If his words had been filled with happiness. If there had been any indication that he felt emotion for her, then she would have been... She would have only been happy. But there wasn’t. Not at all. He was hard and stoic as ever, presenting this as nothing more than another edict as impersonal as the one that came before it, as if they had not been skin to skin. As if he had not rearranged unseen places inside of her. As if he had not been the scene of her greatest act of liberation, and her greatest downfall.
“Just like that. You expect me to marry you.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“There is nothing to understand. You will simply do as you’re com
manded. As you are in Monte Blanco now. And the law here is the law you are beholden to.”
“But you don’t care at all what I want.”
“To be free. To go back to your life. To pretend as if none of this had ever happened. But it has. And you’re mine now.”
“Why? Why are you marrying me instead of him? I don’t seem to matter to you. Not one bit.”
That was when he closed the distance between them. He wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her up against his body. “Because you are mine. No other man will ever touch you. I am the first. I will be the last.”
She was angry then that she hadn’t had the presence of mind to lie to him when they’d made love. Because it would have been much more satisfying in the end. To take that from him, when it clearly mattered.
“I will be the only one. Didn’t I promise you? That no other man would ever satisfy you as I did?”
“Yes,” she said, her throat dry.
“I know no man will ever have the chance to try.”
“That’s all you want. To own me?”
“It’s all I can do.”
There was a bleakness to that statement that touched something inside of her. This, for him, was as close to emotion as he could come. It was also bound up in his control. In that deep belief that he was a monster of some kind. He had told her he was not good, but that he had honor.
And she could see now that he was willing to leave her behind, embrace greed.
And on some level she had no one to blame but herself. Because hadn’t she appealed to that part of him when she had seduced him in the library? Hadn’t it been on the tip of her tongue to ask him why he was so content to let his brother have what he so clearly wanted?
But he didn’t need her goading him to embrace those things now. He emanated with them. With raw, masculine intent. With a deep, dark claim that she could see he was intent to stamp upon her body.
Unknowing he had already put one on her soul.
It wasn’t that he didn’t feel it, she realized. It was that he didn’t understand it.
Perhaps she had not felt the depth of those emotions alone. It was only that he did not know how to name them. Only that he did not understand them.
“And what will it mean for me? To be your wife?”
He stared at her, his dark eyes unreadable. “You did not ask me that. About my brother.”
“Because I wasn’t going to marry him.”
She let the implied truth in those words sit there between them. Expand. Let him bring his own meaning to them.
“There will be less responsibility as my wife. I do not have the public face that he does.”
“And if I should wish to?”
“Whatever you wish,” he said. “It can be accommodated.”