Lord of Scoundrels - Loretta Chase [79]
He kicked the footstool away. "I see. So that's what you've been about— humoring me. Softening me up— or trying to."
Jessica closed the book and set it aside.
She had resolved to be patient, to do her duty by him, to look after him because he badly needed it, whether he realized it or not. Now she wondered why she bothered. After last night— after this morning— after exiling her to the foot of a mile-long dining table— the blockhead had the effrontery to reduce her superhuman efforts to manipulation. Her patience snapped.
"Trying…to…soften…you." She dragged the words out, and they slammed inside her, making her heart pump with outrage. "You cocksure, clodpated ingrate."
"I'm not blind," he said. "I know what you're about, and if you think— "
"If you think that I could not do it," she said tightly, "that I could not make you eat out of my hand, if that's what I wanted, I recommend you think again, Beelzebub."
There was a short, thundering silence.
"Out of your hand," he repeated very, very quietly.
She recognized the quiet tone and what it boded, and a part of her brain screamed, Run! But the rest of her mind was a red mass of anger. Slowly, deliberately, she laid her left hand, palm up, upon her knee. With her right index finger she traced a small circle in the center.
"There," she said, her own voice just as quiet as his, her own mouth curved in a taunting smile. "Like that, Dain. In the palm of my hand. And then," she went on, still stroking the center of her palm, "I would make you crawl. And beg."
Another silence thundered through the room and made her wonder why the books didn't topple from their shelves.
Then it came, velvet-soft, the one answer she hadn't expected, and the one, she knew in an instant, she should have predicted.
"I should like to see you try," he said.
* * *
His brain was trying to tell him something, but Dain couldn't hear it past the clanging in his ears: crawl…and beg. He couldn't think past the mockery he heard in her soft tones and the fury twisting his gut.
And so he locked himself in frigid rage, knowing he was safe there, impervious to hurt. He had not crawled and begged when his eight-year-old world shattered to pieces, when the only thing like love he'd ever known had fled from him and his father had thrust him away. The world had thrust him into privies, taunted and mocked and beat him. The world had recoiled from him and made him pay for every pretty deceit that passed for happiness. The world had tried to beat him down into submission, but he would not submit, and the world had had to learn to live with him on his terms.
As she must. And he would endure whatever he must, to teach her so.
He thought of the great rocks he'd pointed out to her hours ago, which centuries of drumming rain and beating wind and bitter cold could not wear down or break down. He made himself a mass of stone like them, and, as he felt her move beside him, he told himself she would never find a foothold; she could no more scale him than she could melt him or wear him down.
She came onto her knees beside him, and he waited through the long moment she remained motionless. She was hesitating, he knew, because she wasn't blind. She knew stone when she saw it, and maybe, already, she saw her mistake…and very soon, she'd give it up.
She lifted her hand and touched his neck— and snatched her hand away almost in the same instant, as though she felt it, too, as he did: the crackling shock darting under the skin to shriek along his nerve endings.
Though he kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, Dain saw her puzzled reaction in the periphery of his vision, caught her frown as she studied her hand, discerned her thoughtful glance moving to his neck.
Then, his heart sinking, he perceived the slow upturn of her mouth. She edged nearer, and her right knee slid behind him against his buttock, while her left pressed against his