Either way, I surrendered. And my surrender felt like strength.
It was like some kind of dance. Parry, then retreat. His mouth and his hand, one and then the other, or both at once.
Before I knew it, that fever in me was spreading. I shook, everywhere. I could feel my own body grow stiff in his arms and I felt myself edging ever closer to crisis.
I would have pushed him away if I could. If I could make my hands do anything but grip the front of his shirt as I shook and stiffened and spun further and further off into that blazing need.
I lost myself somewhere between Javier’s hot, hard mouth and his pitiless hand between my legs. I lost myself, and I followed that shaking, and I hardly understood why I was making those greedy, shameful noises in the back of my throat—
“Come apart for me, Imogen,” he growled against my mouth, as if he owned even this. “Now.”
And there was nothing in me but heat and surrender.
I exploded on cue.
And I was only dimly aware of it when Javier set me away from him. He settled me on the lip of the table behind us, ran his hands down my arms as if he was reminding me of the limits of my own body, and even smoothed the skirt of my dress back into place.
I was tempted to find it all sweet, however strange a word that seemed when applied to a man so widely regarded as a monster. A man I still thought of in those terms. But there was a tumult inside of me.
My head spun and everything inside me followed suit. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t make sense of what had happened.
And when my breathing finally slowed enough that I could think beyond it, Javier was waiting there. He stood in the same position he’d been standing before, his hands thrust into the pockets of the trousers I knew at a glance had been crafted by hand in an atelier in a place like Milan or Paris.
His might seemed more overwhelming now. I had a vague memory of the stable boy’s dreamy blue eyes, but they seemed so insubstantial next to Javier’s relentless masculinity. I felt it like a storm. It buffeted me, battering my skin, until I felt the electricity of it—of him—as if he had left some part of himself inside me.
I told myself I hated him for it.
“You look upset, mi reina,” Javier murmured. I understood the words he used—Spanish for my queen—but stiffened at the dark current of mockery in it. “Surely not. I am certain someone must have prepared you for what goes on between a man and a woman no matter how hard your father has worked to keep you locked up in a tower.”
I was not one of the sacrificial maidens ransomed out of this place in centuries past, despite appearances. I might have lived a sheltered life, but that life came with abundant internet access.
Still, I followed an urge inside of me, a dark insistence I didn’t have it in me to resist.
“I prepared in the usual way,” I told him. “Locked towers might work in fairy tales. They are harder to manage in real life, I think.”
And when his dark gaze turned to fire and burned where it touched me, I only held it. And practiced that half smile I had seen on my sister’s face earlier.
“I will assume you mean that your preparation for marriage took place under the careful tutelage of disinterested nuns as they discussed biology.”
I channeled Celeste. “Assume what you like.”
Right there, before my eyes, Javier...changed. I had thought he was stone before, but he became something harder. Flint and granite, straight through.
I couldn’t tell if the pulse that pounded in me then—in my wrists and my ears, my breasts and between my legs—was fear or something else. Something far more dangerous.
All I knew was that I wanted whatever Celeste had appeared to have on my settee. I wanted that confidence. I even wanted her smugness.
Because it seemed to me that was some measure of power.
I didn’t want to be what they called me. The lesser Fitzalan sister. The unfortunate one. Not here. Not now.
I didn’t want this man—who had broken me wide-open in ways I didn’t know how to explain without, as far as I could tell, so much as breaking a sweat—to know how inexperienced I was. I didn’t want to give him my innocence, particularly if he thought it was his by right.
Just once, I thought defiantly, I wanted to feel sophisticated.
Just once, I wanted to be the sleek one, the graceful one.
I wasn’t sure I could fake my sister’s effortlessness. But I knew that my smirk was getting to him. I could see it in all that stone and metal that made his face so harsh.
“All the better,” Javier growled at me, though he didn’t look anything like pleased. “You should know that I am a man of a great many needs, Imogen. That I will not have to tutor you how best to meet them can only be a boon.”
I didn’t believe him. I didn’t know what it was that whispered to me that he minded a great deal more than he was saying, but I knew it all the same.
Or you want to know it, something whispered in me, leaving marks. You want to affect him, somehow, after he took your breath away like this.
I didn’t want to think such things. I found myself frowning at him instead.
“Careful,” Javier said with a soft menace that made me feel molten and shivery all over again. “If you do not want an example of the sort of appetites I mean, here and now, I’d suggest you go back wherever you came from. There is a wedding in the morning. And an entire marriage before us in which, I promise you, you will have ample time to learn what it is I want and expect. In bed and out.”
And then I felt twisted. As if there was something wrong deep within me. Because the fact he was dismissing me stung, when I knew I should have been grateful for the reprieve. I flushed again, but this time it felt more like poison than that same impossible, irresistible heat.
I was only pretending to be like Celeste—and the look on Javier’s harsh face suggested that I wasn’t doing a particularly good job. I was certain that if he touched me again, I would never be able to keep it up.
And no matter that there was a part of me that shimmered with longing. That wanted nothing more than to feel his hands on me again. And more.
So much more.
I knew I had to take the escape hatch he had offered me—or lose myself even further.
Possibly even lose myself for good.
I slid off the table to find my feet, and fought to keep my expression from betraying how tender I felt where his hand had been between my legs. It felt as if my panties were somehow too tight, as if I was swollen, and I hardly knew how to walk on my own.
Yet I did. I managed it.
I skirted around him as if he was on fire, convinced that I could feel that blistering heat of his from feet away. Convinced that he had branded me, somehow. And entirely too aware of his glittering, arrogant gaze.
But I had a long night ahead of me to fret over such things.
I only understood that I expected him to reach out and take hold of me again when he didn’t. And when I made it to the spiral stair and ran up it as fast as I could on my rubbery legs, the clatter of my heart inside my chest was so loud I was surprised he didn’t hear it and comment on it from below.
I made my way along the second-floor gallery, aware of his gaze on me like a heavy weight—or some kind of chain binding me to him already—but I didn’t turn back. I didn’t dare look back.
Maybe there was a part of me that feared if I did, I might go to him again. That I would sink into that fire of his and burn alive, until there was nothing