Chapter Eleven

They both lay fully clothed on the bed, Tessa beneath the covers and Mitch on top of them. Sometime during the night, the autumn chill touched him and he crawled beneath also. Still later, at some point, Tessa moved into his arms.

He woke from a fitful doze to find her cuddled into him, the scent of her beguiling his senses. Helpless against his feelings, he gathered her more closely in.

In slumber, she didn’t push him away. He lay there miles from sleep and fought his impulses. Right now—for reasons he didn’t completely understand—she needed him. Or perhaps she just needed someone who thought better of her than she did of herself.

The last thing he wanted to do was scare her away. Well, perhaps the second-last thing.

She breathed softly, exhausted, and her velvety cheek lay just beneath his lips. Through an act of sheer will he kept from brushing them against it, but he did run his fingers through her curls, tenderly.

Tenderness—an emotion foreign to him. He’d had no room for it in his life. No room for it amid the struggle for survival.

How? How did it find him now? Because, to his amazement, it seemed to come instinctively with this woman. He wanted to enfold her, protect her. He wanted to destroy anyone who might hurt her.

He’d happily kill her father all over again if he could bring him back from the dead for that purpose. He’d kill any man who touched her.

He wondered again about the fellow she loved. Who was he? How could he, Mitch, transfer her affections away from him?

Damned if he knew. But until he could figure it out, he’d live on this, this. He pulled her still nearer and closed his eyes.

****

Tessa woke to a sensation of deep warmth and complete safety. For several moments she failed to remember where she was. She opened her eyes and stared into darkness.

Someone held her in his arms. Richard? No; he didn’t smell like Richard, but like…

Recognition flooded upon her, and memory burned into her senses. Mitch Carter lying on top of her, his body hard and his mouth questing.

In this very bed.

She stiffened and stirred.

He whispered immediately, “Hush. Hush, it’s all right.”

Was it? Finding herself lying in the arms of her husband, the man she detested?

How did he come to be here in her bed, holding her so tightly?

The balance of memory fell on her then, like a brick wall: her father’s death, her failure to forgive him. Her fault.

She gasped and stiffened with pain, and began to weep.

“Here, here—no need for that.” Very gently Mitch swabbed the tears from her cheeks, using the edge of the sheet. She knew she should push him away. She wanted to. She did.

But it felt so damn comforting, having someone cradle her this way.

So instead of pushing him away, she lifted her face to his.

Could she blame him for what happened next? It began as the merest brush of lips on lips, tentative and inquiring. He asked a question; she did not refuse.

A sigh broke from her lips an instant before his mouth claimed hers. In the dark, she could not see him. And when he kissed her this way, she didn’t need to think.

If ever kisses were designed to numb a woman’s mind, these were. He blessed her lips with them, feathered them across her cheek and down her neck, setting her skin to quivering. When his mouth returned to hers, she opened to him, without conscious intention.

How long it went on so, she never knew. When at last he stopped kissing her and rested his forehead against hers, he sounded stunned.

“Tessa. I want you so much.”

“You mean…” She froze there, unable to conceive of it. Or could she? He would remove her clothing, continue to kiss her, making her warmer and warmer.

She understood the mechanics of the act but could not imagine such intimacy. Not with this man.

“I don’t want to ask anything of you that you’re not ready to give.”

That was good. She didn’t know if she felt ready. Yet being with him this way in the dark felt so reassuring.

She was a terrible person, one who’d failed to save her father from suicide. But Mitch Carter, so it was rumored, had been found in a gutter. Perhaps that made him just as terrible as she.

“Touch me,” she said.

“All right.”

He kissed her again, ran his hands through her hair, along the slope of her neck and inside her bodice. He smelled so good, and tasted better. And, sweet heaven, what a sensation when his fingers ventured where no other man’s had been.

He shifted his position so he lay on top of her, just like before, hard and heavy between her legs. When he spoke this time, he sounded drunk. “Touch me, too.”

He wore trousers and a thin linen shirt. She could feel the heat of his body right through the fabric—shoulders, arms, chest. Her fingers found their way inside the front of the garment and met coarse, rough hair, a flat stomach that rippled beneath her touch, the waistband of his trousers, and—

No, no, no. She couldn’t touch him there.

Panic reared its head. She gasped beneath his kiss and fought her way free.

He released her at once and rolled to one side. “Tessa?”

“I can’t. My God, I can’t!” She scrabbled away from him, sat on the edge of the mattress with her feet on the cold floor, and put her head in her hands. “My father’s just died. What kind of person am I?”

His voice came slowly out of the dark. “It’s comfort, Tessa. The sort a man gives a woman; the kind a husband gives his wife.”

“Is it?”

“Sure. Let me give it to you. Let me take care of you.”

Oh, what a seductive suggestion! At the moment, caught in self-loathing and need, Tessa could scarcely think of anything more tempting. Let him take care of her, protect her—and she had no doubt he could. She needed so badly to belong to someone.

Was it wrong that the someone should be him?

Yes. Yes, because he’d taken advantage of her father’s misfortune, won her through coercion and demand, and contributed to her father’s guilt, his ultimate downfall.

Not so much, though, as she.

That thought crept into her mind and set up the grief all over again. Maybe she deserved nothing better than to be Mitch Carter’s whore.

He touched her shoulder softly, gently. For an instant she felt sure he would pull her back underneath him and take what he wanted. Surprising, really, he hadn’t demanded it before now. It was part of marriage, so her friends said, and for men, a big part.

Yet Mitch Carter—feared throughout the city, the self-styled King of Prospect Avenue—did not drag her beneath him. He merely lay there with his hand warm on her skin.

At last he said, “Come back under the covers. You’ll be chilled.”

She was chilled. But in truth, she didn’t trust herself to crawl back into that bed with him.

He sighed, a gusty sound in the dark. “I’ll not do anything you don’t want.”

“No? You promise?”

“Tessa, I’ll never do anything to hurt you.”

Did she believe him? Believing—just like intimacy—would require trust. She wasn’t sure she dared trust this man.

“Here, come beneath the blankets. I’ll go to my own room.”

She turned her head and attempted to see him; the room remained too dark. “Will you?”

“Yes.”

She heard him get out of the bed. He moved immediately around the end of it, went to the door, and slipped out. The door closed with a soft thud.

Tessa drew her feet from the icy floor and crawled back beneath the covers, still warm.

But, she found, it didn’t seem such a refuge with him gone—not the same at all. She wrapped her arms around herself and lay sleepless till dawn.