She touched the back of her hand to his cheek. He brought her palm to his lips. For a moment he thought he was kissing the hand of a bricklayer. He turned her hand toward the light to better study it. She yanked. He did not let go.
On her hand was writ a record of ravage and hardship. Scars, faded and thin, marked her index and middle fingers. On the back of her hand and the base of her palm were a half-dozen blemishes, burns severe enough to have permanently discolored her skin—skin as rough as his mother’s had once been.
“My God,” he murmured. So she did work in a kitchen. And he’d been so incinerated by desire he hadn’t even noticed until now.
In his distraction, she managed to snatch her hand away. He reached for it again, but she’d already clenched it: her thumb buried deep in the enclosure of her fingers.
“Let me see your hand.”
“I don’t want you to see it.”
“There’s no need to be ashamed over honest work.”
“More pretty words,” she said.
“Yes, I sense myself in severe danger of becoming a lyrical poet.”
He made a slow, detailed tour of the ridges and dips of her knuckles, traced each finger down to the first joint, and turned her tightly fisted hand over.
The mound of her palm, the edge of it, her fingernails—he caressed everything that was not expressly denied him. Worshipped her as if she were Aphrodite of Milos freshly unearthed and he the humble excavator struck dumb by her beauty.
When she eased the slightest bit, he pounced and unclamped her hand. She sucked in a breath as he ruthlessly exposed every part of her palm and her fingers. She made a move as if to close her hand over his.
“Don’t,” he said. “I want to touch your calluses.”
“Why?” Her voice was low and plaintive. “Why would you want to touch them?”
“Because they are yours.”
She sank her teeth into her lower lip and acquiesced. He raised her hand and pressed a kiss against an old burn mark. He kissed her knuckles, one by one, learning their angularity, savoring the feel of her skin against his lips.
Then he licked a callus. She gasped—a sound that ignited his blood—and tried to close her hand again. He permitted no such thing but ran his tongue over her callus once more.
Her reaction was so acute—and she was so stunned by it—that it all but made him break a piece off the headboard in a surge of lust. Her work-toughened palms were sensitive beyond belief. A simple nibble produced moans; his teeth raked gently across the center of it, shudders.
Her other hand gripped him behind his back. Her body molded into his. He understood what she sought. She wanted him inside her. It made him weak. It made him hard as a mace.
He yanked back the sheet and invaded her fully in one long, hard thrust. He linked their fingers together, so that every part of her hands touched every part of his, and kissed her on the mouth. He did not stop kissing her as he filled her, searing in her heat, buckling under the pleasure, until he had to jerk his head back for breath as his orgasm pummeled and slammed into him, breaking him into pieces again and again.
Verity stared at her hands in wonder. She hadn’t taken care of them in weeks. They were rough as salt, the joints of the fingers knobby, the skin red and splotchy from too much immersion in water—the symbol of all the costly mistakes of her life. If anyone had told her that she could be seduced merely by having these hands fondled and stroked, she would have snickered in derision and replied that her chopping board would sprout leaves first.
But such huge sensations he had invoked, making love to her hands. Such pleasure, downright frightful in its intensity. She wanted to weep for the wonder and joy of it.
From behind her Mr. Somerset held her snugly. “I’d like to do this every night,” he mumbled.
She heard the sleepy smile in his voice. Her heart broke clean in two.
“Promise me you’ll think about it,” he said, as if she could not think about it.
“You are mad,” she told him.
“Mad in general, no. Mad for you, granted,” he said, his speech slow with the onset of slumber.
“You are mad,” she repeated.
But no response came from him, other than a squeeze of his arm about her.
“Mad. Mad. Mad. Mad,” she said, to no one in particular.
A monstrous hope threatened to lay waste to her. Already it was telling her to believe Mr. Somerset entirely—in his honor, his sincerity, and his sanity. Here was a man, said the perfidious hope, who was not only persuasive and clever—and handsome, of course—but also wise, judicious, true-seeing, a man whose gaze pierced past her present lowly stature and her past sexual peccadilloes directly into the beauty of her soul.
Marriage. God, marriage. He was mad.
What would they tell others about her? Where was she from? Who were her family? What had she done with herself until this point?