If Dorian Blackwell didn’t show his face soon, she would go raving mad.
What if he didn’t come to her tonight? What if he’d been lying to her when he promised to get her with child?
I’m not above lying to you to get what I want.
Oh, she would skin him alive. If Dorian Blackwell meant to stand her up on her own wedding night, she had more than a thing or two to say about that! Farah paced the floor for a few minutes, organizing her rant into specific and chronologically important points, the last one beginning with and furthermore, because when one predicated a statement with that, it was impossible to ignore it. Even if you were the bloody Blackheart of Ben More.
Having worked up a sufficient amount of righteous indignation, she marched for the door.
It burst open, missing her face by inches.
Farah shrieked.
Blackwell stared.
“What do you think you are doing?” she demanded.
“Where do you think you are going?” he said at the same time.
She answered first. “I was coming to find my husband.”
“Well, here I am,” he said with a droll glance around her room, twitching his nose at the rosewater scent she’d sprayed on the pillows and curling his lip at the carefully placed candles.
“You could have knocked,” Farah indicted, unwilling to show the hurt that squeezed within her breast.
Blackwell entered her room, forcing her to take a step back. “I’ll be a dead man before I knock on a door in my own castle.”
“What if I wasn’t ready?”
He speared her with those eyes. Ones that could be so full of mystery and flame. Ones that could be so dead and cold.
Like now.
“There’s no amount of preparation for what we’re about to do.” He strode past her, barely giving her an assessing glance, and claimed the seat by her bed as though he owned it. Which he did, of course. Shadows gathered near him as they were wont to do, despite the candles she’d so carefully placed. Cold menace and a dangerous, unstable element rolled off him and reached for her like the mist that blanketed the Highland shores of a morning, shrouding the dangers of the ancient volcanic rock and the shapes of predators.
For a predator he was, that had never been clearer than in this moment.
“Now,” he said in that deep, chilly voice, examining the fine leather of his fitted gloves. “Take off your dress.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Farah clutched the bodice of her dress, even though the buttons were still doing their job, and stared at the large, dark man in the chair.
He met her look with a level one of his own. “Second thoughts already, my dear?” The endearment was not meant as such, and they both knew it. His words were a challenge, an answer to one that she’d issued initially. She’d offered him her body, almost demanded that he take it, and now he’d come to collect.
It would be foolhardy to think that he might make this easy for her.
Farah lifted her chin. “No. I merely thought that you might want to take it off, yourself.”
She was playing a dangerous game, and she saw that danger flash in his eyes. “If that were the case, I’d have ripped it off you immediately. Stop stalling and take. Off. Your. Dress.”
Of course. He’d want to watch. It excited him. Aroused him.
Very well, Mr. Blackwell, Farah thought. Watch this.
Dorian could tell she pretended it wasn’t the trembling of her fingers that stole the dexterity from her movements. She tried to keep his gaze locked on her challenging eyes, flashing with little gray storm clouds, but Dorian couldn’t manage to stop from visually devouring every hint of skin each release of a button revealed. The slim column of her throat. The soft expanse of thin flesh stretched over her chest and collarbones, so rife with nerve endings.
She took her time, damn her.
The light from the candles kissed her silvery hair and her creamy ivory skin with gold as though King Midas had given in to temptation and touched her with his cursed fingers.
Regret tried to lick at him, to stir the humanity buried down deep beneath the layers of greed, self-loathing, violence, hatred, and anger he walled within that impenetrable casing of ice.
This was Farah. His wife. Should he objectify her like this?
Another button worked free, exposing the first hint of the swell of her bosom.
The question was: Could he stop himself if he wanted to?
Dorian already knew the answer.
Not for all the money and power in the empire.
As she exposed the valley of shadow in between her breasts, Dorian felt the intoxicating, almost chemical mixture of thrill and shame he imagined tortured the waifish opiate addicts that haunted the back alleys of the Chinese immigrant shops on the East End.
His body was going to get something it pined after. Burned for. Screamed with the intensity of its need.
And he’d hate himself in the morning.
Hell, she’d probably hate him, too. But she’d progressed in getting the buttons undone to her navel, and Dorian spied one nipple outlined in pink-tipped perfection against the thin white silk of her chemise, presented to him by her tightly laced corset. All coherent thought dissipated like the mist before the sun’s rays, and everything around him receded but for her. His next breath hinged on the next button being set free. The next expanse revealed for him to consume like a starving man.
He wanted to stop her. To demand that she continue. But for all his composure, words had become lost to him, communication beyond his ability. All he could do was sit helplessly and await her next move. Watching.