The Highwayman (40 page)

Though she was generally clean from a previous bath, his ministrations seemed to be as much ritual as they were practical. He washed the fear from her skin. The taint of an evil man. The remembered smell of death and rot. All the while truly discovering her body with his fingers for the very first time through the thin veil of cloth and water.

Farah could tell by the flare of his nose and the strain in his neck and jaw that he struggled to be gentle with her. To complete his task without turning it into an advance. He was being careful, flicking concerned glances from beneath his lashes.

He stopped doing that once Farah poured invitation into her gaze.

She was a puddle of need and sentiment by the time a second knock preceded Gemma's flounce into the room.

Biting out a curse, Dorian stood to block the view of Farah from the door and opened his mouth to, no doubt, commit a horrid form of verbal abuse on her friend.

“Calm your britches.” Gemma tossed her wild brown curls and held up a simple cotton wrapper. “I brought this for the lady as the doctor's on the other side o' that door. It was you wot called for 'im.”

“Bless you, Gemma.” Farah stood, reaching for the wrapper.

Gemma's face split into a wide smile as she handed Dorian the robe. “Guess you already been examined,” she intimated with a wink.

“See the doctor in,” Dorian clipped.

Though the rather elderly country doctor, a Sir Percival Hancock, tutted and blustered over Farah's ill-treatment and small bruise, it didn't take long for him to announce that she was hale and hearty. He left some sort of syrupy substance to help her sleep and calm her nerves, but Farah disposed of it the moment he tottered out to confer with Dorian about Murdoch. She'd seen the dangers of dependence on the opiate contained within, and couldn't bear the thought.

Dorian returned almost immediately with a wilder cast to his features, kicking the door shut behind him and blowing out the candle.

Farah wrinkled a brow at his almost manic behavior. “What's wrong?” she queried. “Is it Murdoch?”

“He's fine.” Dorian reached her in two long strides and pulled her to him, fusing their mouths for the second desperate time that night. A rough tug preceded the chilly kiss of the night air as her robe dropped to the floor.

Not breaking the seal of their lips, Doran lifted her off her feet and carried her to the bed, setting her gently upon it. Pulling back, he stood above her, as he'd done once before, his gaze roaming her body as his fingers curled into familiar fists. “I want to touch you.”

Moonlight cast his features silver and shadow, and illuminated the vulnerability lurking beneath the lethal ruthlessness. He was once again that starving boy, trapped between his hunger and his fear.

Slowly, so as not to spook him, Farah rose to her knees. “Then touch me.”

His mismatched eyes dropped to her breasts, swaying with her careful movements. His tongue wet his lips, and yet he didn't move. “I—shouldn't.”

Farah tilted her head to the side in confusion. “You already have.”

He winced. “I couldn't stop myself. I wasn't in my right mind. I was mad with worry.” He turned his head and studied the bright moon shining through the window like a shameless voyeur.

They had a few things in common, her husband and the moon. They dominated the night. Created shadows and, yet, illuminated the darkness.

“Maybe I should order a proper bath,” he offered, not looking at her.

Farah shook her head in confusion. Now? She was naked, offering her flesh to him. “I bathed this afternoon. You only
just
washed me. I can't be much cleaner than I am now.”

“Yes, you can.” His tormented gaze found her again. “I touched you, Farah.”

“I've been touched by you before,” she reminded him suggestively.

“You don't
understand,
” he said through his teeth, and Farah feared that he might bolt again.

“You're right,” she said gently. “You keep saying that, and I truly don't understand why you're repulsed by touching me.”

“No.” He stepped toward her, as though wanting to argue, but stopped himself. “That isn't it.”

“Tell me,” she entreated him. “I deserve to know.”

He came to his decision looking like a prisoner readying himself for the gallows. As though, with his words, he would bring about irrevocable ends. When he spoke, it was with the voice of a dead man. “For a time I was the youngest inmate at Newgate Prison. The smallest. The softest. The—weakest. I won't describe the hell that distinction brings.”

