Captive of Sin (25 page)

He closed his eyes as if he couldn’t bear to witness what she did. His tension was a vibrant, writhing force. Air scraped in and out of his lungs.

Doubt assailed her. Held her paralyzed.

Could she do this? Should she do this? What if her actions pushed him deeper into purgatory?

She braced her shoulders and reached forward to pull his shirt free of his trousers. Her heart banged against her ribs. Her hands shook.

He opened his eyes and snatched the hem of his shirt. “Here, damn you,” he grated out. He tore the garment in two, shucked the ragged pieces, and dropped them to the floor.

Anything Charis might have said lodged unspoken in her tight throat. Her hands fisted at her sides. Her eyes flew up to meet Gideon’s glassy gaze, then dropped to convulsively trace every line of his torso.

She’d known he’d be beautiful. But his virile splendor left her speechless. His pale skin stretched tight over ridges of hard muscle. Feathery dark hair covered the broad plane of his chest.

Scars patterned his chest and arms. Long lines that she guessed came from a whipping. Pale satiny welts that looked like burns. Round marks that could be bullet holes. A tangible history of unrelenting pain.

Her attention returned to his face. His jaw set like stone with stoic endurance.

He loathed this. He loathed this to the depths of his being.

Oh, Gideon, I’m so sorry. Forgive me.

She reached out and placed a gentle hand on one powerful arm. He flinched away. Just like he used to. Fear scored her heart. Would tonight hurl him back into his nightmare isolation?

She straightened. She’d set out on this path. For good or ill, she must follow it to the end.

Steeling herself for what she’d see, she slowly stepped behind him. He held himself so still, she couldn’t hear his breathing anymore.

His back was long. Leanly muscled. Graceful in its strength.

Marred with scars upon scars upon scars.

How had anyone borne such torture and lived?

Scalding tears stung her eyes, but she forced them back. A sob jammed behind her lips. She must be strong, just as Gideon had been strong.

Her horrified gaze clung to the pattern of cicatrices across his flesh. Every inch of his back carried the mark of violence. His captors must have beaten him again and again. They must have stabbed him and burned him. Her imagination failed as she sought to measure his torment.

With one trembling hand, she touched a thick puckered line that snaked around his ribs. He flinched again, although the wound had long since healed.

“Have you had enough?” he asked cuttingly.

“Oh, Gideon, what did they do to you?” she whispered.

“I warned you.”

She traced the scar, feeling where other scars intersected it. The raised flesh under her touch was unnaturally smooth. “I still think you’re beautiful,” she choked out.

His muscles tensed, then he jerked away from her tentative exploration.

“Do you indeed, sweet Charis?” he snarled, whirling to face her. “What about this?”

With savage swiftness, he ripped the gloves from his hands and flung them to the floor.

C
haris’s heart crashed to a halt. At last she saw what Gideon had hidden all this time. She saw and yet could hardly believe it.

She thought viewing the scars on his back had tested the limits of her courage. But this, this went beyond anything she could conceive.

Her appalled gaze clung to the ruined hands he spread out before her as if he taunted her with their shattered elegance. “Oh, Gideon,” she whispered, the words lacerating her throat.

“Quite a sight, aren’t they? At least they work. After the torture, I wasn’t sure they would.” His tone stung. He lifted his right hand and held it so close in front of her face that the tangled network of scars blurred. “Do you want these touching your skin? Do you?”

She jerked back, mainly at the corrosive pain in his voice, then made herself stand still and look without flinching. He wanted her to recoil, she knew. He wanted her to confirm he was as repulsive as he believed.

“Don’t,” she begged. Shaking, she reached out to catch his hand, but he wrenched free to stand in front of the grate.

Apart from hectic streaks of color lining his prominent cheekbones, his face was drawn and gaunt. His mouth was a white gash of anger. His black eyes were brilliant with humiliation and self-loathing.

“Don’t touch you?” His bitter laugh made her cringe. “I wouldn’t dream of desecrating your body with these claws.”

“No…” He’d misunderstood her. Deliberately, she guessed. Her belly clenched in sick misery. She raised unsteady hands to her face and discovered it wet with tears.

He had so much pride. His pride was part of his extraordinary strength. But that also meant he’d hate her to cry over him. She should stop.

If only she could.

He sent her a blistering glare, then stalked toward the door, snatching up his coat on the way. “I’ve had enough of this. Find some other damned charity case.”

“Gideon, please don’t go,” she forced through a throat thick with churning emotion.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he grated out without looking at her. On the hand that clutched his coat, his broken knuckles shone white.

She couldn’t let him leave like this, believing she despised him for his injuries. Lunging forward, she grabbed his bare arm with both hands. “No!”

“Let me go, madam,” he said stiffly, although at least he curtailed his headlong retreat.

She expected him to shove her away and make his escape. But he stood facing the door, his back to her, quivering as he did in the grip of his affliction.

“Never,” she vowed, her voice fracturing. She slid one hand down his arm to cup his poor, damaged hand between hers. “Never, never, never.”

