He suddenly, absurdly resented that everything here at The Grand Palace on the Thames was so well maintained, so smoothly oiled and meticulously dusted. He would never have heard the door creak.
But his instincts told him it wasn’t an accident.
And now his heart accelerated.
If it wasn’t an accident, was it an invitation?
A test?
Or... a trap?
The bear trap sort of trap, that would clamp over his heart?
Christ. It was just a door.
But he now couldn’t breathe for yearning toward that dark space and the possibilities that lay behind it.
He didn’t see how touching her again would lead to anything but more confusion and pain for both of them. He knew definitively that she still possessed the power to hurt him. This had been an unwelcome revelation. Only fools courted pain. He’d had enough for a lifetime.
And thus began a dialogue between want and reason. Sex was bliss and forgetting, wasn’t it? A function of biology. It needn’t have meaning or import. It needn’t be part of the arc of astory, with ramifications.
He thought of Corporal Dawson and his wife, who made love like they’d discovered it, like they were the very first humans, and suddenly he had his answer: Life is short. Pleasures are for seizing.
The next breath he pulled in was hot.
It shuddered out slowly as he moved toward the door and pushed it open.
The fire in her room had burned down to embers, too; an orange glow traced the far edge of the bed. Everything else was lost in velvety, inky shadow.
He hovered just inside the doorway indecisively, and listened for the sort of steady breathing that would tell him whether she was sleeping. Waiting for the shadows to evolve into shapes. Waiting for a definitive sign.
But he could hear nothing. Apart from—he could have sworn—his own heart beating.
He inched toward the darkest edge of the bed and stopped as his thigh met the edge of the mattress. And there he stood, held in a vise of indecision and lust.
If he were any other sort of man there would be no hesitation: he would climb into bed and demand that the woman he’d married satisfy him.
With the increasing chill on his bare torso came the dawning conviction that he’d deluded himself. The open door meant nothing. And this tiptoeing into the room and agonized pondering was unworthy of him as a man.
He tensed his muscles to turn to leave.
His breath arrested in his lungs when something brushed the fall of his trousers.
He froze, breathing shallowly.
The bedding rustled as she stirred, raising herself up on her elbows.
And he stood absolutely motionless, scarcely breathing, as Alexandra worked open a button on his trouser fall.
And then another.
And then the next.
His cock stirred against the brush of her fingers as, one by one, she freed the buttons from theirbuttonholes. Neither one of them said a word. He didn’t assist, move, or breathe. As though if he did, she might change her mind.
The last button freed, he pushed his trousers down to the floor and stepped out of them. She raised the blankets so he could slide beneath.
They turned to each other immediately.