Farah held her breath to trap a sob in her lungs, knowing that the pity conveyed by her agony on his behalf would insult him.

“To say it was a nightmare would be kind. The brutality was all-encompassing. Sexual, physical … mental.” He lifted his eyes to her, covering the flicker of shame behind those familiar walls of ice. “Can't you see how it changed me, Farah? Not only physically, but essentially.”

Aware of her nudity, Farah didn't give in to the impulse to wrap her arms around herself, in case the motion conveyed the wrong message. “I remember our conversation at Ben More,” she said carefully. “You so much as told me about all that. And, you forget, I've worked at Scotland Yard for a decade. I'm aware of what happens in those prisons, how criminals prey on each other. It breaks my heart, Dorian, but it doesn't color my opinion of you with darkness. You were young. You were small and helpless.” She inched toward the edge of the bed. “You are none of those things anymore.”

“You are such a fucking angel.” He said these words with his lips pulled back in a snarl. “And so you still do not
see.
I did not remain helpless for long. I took my vengeance.”

“Yes.” Farah nodded. “Yes, you told me about the guards, about other prisoners.”

“Those guards, that judge, they were lucky to die as swiftly as they did.” He stared into her eyes, unblinking, making certain she marked the horror of his every word. “I repaid all the sins committed against me in kind, Farah. My brutality surpassed that of anyone else. I didn't hurt people, I broke them. I didn't kill, I murdered. I didn't punish, I humiliated, until only those loyal to us were left. Do you understand
now
?” he demanded. “Don't you see? Everywhere my fingertips touch your sacred flesh, blood and filth is left behind like so much hot tar. Impossible to remove. I can't do that to you, Farah.” He jammed fingers through his hair, his volcanic emotions preparing to erupt in front of her eyes. “I can't—”

“Stop,”
Farah ordered, holding up her hand. “Stop it and listen to
me,
Dorian Blackwell.”

His eyes widened with dangerous warning, but his lips slammed shut.

Farah wanted to hold him more than she'd ever wanted anything in her entire life, but she clenched her own fists to keep from ruining the moment and overwhelming him. She, instead, held his gaze with the earnestness she injected into her words. “You
survived,
” she said adamantly. “You survived when others didn't. You had no other means with which to keep yourself alive. In order to stop the persecution, you
had
to become a man with a black heart. I don't … sanction violence, but neither can I condemn you for the past. Especially when it was my fault you were there in the first place.”

“Don't say that,” he growled. “Don't ever say that!

“It's true.” She shook her head. “Look at me.” Holding her hands out to her sides, she bared her body to the moon. “You have touched me, and yet my flesh is unmarred.”

The tormented hunger in his gaze caused a thrill of hope and possessive need to warm her skin against the night.

“Mine isn't,” he muttered. “There is nothing pure left of me. Not my flesh. Not my hands. Not my soul. Why would you want that anywhere near you?”

“The darkness you see in your touch is only in your mind,” she said gently. “Perhaps we can fix that.”

“It's impossible,” he lamented, shaking his head.

“Come closer,” she entreated.

He didn't move.

“If I've learned anything in my life, it's that there is no darkness so absolute that it cannot be dispelled by the faintest of light,” she explained.

His face softened as his eyes touched her, and his boot slid forward. “My sweet Fairy.” He exhaled on a painful breath. “You can't imagine darkness. You are the only light I've ever known.”

His tender words didn't match his pitiless features, but Farah still found hope. “You must believe that my light is more powerful than your darkness. And so let me touch you, instead. And everywhere that
my
fingers touch your flesh, they will clear away the blood and filth that you see, and will leave behind the light I've always wanted to give to you.”

He didn't grant her permission, not verbally. But he slowly stepped back to the edge of the bed, holding a breath trapped in his wide chest, and a wary uncertainty banked in his eyes.

Farah held a similar breath captive as her fingertips found the lapels of his coat. Gently, with infinite care, she parted the unbuttoned folds and pushed it from his shoulders, letting it fall to a heap on the floor. He wore only a black shirt, no cravat, unbuttoned at the collar, and a charcoal vest.