Dear Lord, she had to stop crying. She sucked in a broken breath and struggled for control.

He was as taut as a drawn wire. On edge. Furious. Grieving. Likely to lash out at the least provocation. Perhaps she pushed him too far, risked another attack. She muffled a sob and stroked his hand with trembling fingers as if touch alone could mend what could never be mended.

His other hand opened, and the coat dropped to the floor, tacit admission that he wasn’t going anywhere. His glossy dark head lowered until his forehead rested against the door.

In the unnatural contours of the hand she held, she felt what his captors had done. The tracery of scars. The spurs and welts. The jagged knitting of the bones. Bones that had been smashed over and over. The knuckles were swollen. The fingernails were jagged and misshapen.

What had happened to him was obscene, unspeakable, barbaric. The damage made her want to scream and claw and fight. But all she could do was cry.

Heaven help me, I need to dam these endless tears.

“Charis, I don’t want your pity.” His voice was so deep, it was a subterranean growl.

He was wrong about her reaction. Pity was too weak a response to the horrors perpetrated on him. What he’d withstood beggared imagination. She felt like an ax cleaved her heart, and nothing would ever weld it whole again.

“I don’t pity you.” The words emerged as a choked murmur.

Still Gideon didn’t look at her. “I don’t believe you.”

With a jerky movement, he laid his other hand flat against the dark wood of the door. It had been as tortured as its twin. But staring at his hand against the timber, she saw the grace and beauty it must once have possessed.

“My love…” Curse these tears, nothing stopped them. “I’m so sorry.”

Words failed her. What could she say? Nothing was equal to what he’d been through. Instead, she followed where her heart dictated. Holding his shattered hand tenderly between hers, she raised it to her lips.

She placed a fervent kiss on the uneven knuckles. It was
an act of homage for all he’d borne. It was an act of overwhelming anguish. It was an act of gratitude that he’d survived so she could fall in love with him.

Under her lips, his flesh was warm. His hands looked like they belonged to a monster. The skin she kissed was unquestionably a man’s.

He went utterly still. His shaking quieted. He didn’t breathe. He didn’t speak. His back was stiff with tension. If his living hand hadn’t rested between hers, she’d almost wonder if he’d turned to stone.

In the brittle silence, she finally heard him take a shuddering breath. The hand she held curled into a fist. He drew another of those long, difficult breaths.

“I hate what they did to me.” His voice was so low, she strained to hear him. He spoke toward the door. “I hate that I have to live with Rangapindhi forever.”

Oh, my dear.

She recognized his shame and pain. Without thinking, she shifted, pressing herself hard against his back with its interlocking network of scars. She turned her hot sticky cheek against his skin, feeling the tight muscles, the lines of raised flesh.

His shoulders bent forward. He was so rigid, it was as if he kept himself upright through will alone. Compassion, all the more poignant because she couldn’t express it, stabbed her. She waited in painful suspense for him to push her away, berate her, walk out. But he didn’t move.

Without releasing the hand she’d kissed, she raised her other hand to cover his where it flattened against the door. He jerked infinitesimally under her touch, then subsided into stillness. She tried to infuse him with every ounce of her love. Physically. Through the human warmth he’d thought denied to him forever.

She didn’t know how long she sprawled against him in wordless communion. She closed her eyes and let darkness take her.

After a long while, she felt him shift. She opened her eyes and straightened.

Finally, he turned to face her, forcing her to free one of his hands although she kept her clasp on the other. She steeled herself to look into his face as fear sent icy tendrils along her spine.

What would his expression reveal? Anger? Disdain? Coldness, as he rebuilt barriers of pride and detachment that had crumbled tonight?

His face was stark with some deep emotion she couldn’t identify. She stared into his burning eyes.

“Charis…”

He looked as though he’d lost his soul. The stony desolation in his eyes cut her to the quick.

“It’s all right, my love.” She curled her arms around him, anything to assuage his cruel isolation. His muscles tensed as he resisted her. She tightened her embrace. “It’s over. It’s over.”

For a long moment, Gideon stood unresponsive, unmoving. Then she felt him tense. Was he finally going to spurn her? She was astonished he’d endured her touch as long as he had. She was astonished he’d revealed his scars and his suffering. However he treated her now, the bond between them had become unbreakable.

Which wouldn’t ease her hurt if he rebuffed her after all they’d shared in the last half hour.

He made a choked sound deep in his throat. She felt his chest expand as he sucked in a massive breath.

“Oh, dear God in heaven,” he forced out in a cracked groan.

Shaking, he lashed his arms around her and tugged her roughly into his chest. His shoulders heaved convulsively as he buried his face in her neck. She felt the heat of his breath, the bruising power of his arms, the frantic race of his heart.

“I want to give you peace,” she whispered into his thick
dark hair. Painful tears welled again. She loved him so much, it was agony.

“You have. You do,” he said urgently, but the hands that clutched her so hard spoke of desperation, not rest.

