The Duke Is Mine - Eloisa James [126]
“You mustn’t!” Olivia protested. “You can’t! I weigh too much.” But he merely pressed a kiss on her forehead and walked out of the courtyard, leaving the sordid garrison behind.
His body ached, but he never gave way to fatigue. It was half a league to the inlet where the rowboat waited for them, but the duke’s muscles seemed to be made of steel.
Olivia was quiet, her arms around his neck, her cheek against his chest, so grateful to be with him, and alive, that she couldn’t speak. But when he walked through the woods and she heard the sound of running water, she insisted on being put down.
“We’re almost at the Day Dream,” Quin protested. “I want to get out of this bloody country.”
She ran a hand along his cheek. “Please?”
He groaned, but he put her on her feet.
It was early evening, and the air was warm and smelled of flowers. Bluebells stretched down to the edge of a lazy stream lined by young oaks. “They’re so beautiful,” Olivia breathed, kneeling in a patch of blossoms.
Quin just growled. “Enjoy them now, because you won’t see these flowers again. We are never returning to France.”
She laughed. “Of course we will return, after the war is over. I want to meet Petit’s bride someday, and learn if the drunken capitaine sobers up. Besides, I heard you making plans for cognac to be sent to Littlebourne Manor on a regular basis.”
“The best I’ve had in years.” Quin looked unrepentant.
“I hate to say it, but Madame’s bread was astonishingly good. Worth a trip to France.” Her voice trailed off as she looked up at him.
Quin had bathed as well, and washed away the streaks of black soot that made him look like a thief in the night. Even so, there was something different about him. The cheekbones that seemed aristocratic in England now seemed harsh and undomesticated. He wore no coat, and one shirtsleeve had been ripped away, baring his muscular arm. He was the embodiment of an avenger.
“What?” he asked, scowling down at her.
“You look like a warrior,” she said, her whole body thrilling in a distinctly uncivilized way to the barely suppressed violence pulsing in his every sinew.
He crouched beside her, and his thigh muscles bulged in a way that made her long to run her fingers over them. A lady would never notice that. Her mother would be scandalized, and she could not have cared less.
“I thought I had lost you,” he said, his voice stark and uncompromising. “It turned me into a madman, so I should probably warn you that I may never be the same again, Olivia.”
She came up on her knees so that their eyes were level. “My last thought before I fainted was of you. I knew you would come. I love you, Quin.”
“I never understood much about love,” he said, not touching her. “But I do know that I love the way you hold your own against my mother, and your bad jokes, and your silly limericks, and your violet dress, and the way you can climb a tree and fly a kite.”
She smiled. That was good enough.
“My mother told me long ago,” he continued, “that it was a good thing that we were an unemotional family, because love was dangerous. I proved her hypothesis by falling in love with Evangeline.”
Olivia bit her lip, ready to argue.
“But I love you so much more.” His voice grated and nearly broke, but he steadied it. “I love you more than anything in this world, more than my own life. If love is dangerous, then I don’t want to live in safety.” His voice was rough and savage, and doubly honest for its hunger.
Olivia shifted backward, still on her knees. “Just looking at you makes me ache . . . here.” She put a hand on her stomach, let it drift lower. “And here.”
His face changed from deadly to sensual. “Olivia.” He breathed the word. Then: “No.” He tried to make the word into a command, but she was pretty sure that warriors married Amazons, which meant it was time she became as bold as any Amazon. Not that history was her strong point.
“I’m not afraid when you are with me.” She undid the top button of a villager’s dress,