“It’s crazy, isn’t it? I shouldn’t feel anything for you. But you... I mean, look, I know it’s chemistry, or whatever, I know it’s not feelings. But...”

She bit her full lower lip and looked up at him from beneath her lashes, the expression both innocent and coquettish. “Don’t you think that maybe we should have a chance to taste it before I’m sold into marriage?”

She planted her hand on his chest. And Javier knew that she could feel it then. Feel his heart raging against the muscle and blood and bone there. Feel it raging against everything that was good and right and real.

She let out a shaking breath, and he could feel the heat of it brush his mouth, so close was she. So close was his destruction.

He was iron. He was rock. He had been forced to become so. A man of nothing more than allegiance to an ideal. Knowing with absolute certainty that if he should ever turn away from that, he might become lost. That corruption might take hold of him in the way that it had done his father. Because he considered himself immune to nothing.

And so, he had made himself immune to everything.

Except for this. Except for her.