His lungs emptied of breath as an exquisite ache speared them, and he had to struggle to fill them again.
“I want to give someone the childhood that was taken from me,” she said more softly. “And the man I marry must agree to that.”
“You. Don’t. Understand.”
“I understand that you are the boldest and most feared man in the realm. You can kill someone without a second thought, or ruin entire families with the stroke of a pen. If you are brave enough to do that, then you can summon the courage to lie with your wife the few paltry times it will take to get me with child.”
They glared at each other, their wills clashing with palpable force.
“Is your body promised to someone else?” she asked.
“God, no.”
“Is your heart?”
“I thought we’d quite established that I don’t have one.”
She was getting better at those irritated glances that conveyed her impatience. “Then explain this to me, if I don’t understand it.”
Dorian couldn’t put it into words. Not to her. “I already did.”
She studied him for a moment, then extended her hand toward him.
He retreated out of her reach.
Her brow furrowed in thought. “Dorian, how long has it been since you’ve allowed someone to touch you?”
His stomach clenched at the sound of his name on her lips. He couldn’t tell her, not without giving away too much. “A lifetime,” he answered.
“And honestly, is that why you cannot have—er—relations with me?”
He glanced away from her, regretting that he ever revealed such a weakness. When he’d avoided contact with others, he’d turned it into a power play, insinuating that he found them too beneath his dignity for a handshake or an offered arm.
That wasn’t so in this case. Not with her.
“How do you kill people if you do not touch them?” she asked curiously, then shook her head, a peculiar expression twisting her mouth. “I never thought I’d ask such a question.”
“I often wear gloves,” he answered honestly. “Also, not every weapon requires physical contact.”
“Of course,” she said automatically, though her brows furrowed as if puzzling out a problem. “But, with your gloves on, you have come into contact with others?”
“Rarely. If it can’t be avoided.”
She nodded, deep in thought. “Though I live as a widow, I remain a virgin. Despite the issue of a child, our marriage would need to be consummated in case its validity was ever called into question.”
Dorian’s mouth went dry. He’d thought he’d considered everything, but a sexual relationship had been so far out of the realm of possibility, this one detail had escaped him. Beneath the panic, a whisper of pleasure beamed at the knowledge that another man hadn’t touched her.
Tapping the tiny divot in her chin, she set her towel down and picked up a brush from a dressing table and began to work it through her curls. “I—suppose if I was being completely practical, I could take a lover. That would solve both of our problems, wouldn’t it?”
“I would kill any man who dared touch you,” he informed her coldly.
“Well, that isn’t being very solution-oriented, is it?” She sighed, exasperated. “Would it please you to watch? That seems to be a proclivity of yours.”
He took a threatening step toward her, smarting at her observant insinuation. He’d been nothing his entire life but an observer and manipulator of human will and desire. Should it be such a surprise that the inclination extended to his troubled sexuality? “I will force you to watch as I dismember whatever part of his body he dared to touch you with, and feed it to him,” he declared tightly.
“Then it has to be you,” she insisted.
They glared through another impasse for the space of a few moments.
The thought of another man touching her brought out his most evil, sinister impulses. He’d felt them when she’d kissed Morley, and had barely stopped himself from snapping the man’s neck in front of her.
Despite his anger, he loved looking at her like this. Flushed from her bath, her hair a heavy curtain of coils around eyes the color of moonbeams. How could any man deny her? He wanted to touch her. Craved it.
But he couldn’t bring himself to taint her like that. Why did she refuse to see it? How could she invite the Blackheart of Ben More into her bed? Marriage was one thing. Sex was something else altogether. Did she really want a child so badly that she’d lower herself to allow someone like him inside her glorious body? Did she not know who he was? Had he not painted a clear enough picture of what he’d done?
Of what had been done to him?
“Your gloves,” she murmured, as though struck with a bit of genius.
“What?”
The pink of her cheeks deepened and she visibly gathered her courage to explain. “I’ve spent a great deal of time over the last ten years in the company of street and dock prostitutes,” she began. “And I’ve learned from them that to conduct their business out in the open like they do they rarely have to disrobe. In fact, I gather that very little in the way of contact is required.”
The idea angered Dorian, because it tempted him. “You want me to treat you like a bloody dock walker?”
She leveled him a droll look, though her cheeks still burned with timidity. “Not particularly. My point was that I think we could achieve—intercourse—without a great deal of touching.”