This wasn’t peace. Perhaps peace and he were such strangers, he no longer recognized it. “Oh, Gideon, I wish that were so,” she said sadly.

He held her so close, he crushed her breasts against his chest. She drew a shallow breath, all his stranglehold allowed her. His head was heavy on her shoulder. His hair tickled her neck the way it had after he’d shared her bed for the first time.

“Whenever I look at my hands, it all comes back.” His voice was thick, hesitant as he spoke into her skin. “The stink. The heat. The cold. The hunger and thirst. The unending pain.”

With a hand that trembled with horror at all he’d suffered, she stroked his disheveled hair. The caress seemed so natural. How curious to think before this morning she couldn’t have made it. Just as only a day ago it would have been unthinkable to cradle him in her arms and infuse his cold loneliness with her love.

So much had changed since they’d left Penrhyn.

“I don’t know how you endured it,” she said softly.

He tautened, and the muscles across his back became as unrelenting as steel. “I didn’t endure. Before they finished with me, I screamed for mercy.”

He was so hard on himself. If only he could spare some of the generosity he’d shown her to stanch his own wounds. “You didn’t betray your comrades or your country,” she said in a quiet but implacable voice. “You stood up to over a year of torture and didn’t break. You’re too brave for your own good.”

“You wouldn’t think that if you’d seen the pathetic fool I made of myself when they started on my hands.” He rubbed his head against her neck in a desultory caress. The unforced gesture sent warmth spiraling through her. She could hardly comprehend he trusted her enough to stay in her arms.

“Oh, my love,” she said in a low voice throbbing with emotion. She ran her hand in comforting trails over his powerful back. Under her hand, his scars created a bumpy tapestry, a map of the intolerable tribute his years in India had claimed. She couldn’t see his ruined hands. She didn’t need to. The sight would haunt her forever.

“You have to forgive yourself, or you’ll go mad. Good Lord, Gideon. You’re covered in scars. You hardly sleep. You flinch if anyone comes within reach.” Her voice softened into persuasion. “You gave all anyone could ask. More. Much more. Everybody in the world sees that but you.”

Charis turned her head and glanced a kiss across his cheek. The poignant tenderness inside her demanded some expression. She felt his breath catch. She suspected acts of uncomplicated affection had been rare in his life.

Because she ached for his solitude, because it was all too easy to picture a clever little boy happier with his books than any companions, she kissed him again. A glance of the lips that caught him on the rim of one ear.

Again the hitch in his breath. Slowly, he straightened and stared at her with a wariness that pierced her heart. Surely by now he must know she wanted only his good. But he’d been so hurt, he shied away from anything that smacked of love. For all the barriers she’d crashed through in the last days, she didn’t fool herself that he was near to accepting he was worthy of her adoration.

The scars of Rangapindhi cut too deep for any simple remedy.

For now, he was with her and showed no signs of wanting to go. She intended to take what advantage she could. Rising on her toes, she kissed one side of his neck, then the other. She still held him, but loosely, easily, without the quaking desperation. He shifted restlessly, and his hands slid to span her waist.

She traced a line of kisses along one sinewy shoulder. Pausing when she reached the top of his arm.

A strangled sound emerged from his throat. She wasn’t
sure whether it was encouragement or protest. She dropped another kiss on the ball of his shoulder.

The kisses were quick, soft, playful. Like those she’d give a crying child to coax it from a fit of sullens.

Except she knew to the depths of her soul that Gideon was no child.

He was a full-grown man. Potent. Passionate. Predatory.

A thrill shivered through her. More purposefully, she grazed her lips along the vein down the side of his neck. Feeling the powerful life thundering through him.

His breath caught again. Then he shifted and pressed his lips to the collarbone revealed under her red gown’s square neckline.

Her heart stuttered. He became a participant at last. She closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe. Her hands settled loosely on his hips.

She pressed a kiss to his other ear.

He kissed her chin, his lips warm and firm.

She brushed her lips over his jaw.

He caught one earlobe in his teeth and bit down gently.

Response burned down to her toes, and a strangled moan escaped her. As he bent to kiss her shoulder, she caught a flash of masculine triumph in his face.

They no longer clung to each other like the survivors of a shipwreck. She’d kissed him to comfort, but somewhere the game had changed into a duel of kisses.

She angled her head and kissed the hammering pulse at the base of his throat. Instinct made her lick him there. His skin was warm and salty. Delicious.

She forgot the playful battle and licked him again. Slowly. Luxuriously. His flavor filled her senses. His low rumbling growl vibrated against her lips.

Dazed, she lifted her head and stared at him. The humor seeped from his expression. Replaced by an intense concentration that sent a sizzle of anticipation down her spine.

The innocent games were over.

Danger hovered.

Danger and passion.

Time stopped. Along with her heart and breath. She felt as though she poised on the brink of one of Penrhyn’s craggy cliffs. Would she plummet to her death? Or would he catch her, as he always had?