She caught her breath, trying to find her anger again, for the image had been strangely pleasant.
She saw his half smile change again, as though he knew what she had imagined and it pleased him. 'I will have you home by dawn. Not too late to save your reputation, if you have managed to conceal your absence.' He paused again. And then said, 'If you still wish to go through with this, that is. I have no intention of forcing you to do something you find abhorrent.' He paused once more time. 'It is not too late to change your mind.'
'No. I am resolute.' But her voice did not sound that way in her own ears. He had given her the chance to get away. Why did she not take it and run? Or take it as her moment of victory. She had but to say the words, 'Touch me and you will never see Helena,' and the evening would be at an end.
But when she should have spoken, her traitorous mind had been wondering how the impending process could possibly take weeks. She had missed her opportunity.
Perhaps time was an illusion. Because he was progressing so methodically that each thought, each smile, each word from his mouth, seemed to take hours to reach her. Several more heartbeats passed before he said, 'Very well. Then let us begin.' He touched her shoulders with his hands, brushing the cloak out of the way, and draping it gently over a chair. When he turned and caught sight of her dress, he froze in place for a moment, and she could feel his eyes travelling over her body, lingering on the exposed flesh.
She waited for the pounce. The rough grasp and the shock of his ravenous mouth against her breast.
'So beautiful. But too much, too soon,' he whispered. 'You are like a feast, and I am a starving man. You come to me like this, knowing that, other than by accident, on the very first day, I have not felt the touch of your ungloved hand?' He reached for her again with tenderness, beginning at the shoulders and letting his fingers trail down until they barely touched her own, and then he took both her hands, and brought them to his lips in a gesture that was more reverence than kiss. Then, one at a time, he tugged gently at her fingers until he had pulled her long white gloves down, baring the flesh of her arms inch by sensitive inch. The gloves dropped to the floor and he brought her hands to his face again, rubbing them with his closed lips, binding them together with his fingers about her wrists as he kissed the palms, turning them so that they were cupped before him and he could taste each fingertip in turn before settling over her pulse point, his tongue flicking against the skin in time to the ebb and flow of her blood.
From somewhere deep within her, there came an unexpected shudder of delight.
He smiled. 'This is why it must not be too quick. We must not squander this night. Do you understand?' He held her by the fingertips, walking backward, leading her through the door and toward the stairs. 'I have so much to learn.' He never took his eyes from hers as he went, drawing her after him, up the stairs and down the hall, to the master suite.
She went with him, powerless to resist, as though the kisses on her hands had bound her to him more tightly than any shackles. She glanced about her as they walked, and saw that, in ten years, the decoration of the corridor had changed. Colours, furnishings, the hangings on the walls, all different or rearranged. It was a different house than the one she had left, just as she was a different person.
And Nathan Wardale was a different man from the one she expected to find here.
No. The same. He was the same man that had ruined her father, and she must not forget it. Nathan Dale's stories of hardship and loss meant nothing to her. They were not justification for what he had done to her. Other men had suffered, yet they did not buy and sell innocent girls over a gaming table.
And yet, he continued to stare at her in wonder, as though none of that had happened. He looked as she imagined a man in love might look, as though no past or future existed outside of his lover's arms.