But this time, he hadn’t been so lucky.
“No! No, Papa! No, please! I promise I’ll be good. Just don’t hurt me! Papa, no!”
But the long white hands that were larger, crueler versions of his own dragged him onward.
“No!” he sobbed. “Please.”
The long white hands shook him.
But they no longer bit like talons into his flesh. Instead they were cool and gentle. He opened his eyes to find Verity leaning over him in the darkness. For a moment, he was too disoriented to be ashamed of his trembling and his tears.
“Kylemore, wake up. You’re having another nightmare,” a soothing voice said.
No monster then. He was safe.
This particular monster had died twenty years ago. Coming back to reality, he blinked and took a deep breath. His chest hurt, as if he’d been running for hours.
“A nightmare,” he repeated and abominated the croak in his voice.
He’d suffered bad dreams right through Eton. His hardier schoolfellows had tormented him endlessly about his sobbing and moaning in the night. Those bad dreams had continued into early manhood. He thought he’d trained himself out of them. The memories hadn’t overtaken him for years. Cold Kylemore, the magnificent duke, permitted no vulnerability to rattle his sangfroid.
It was this glen. He should never have returned. Coming back to this house had been the final test to see if he’d become as impervious as he so desperately wanted to be.
A test he spectacularly failed.
His body was slick with sweat, and he shivered. He felt so alone that he thought he’d die.
With a wordless groan, he wrapped his arms around the woman who hated him and buried his head in the softness of her breasts. Immediately, her haunting scent filled his senses, and his racing heart calmed.
How did she imagine he could ever let her go? She was the only being in creation who gave him this peace. Verity was all that stood between him and madness. It was the intolerable and eternal burden fate placed upon them both.
For a long moment, they lay entwined in silence. He anticipated her rebuff. What a pathetic admission that in his whole life no one had given him kindness or comfort he hadn’t bought. Until she’d come to his room yesterday. When she’d offered up her strength and warmth as lights against the dark.
He didn’t deserve her generosity. Even in his overwhelming need, he recognized that. He tightened his grip on her slender body, braced for mockery and rejection.
“Shh, Kylemore,” the woman in his arms murmured. “You’re safe here.” She shifted up toward the headboard so he lay more comfortably against her.
Astonishment clawed at him, banished his ability to speak. She abhorred him, wished him dead.
So why was her voice so soft? Why was her touch so gentle?
“Shh.” She smoothed the hair away from his damp brow with a tenderness that cut him to the bone. “It was only a dream.”
Such consolation was sweet indeed from the woman he wanted above all others. But for once, his craving for simple human warmth exceeded his craving for sex.
His own mother had never held him like this. His own mother had never touched him in affection as far as he could remember.
He lay motionless while Verity’s cool hand brushed across his hair. Each slow stroke drew out a little more of the dream’s lingering dread.
She smelled like everything good in the world. Baking bread and mown grass and the countryside after rain and the clean air above the waterfall at the top of the glen.
Yet she smelled like none of these, but purely herself.
If she sent him away now, he thought he’d scream like the terrified boy who had fled in fear of his life from his own father. But she didn’t send him away. Instead, she curved around him to shield him from the house’s dark shadows.
She crooned soft nonsense in his ear. It was the most enchanting sound he’d ever heard. He pressed up against her, his fingers tangling in the nightdress she’d put on before sleeping. Gradually the nightmare receded.
Still he didn’t move away. He listened to the even tenor of her breathing, while her warmth slowly seeped through his cold, cold soul.