The Winter Wife
the last rash step into infinity.
Her voice was quiet but steady. “Then be gentle, Sebastian.”
Chapter Three
KINVARRA’S GRIP ON the chair turned punishing. Good God, he must be mistaken in what he’d heard. Alicia couldn’t be offering herself. In all these many years, she’d never offered herself. Even in
the beginning, he’d always had to take. He’d grown to hate it, whatever physical pleasure he found in her arms, so that when she’d finally begged for a separation after those wretched months together, he’d almost been relieved.
Of course, he hadn’t realized then that his agreement would lead to ten excruciating years without his wife.
She sat up against the bedhead, pale against the dark wood, and watched him with a glow in her blue eyes that in any other woman he’d read as blatant sexual interest. She’d taken her beautiful golden hair down and it flowed around her shoulders, catching the firelight. She’d become his fantasy Alicia. The unforgettable woman who had haunted every empty day he’d endured without her. The woman she’d never been for him, even when they’d lived together.
“Sebastian?” A faint frown drew her fine eyebrows together.
He should say something. His continuing silence must make her nervous.
“You don’t know what you’re asking,” he said in a constricted voice, wondering why the hell he tried to talk her out of fulfilling his dearest hopes.
He’d missed Alicia since the day she left him. Now she was near enough to touch. And for once she didn’t seem to loathe him. All
his dearest, most outlandish hopes came to fruition. He’d always been blackguard enough to want more from their meeting tonight than mere conversation. One bed and a cold night and Alicia in an
uncharacteristically amiable mood all seemed to augur at the very least a physical respite from his damnable longing.
Then he’d remembered those fraught encounters at Balmuir House. However much he wanted her, he couldn’t bring himself to inflict himself upon her again. So he’d consigned himself to an excruciating night in the chair. That was less excruciating than seeing her now and knowing that she’d accept him into her bed—and realizing that in his des
peration, he was only too likely to disgust and frighten her again.
She raised her chin, an act of bravado familiar in the young Alicia. The memory made his gut clench with poignant yearning. He’d hurt her before. He couldn’t bear to hurt her again. He must stay away from her, for both their sakes.
An uncertain smile curved her lips as the silence extended into awkwardness. “Tonight you chased my lover away. Honor compels you to offer recompense.” Then in a low voice, “Sebastian, once long ago, you wanted me. I know you did.”
He swallowed and forced his response from a tight throat. “I still do.”
She raised trembling hands to the buttons on her mannish ensemble. An ensemble that looked anything but mannish on her lush figure. She’d filled out from the girl he’d married. Delightfully so.
Her traveling garb was cut like a riding habit and the white shirt under the dark jacket was suitably modest, buttoned high at the throat. Even so, when her fumbling fingers loosened that top button to reveal a couple of inches of skin, every drop of moisture dried from his mouth and his heart flung itself against his ribs.
The Earl of Kinvarra was accounted a brave man. But he immediately recognized the emotion holding him paralyzed as ice-cold fear.
Tonight provided a miraculous second chance to heal the breach
in his marriage. A gift of love for Christmas Eve. But if he hurt Alicia again, he’d never have another opportunity to bring her back to him.
He needed patience, self-command, insight to seduce his wife into pleasure. Yet he burned hotter than a devil in hell. What was he to do? He wanted her too much. And wanting her too much would destroy
the cobweb of intimacy building between them in this quiet room. An
intimacy woven from soft conversation and new understanding.
When his family had presented him with such a beautiful bride just after his twenty-first birthday, he’d been confident that he and Alicia would find happiness. Instead every coupling had been furtive and soured with shame, accomplished in darkness and ending with his
wife sobbing into the pillow. No wonder he’d lost his taste for forcing himself upon her, although to his endless torment, his desire had never waned.
Desire still roared inside him.
Her shirt fell open another fraction to show a delicate line of collarbone and a shadowy hint of her breasts. Her stare unwavering, her hand dropped to the next button.