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Her skin tingled where he touched her, and the air grew thick and hot. This was desire, Sophie realized. This was what she’d heard the maids whispering about. This was what no gently bred lady was even supposed to know about.
Suddenly anything seemed possible, maybe even a life free of servitude and stigma.
“I want to meet your parents and pet your damned dog,”
“I want—” His voice dropped to a whisper, and his eyes looked vaguely surprised, as if he couldn’t quite believe the truth of his own words. “I want your future. I want every little piece of you.”
From the moment he’d seen her—no, from the moment before he’d seen her, when he’d only just felt her presence, the air had been alive, crackling with tension and excitement. And he’d been alive, too—alive in a way he hadn’t felt for years, as if everything were suddenly new and sparkling and full of passion and dreams.
“So pretty,” he said softly, “like a storybook fairy. Sometimes I think you couldn’t possibly be real.”
“I think I have to kiss you,” he said, looking as if he couldn’t quite believe his own words. “It’s rather like breathing. One doesn’t have much choice in the matter.”
In that moment, Benedict knew that he had to have her. There was a connection between them, a strange, inexplicable bond that he’d felt only one other time in his life, with the mystery lady from the masquerade. And while she was gone, vanished into thin air, Sophie was very real. He was tired of mirages. He wanted someone he could see, someone he could touch.
“Be mine,” he said, his voice thick and urgent. “Be mine right now. Be mine forever. I’ll give you anything you want. All I want in return is you.”
He made her long for him, long for all the things she couldn’t have, and curse the things she could.
She had been living on dreams, and she wasn’t a woman for whom many had come true. She didn’t want to lose this one just yet.
“I can live with you hating me,” he said to the closed door. “I just can’t live without you.”
She loved him desperately—she’d long since given up lying to herself about that—and yet he could make her entire body shake with anger with one little quip.
“I burn for you,” he said, his lips touching her ear. “Every night, I lie in bed, thinking of you, wondering why the hell you’re here with my mother, of all people, and not with me.”
She was here, with him, and she felt like heaven. The soft scent of her hair, the slight taste of salt on her skin—she was, he thought, born to rest in the shelter of his arms. And he was born to hold her.
When she came to him—and she would, he vowed—it would be of her own free will.
You will stay right here, and you will keep smiling. Because it breaks my heart to see any other expression on your face.”
It was strange, to find a woman who could make him happy just with her mere presence. He didn’t even have to see her, or hear her voice, or even smell her scent. He just had to know that she was there. If that wasn’t love, he didn’t know what was.
“They say that a smart person learns from her mistakes,” she interrupted, her voice forcefully ending his protest. “But a truly smart person learns from other people’s mistakes.”
“You are the reason I exist,” she said softly, “the very reason I was born.”
