The question backed her into a corner. Her feet tingled with a need to retreat while hot-cold shivers raced over her. She crushed the damp tissue she still held, knuckles going white.
“Please don’t ask me to be your mistress again,” she managed to say.
“I won’t.”
The backs of her eyes filled with a hot sting. What a stupid thing to ask, she berated herself.
“Don’t,” he groaned, and suddenly she was yanked against his chest, off balance and caged by hard arms that held her in a gentle grip when she reacted and began to struggle. “Listen, Clair. Please listen for just one minute,” he whispered against her hair.
The movement of his lips on her skin stilled her more than the words, plucking at her heartstrings as she recalled all the tender ways he’d touched her. Need stirred in her, liquid heat settling low, preparing her for the pleasure they gave each other.
“You came into my life when I thought I had only one thing to offer a woman. I made you my mistress because that’s all I was capable of. I couldn’t offer myself. I was a shell. A robot programmed for revenge. And you were the last woman I should have had anything to do with. I didn’t even understand why I had to have you, I just did.”
“It was a temporary need for human closeness. I understand. I felt the same.” She pressed for escape.
“No! That’s not what it was. You were like the sun coming back after the longest Arctic winter. I was bitter and frozen and suddenly I was thawing. Feeling. Do you know how much it hurts when feeling starts to come back into a numb limb?” His fingers wove into her hair and stroked the nape of her neck.
“Oh, Aleksy,” she murmured, hating to hear of his suffering. Drawing back, she reached to cup her hand against his scarred cheek, feeling the muscles tense beneath her touch. She almost pulled away, but he covered her hand and closed his eyes. Turning his mouth into her palm, he pressed a kiss into her hand before letting her touch settle against the jagged line again.
“Are you really able to accept all that this scar means?” he asked with a mixture of anguish and hope.
“It means you’re a man who would fight to protect the people he loves. That’s not something to be ashamed of.”
“I am. That’s what I came here to tell you. I would die protecting you.”
His image blurred as her eyes filled with tears, afraid to believe what she was hearing.
He moved his hands over her with fervent possession. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath, especially when he looked at her with uncertainty edging the blaze in his eyes.
“Can you imagine for a minute how difficult it has been for me to know that you deserve every type of happiness and be completely convinced I’m the last man who can give it to you?”
“About the same as it feels for me?” she suggested, feeling something crazy and optimistic battering at the thinning shell she’d always held tightly around her heart.
He shook his head. “All you had to do was stay and I would have been the happiest man alive.”
The feeling inside her became massive, too big to be contained. “How could I stay when you didn’t seem to w—” Her chin crumpled and she bit her bottom lip, vision blurring again.
When she would have drawn back, he hugged her close, his thickly accented words breaking her open. “I want you, Clair. Of course I want you. I love you with all my heart.”
She shuddered at the cataclysm of hearing him say that, at feeling love all around her as he held her tightly and pressed hot kisses to her wet face. Her hands sought to grasp all of him, sliding up his chest, over his flexing shoulders, following the line of his tense neck, smoothing over his hair…. Their mouths met in damp, sweet, poignant ecstasy. Clair’s heart was so full it was going to explode.
In a move of agile, male strength, he hitched her to sit on her desk, sending files skating to the floor. Bracing his hands next to her hips and his forehead sternly against hers, he said, “Tell me you’re not just reacting to the first man to tell you that. I don’t have it in me to be noble and give you up again, Clair. A man like me loves for life, and this is it.”
Life. She smoothed his bottom lip with the pad of her trembling fingertip. “Just because I’d never had sex before doesn’t mean I didn’t know what it was or ache deep down to experience it. It’s the same with love. I don’t need a hundred men to compare to in order to be sure what I feel for you is the real thing.”
“Good, because you’re not getting a hundred. You’re not even getting one other man,” he muttered with a self-deprecating curl of his lip. He tilted her chin up, his gaze so tender it warmed her to her soul. “Are you too shy to say it properly?”