She had dressed up for him. Even if it was foolish. For one thing, he wouldn’t be able to see her. For another, she didn’t want him to.
It didn’t take her long to see him, though. Her eyes were drawn to him, like a magnet. He was near the center of the ballroom, standing and making conversation with a group of men in suits. He was the tallest. The handsomest. He had always been the singularly most beautiful man she had ever seen. And he still was. Except at thirty he was much more mature than he’d been at twenty-five. He had filled out, his chest thicker, his face more chiseled. Dark stubble sat heavy on his jaw, and she wondered...she wondered what it would be like to touch his face with it there.
She hadn’t touched a man since Rafe. She’d had no interest.
She needed to find some interest. Because she was going to have a normal life. After she claimed the inheritance she knew that she still had—untouched—in a trust at the bank in London, she was going to start her life in earnest.
Maybe go to school. Maybe start a shop of her own, since she had always enjoyed working in them over the past few years. Had enjoyed not being lonely.
Whatever she did, it would be her choice. And that was the point.
She didn’t know what answers she had expected to find here. Right now, the only clear answer seemed to be that her body, her heart, was still affected by him.
He excused himself from the group, and suddenly, he was walking her way. And she froze. Like a deer caught in the headlights. Or rather, like a woman staring at Rafe Costa.
She certainly wasn’t the only woman staring. He moved with fluid grace, and if she didn’t know better, she would never have known his sight was impaired at all.
He was coming closer, and as he did her heart tripped over itself, her hands beginning to shake. She wished she could touch him.
Oh, she wanted it more than anything. In that moment, she wanted it more than her next breath. To put her hands on Rafe Costa’s face one more time. To kiss those lips again. To place her hand over his chest and see if she could still make his heart race.
It was easy to forget that her stepmother had told her how Rafe had left, taking an incentive offered by her father to end his tenure there earlier. How he had thought nothing of Charlotte when he left. Nothing of all the promises he had made to her.
Yes, it was so easy to forget all of that. It was easy to forget that and remember instead the way it had felt when he had kissed her. Touched her. The way that she had begged him to use more than his hands between her thighs, more than his mouth. The way she had pleaded with him to take her virginity, to make her his in every way.
But he hadn’t.
For honor, he had said. And for her protection.
Except, really, he had never wanted her. At least, not enough to risk anything. So he had simply been toying with her.
She should remember that. Her treacherous, traitorous body should remember that well. But it didn’t. Instead, it was fluttering. As if a host of butterflies had been set loose inside her.
He came closer, closer still, passing through the crowd of people, everyone moving out of the way for him, as though he was Moses parting the sea.
Time seemed to slow. Everything around her. Her heartbeat. Her breathing.
Suddenly, he was there. So close that if she wanted to she could reach out and touch the edge of his sleeve with her fingertips.
Could bump into him accidentally, just to make contact. He wouldn’t know it was her. He couldn’t.
Suddenly, he turned. He was looking past her, his dark eyes unseeing, unfocused. But then, he reached out and unerringly grabbed hold of her wrist, dragging her toward his muscular body.
“Charlotte.”
IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE.
Charlotte—for all intents and purposes—had disappeared five years ago. She hadn’t simply disappeared; she had gone off to marry another man.
The triumphant smile on her stepmother’s face was the last thing he had seen. The last thing he had ever seen. Beyond gray, amorphous shapes.
He mostly hung close to the walls in situations like this. He had a cane to help him navigate, but in a crowd this thick it was still difficult. Though, in a crowd this thick it was also normal to run into people. So there was that.
He could see sharp contrasts between light and darkness, but he couldn’t make out features or colors. Nothing subtle.
But when he had walked by her, he had caught her scent. And in that moment, he had seen so many things. Color and light bursting through his mind, vivid and sharp. Sun-drenched days in Tuscany, that had been hell on earth except for her. Soft, pearlescent skin that was too fine, too exquisite for him to touch. And yet he had. And that beautiful blond hair that her father had had a strange obsession with.
Glossy, impossibly long and always kept wound up in a bun so that no one could truly see it or appreciate it. Memory gripped him tight...
* * *
“Let down your hair,” he rasped against her throat as he kissed her, lying down on her large four-poster bed.
He begged her for that privilege, every night. The privilege of running his hands through her hair. Touching the silken strands, seeing her naked, her hair cascading over her pale body like a waterfall, light pink nipples just barely visible through the golden curtain.
She reached up, taking the pins out, obeying his command. In the past weeks since he had begun coming into her room he had asked her to do this for him every night, and every night she had complied. The fact that she never took it down before he appeared led him to believe that she enjoyed this game. Of his commands, and her acquiescence.
It was fine with him. He liked it too.
It was dangerous. This game. Easy to pretend that it was some sort of harmless assignation. That they might get caught, and might suffer a severe scolding. But Rafe was under no illusions. If he were caught with Charlotte, her father would have him killed. If Charlotte were found not a virgin, after her father had taken great pains to seclude her away from the rest of the world, Rafe would be killed. And possibly Charlotte, as well.
And so, he didn’t take her virginity. Rather, he pushed the boundaries every night. And every night she begged him for more. Every night, he declined. But he was becoming weak. He would not be able to hold out for much longer. And in truth, he didn’t intend to.
He simply needed to get to a place where he had shored up the assets he needed to be free of her father. He could hardly plunge Charlotte into a life of poverty after she had lived the cosseted existence of a gentleman gangster’s daughter. Michael Adair’s empire had the semblance of legitimacy, but it was anything but.
To most of the world he appeared to be a businessman. But that was only because the world didn’t look too closely. Not at fabulously wealthy, powerful men who could offer a great many favors, and do untold amounts of damage if they were crossed. It benefited no one to examine those things too deeply. And so nobody did.
Rafe knew all too well about the power men like Michael wielded. He knew too what it was to go from a spoiled, cushioned life to one of abject poverty. His father was not unlike Michael Adair. Oh, he might not be a criminal, but he thought nothing of using the people in his life until they were spent.
Until he had no more use for them but to grind them under his boot for fun. That was what Rafe remembered most about the father he hadn’t seen since he was five years old. How much he seemed to relish causing pain.
When he had kicked Rafe and his mother out onto the streets, the man had seemed to enjoy their distress. Or, if not that, then the fact