d already begun to lick and lave at the shoulder he’d marked, and her sound of pain escaped as a husky sigh of submission.
It was all he needed to hear.
With another rip, her soft nightgown disappeared. She turned her head to protest, but before any words escaped, he stole her breath by crushing his lips to hers.
Her fingers instantly tightened in his hair, but this time not to pull him away. But closer.
The kiss turned instantly volatile. His tongue seared its way into her mouth. It astonished Imogen that a kiss could convey so much. Unrequited need and a lifetime of desolation. His cultured manners and noble upbringing had done nothing to smother the raw, primal sin that was the soul of this man. He didn’t taste her, he consumed her. Devoured her. Until Imogen wondered if she’d also forget who she’d been to him. Or who she’d become.
Too soon, he broke the kiss and bent her over the trunk, using his superior weight to keep her hostage. His hand stole between them, and after a few jerking movements, his fingers gripped her hips once again.
The heat radiating from his arousal warned her a mere breath before the blunt head of his cock kissed the folds guarding her sex. Desire flushed from her in a wet release, and she whimpered as her intimate muscles swelled in sweet anticipation. Her body was ready to accept his dominance, even though she might not be.
“Wait—” Her voice sounded too thin. Too low. Too husky to be her own.
“Don’t stop me,” he commanded, though a ribbon of desperation threaded through the order.
So she didn’t.
And he didn’t.
He drove inside her with rough power and searing heat. It was like he penetrated her with lightning, striking at her with his hips and injecting an indefinable current that locked every muscle into futile spasms of blistering pleasure.
She threw her head back, a sob or a scream bubbling in her throat, but his hand clamped over her mouth as his cock parted her. Filled her.
He didn’t stop until he was seated deep. Deeper than he’d been before. Through a miracle of discipline and will, he held himself perfectly immobile, the bones of his hips digging into the soft flesh of her ass.
“I somehow forgot what you looked like,” he finally panted against her ear, the moist heat of his breath eliciting little tremors deep within her. Tremors she knew he could feel, because his great muscles shuddered in kind. “But I never forgot how tight you were,” he said from between clenched teeth. “I never forgot how it felt to be inside you.”
Fat tears squeezed from the corners of her eyes, and found a path where his hand sealed over her mouth.
She did not cry because he hurt her. Not because he took her like this. Like an animal. Like a common whore.
But because he’d remembered. Because she’d been empty every night of her life but one, and now he filled her once more. Perhaps she’d have time to be sorry for that later. Perhaps she’d find her pride, or her purpose, and recall all the reasons this was wrong.