“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.