“I don't want you to restrain me this time.” She kissed his throat, the sinew straining and twitching beneath her lips. “
I
want to touch all of you, Dorian. Will you allow me that?”

He remained silent and still, uttering no promises, but making no move to stop her, either, as she reached for his vest and deftly undid it. His eyes burned like blue flame and glittered like volcanic stone. His nostrils flared and fists remained clenched at his sides.

A powerful need to see the man beneath the black seized her. He'd hidden so many secrets. Concealed as much as she'd ever exposed.

Now was the time to reveal the Blackheart of Ben More.

Her fingers reached for the button of his shirt, but her wrists were seized in a swift move. “No,” he gasped. “I can't do this. You don't want to see…”

“Dear husband.” Farah inched forward on her knees until she was on the very edge of the bed, and he allowed her to reach her captive hands toward his face. “You can't know how terribly wrong you are.”

He shook his head. “My skin. It's not like yours. It will—repulse you.”

Farah remembered the strange texture she'd felt beneath his shirt that day in the gardens.

She closed her eyes against a well of pathos for his tragedy. “Your hands are the same, Dougan Mackenzie,” she whispered. “I have always loved your hands, scarred and savage as they can be. I've missed your touch for seventeen years.” She twisted her wrists against his grip and uncurled his palm to press her lips against the scars of his boyhood wounds. “Trust me?” she whispered against the scars she'd treated so long ago.

Farah reached for his shirt and he stolidly allowed it, closing his hand as though to hold her kiss in his grasp and returning it to his side. Farah's heart sped with each button she liberated, but she let his chest remain in shadow until she'd undone the last one before the rest of his shirt tucked into his trousers.

Carefully, she peeled both his shirt and vest from the mountains of his powerful shoulders, and slid them down the swells of his arms.

It wasn't the many slashes and scars marring his chest that caused her sudden gasp, though she felt the pain of each one. It was the unparalleled beauty of his physique that stole her breath. Dorian's body was rendered by some ancient god of war. No Greek sculpture could compare, no artist could re-create the sleek, predatory masculinity rippling through the complex landscape of his torso.

“You're beautiful,” she marveled.

His head snapped to the side as though she'd slapped him. “Don't be cruel,” he said stonily.

Her hands trembled as she reached for him, not out of fear, but of eager anticipation. The first time she ever truly felt like she
touched
her husband was when she laid her hand flat over the hard swell of his chest, right above his heart.

The muscle flexed and jumped beneath her palm. Farah followed a raised slash that cut from beneath the flat of his nipple across the wide expanse of his ribs. Her other hand found a large patch of roughly webbed skin on his opposite shoulder that appeared to have been badly burned a long time ago. “I'm sorry for all you have endured.” She couldn't see all the details of his past wounds by the wan moonlight, and she was glad of that. Some were hidden in shadows and grooves. Though her heart ached, a hot trickle of desire had bloomed between her legs, and the muscles there began to rhythmically clench.

“My touch will
never
bring you pain,” she vowed, slowly smoothing her hands over the inconceivable expanse of his chest.

Dorian's eyes closed, as though he couldn't face the moment. His breaths were short and labored, and his heart kicked like the hoofbeats of a racing stallion beneath her palm. He lifted his hands to cover hers, making as though to pull them away from his skin. But he didn't.

Farah realized this gave him control. That he took an active participation in her experiment, and he could guide her to touch him, or allow her own exploration, depending on how it affected him.

Aware of his hesitation, she caressed down wide ridges of his ribs, and stopped to explore every divot created by the clenched muscles of his stomach. She found more nicks and creases, but ignored them, focusing on the hard male beneath the scars.

His trousers hung low on his hips, and she let her fingers wander over them.

His hands fell away and his breath sped as she found the column of his arousal. She loved the feel of him. Hot like a branding rod, straining for release against his confines.