“Charis…” he whispered into the frail silk veiling her breast.
His dream wife stroked his hair back from his forehead. The gesture’s tenderness slashed his heart. Her fingers brushed his face, and he felt the breath stall in her lungs.
The dream’s physical detail was so rich. So real.
Too real.
It was too late. He knew he wasn’t asleep. The brief warmth was cruel mockery. Already he shrank from contact. Charis’s scent became the oversweet stink of putrefying flesh. The touch of her hand, the grip of dead fingers.
His belly churning with nausea, he rolled away. As he sat up, he kept his back to her. He didn’t want her to see the revulsion that he knew darkened his face.
“Hell,” he groaned, burying his head in shaking hands. He tensed his throat against rising nausea.
“Gideon?” One word quivering with distress.
Of course she was distressed. She’d married a damned madman.
Through his agony, he was vaguely aware of how massively aroused he was. Hard as oak. Hot as Hades. It was a spiteful caprice of his affliction that his body continued to react like any virile twenty-five-year-old’s.
“Gideon, are you all right?”
“Yes.” He was lying.
Sunlight burned behind the closed curtains. Bedclothes rustled as she rose onto her knees. Damnably evocative sound. Desire became a hammering demand in his veins, so loud it drowned out the caterwauling in his skull. He wasn’t sure whether desire or demons inflicted worse torture.
“I don’t believe you.” The mattress dipped as she shifted closer. Then—God help him—the insidious warmth of her hand on his tense back.
He went rigid, fighting the urge to wrench away. Fighting the urge to whirl around, fling her onto the sheets, and ravish her.
“Don’t you know not to touch me?” he forced out through clenched teeth. Every breath strained his constricted lungs. His heart pounded so hard, he thought it must burst.
“I know you spent the night lying in my arms,” she said quietly. Without, confound her, taking her hand away.
He’d broken into an icy sweat when he returned to full alertness. Now heat pooled where she touched him, making his blood simmer.
“I was asleep,” he growled, loving her touch, hating her touch.
“I know,” she said patiently, her palm rubbing in tantalizing, tormenting circles. He wore a shirt but the sensation of her touch was so intense, he might as well have been naked.
He was amazed steam didn’t rise from his quivering flesh. His cock throbbed with the demand to be inside her. The memory of thrusting into her was so sharp, he could taste it.
“The difficulty is in your head. It’s not in your body.” She spoke slowly, as if trying to explain a mathematical problem to a dim student. How could she sound so calm when he was on the verge of exploding?
He could bear it no longer. He had to get away before he did something irrevocable, unforgivable. He lurched to his feet, spinning to confront her.
“I know that. It doesn’t mean I’m making it up. God, Charis, if I could…”
He stopped and sucked in a shuddering breath. What use raging against fate? He couldn’t do anything to alter his bleak future.
Although she must know his anger wasn’t targeted at her, she paled under his onslaught. She knelt on the tumbled sheets in that sinful white nightdress. Gideon fought not to notice the provocative jut of her breasts against the transparent silk. He lost the battle. His eyes feasted on those luscious curves, and the moisture evaporated from his mouth. At his sides, his hands opened and closed as he struggled not to grab her.
“Don’t you see what that means?” she asked earnestly, not seeming to register his seething restlessness.
Her voice was faint over the deafening crash of his heart. Had he missed something she said while he ogled her like a randy adolescent?
“Gideon?”
She clearly expected him to make coherent conversation. Didn’t she realize the state he was in? But her eyes remained focused on his face with a sweet determination that only made him want her more.