Even in his blind ferocity he saw that he had pushed her to the brink of her composure. “Do you think that you can buy my love?” she asked, her voice shaking. “That you can command it? Oh, Hartley. Can you give me what you demand? Can you speak the words?” She smiled unsteadily. “Can you?”
Behind the throbbing in his temples, beyond the demon in his mind, he knew perfectly well what she asked. What she demanded. She, a mortal, demanded it of him.
“Will that be enough for you, Eden?” he asked hoarsely. “Will that ever be enough for the great Lady Eden Winstowe, who sleeps with a servant but pursues a marquess? The lady who bore a fatherless child and would deceive the world rather than sacrifice even a portion of her social position?”
Eden stopped breathing. Her face went pale and still. Slowly she drew herself up, never averting her gaze.
“I can see that our passions have had the better of us both. Perhaps we must reach a new understanding of what we want from each other.”
“Have I not made clear what I want from you, Eden? Let me remind you.”
He kissed her, and all the anger and frustration and confusion in his own heart was transformed into punishment for the woman responsible.
But he could not sustain it. He could not hurt her. His lips gentled, and he drew her into his arms and tried, in earnest, to show her what he could not express and had come so close to destroying.
From the corner of his eye he caught a whisper of motion at the double doors. The curtain twitched back into place, but not before he saw the eavesdropper’s face.
Claudia. Was she gnashing her teeth at the failure of her scheme to separate them?
Eden laid her cool hand on his cheek. “Let us not quarrel. Let us not ruin what we have.”
The look in her eyes could bring a strong man to his knees. Or a Fane. “Will you see Rushborough?” he asked stubbornly.
She sighed and stepped back. “We come from two different worlds, you and I. I will not sever all ties to mine, not even for your sake. I have Donal to think of now. That does not mean…” She shook her head and looked away. “Perhaps you cannot understand.”
Perhaps you are right. Yet when he spoke, it was if a stranger composed the words. A humble, desperate stranger unwilling to lose the two most precious relationships in his life.
“I am not eloquent like your marquess. You say that we come from different worlds, and you are right. But something has happened to my world, Eden. Once it was complete unto itself, needing nothing, no one. I was absolute ruler. If another attempted to enter, I drove him away. Then you came, and it shook to its very foundation.”
She looked up. He smothered his rebellious pride and continued. “I fought back as any conquered monarch fights, with every brazen tactic I could employ. But I discovered that my world could no longer thrive without you. It shriveled and died where your touch did not nourish it.”
She said nothing. A nightingale called from the direction of the forest. Hartley’s pulse pounded in his ears. He began to turn away.
“Hartley.” She raised her hand, and it hung suspended between them, like the words that remained unspoken. “How can say you are not eloquent? It is I who have only the simplest phrase to give in return.” She laid her palm over his drumming heartbeat. “I love you, Hartley Shaw.”
He had not truly comprehended, until this moment, how much he had wanted to hear that phrase. His heart swelled until it filled his chest, crowding out every other organ, making air and water and nourishment and all the necessities of life unimportant.
No time was better to reveal himself for what he was.
But he was afraid. He, who had seldom known fear in his long, long life, feared transforming that adoring look to one of terror and loathing.
Tell her he must, and soon. But not yet. Not yet.
He leaned forward, took her face between his hands, and let his lips speak for him.