Suddenly, it was critical she believe him. He sat, gathering her in his lap, and broke the kiss. Sophie sighed her disappointment, and King stole another kiss. She matched him perfectly, following his lead, opening for him, sliding and stroking and proving that she wanted this as much as he did.
He wanted this with everything he had.
But there was something else. Something more important than what he wanted. He tore his lips from hers. “Sophie . . .”
She opened her eyes, their blue deeper and darker than it had been earlier in the evening. Changed by his touch. His kiss. Him.
She made him feel more powerful than he’d ever felt, no longer a title, a fortune, an heir. She made him feel more. He wasn’t gong to make love to her. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t ruin her. She deserved a better man. A man who could love. A man who would marry her.
For once in his life, King would do the right thing.
For this woman who had done so many right things herself.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said, knowing the words revealed too much. That they were too reverent. He sounded like a schoolboy. He felt like one. She made him feel that way.
What was she doing to him?
She stiffened in his arms, pulling away from him, and he captured her, blocking her escape. “Where are you going, love? We’re not done here.”
She shook her head and pushed him away. “Stop.”
He released her, and she stood. He captured her hand, and she let him, despite keeping her head down, averting her gaze. “Sophie—” he started, wanting to say the right thing.
“I’m not one of the other women you’ve had. I’m not like them,” she said.
“The other women?” He didn’t like those words. Not at all.
She stared down at their hands, fingers entwined. “You needn’t lie to me.”
Except it hadn’t been a lie. He didn’t want to lie to her. He wanted her to hear the truth. “It’s not—”
She sighed. “Stop. King. You think I do not hear the things they say about me? That the beauty ran out by the time I was born? That my sisters are the pretty ones? The pleasant ones? The talented ones?” She looked to him. “I’m not beautiful. You know it. You’ve said it before.”
What an ass he’d been then. What a blind, horrid ass.
She continued. “You’re kind to say so now, and I suppose I understand the impulse, but lying about it won’t make me enjoy”—she waved one hand between them—“this more. In fact, it will make me enjoy it less.” She released his hand. “It makes me enjoy it less.”
He didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t an impulse designed to make her more likely to climb into his bed. It was the truth. He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake sense into her. He wanted to tell her again and again, until she believed him. Until she saw it herself. But it wasn’t what she wanted.
And he wanted her to have everything she wanted. Forever.
Good God. Forever.
The word curled around him, settling strangely in his chest as he watched her, and he reached for her hand, taking it once more. She allowed it. “Look at me, Sophie.”
She did, and he could see the wariness in her eyes.
One day, he’d have the head of the person who made her feel anything less than the beauty she was. “I’m not going to tell you you’re beautiful.”
Wariness turned to relief and something else that looked like sadness; there, then gone so quickly that he couldn’t be sure.
He lifted her hand to his lips, pressing a kiss to her knuckles. “Let me be clear. That doesn’t mean that I don’t fully intend for you to leave Lyne Castle believing that you are quite beautiful.”
She blushed and looked away.
“There will come a day when I tell you that and you don’t look away.”
She looked back. “You plan to do quick work, then?”
“Why quick?”
“I am leaving when my father arrives,” she replied, and the words had more impact than he would have imagined. “You should be happy with that, frankly, as they’d have you at the altar faster than you could imagine if they knew our arrangement.”
He didn’t want her leaving. He wanted her here.
Forever.
Not forever. Forever was impossible. Forever with Sophie would mean love. She wouldn’t be happy without it. Without all its bits and pieces. And love was not in his cards.
Not ever.
Not even with this woman, who somehow grew more perfect each day with her smart mouth and her smarter mind and her laugh that made him want to spend the rest of his life hearing it. More perfect, despite his being an utter ass around her.
“I’ve treated you abominably,” he said.
She shook her head, and he pulled her back to his lap. “You saved my life,” she said softly, letting him gather her close.
“I made you sad,” he whispered at her temple, to the wisps of brown hair that had come loose there. Sad was such a simple, damaging word. It meant so much more than its elaborate cousins. He’d hurt her, and she’d soldiered through.
“I have been sad before, my lord. I will be sad again.”
He hated that. “I wish I could take it all back.”
She smiled. “You cannot. We are here. Your father and the staff believe we are betrothed, as does the entire population of Mossband. And that does not include the people strewn about the countryside who believe we are married. And named Matthew.”
He’d made a hash of it, hadn’t he?
“If you think on it,” she continued, “if I were attempting to land you in the parson’s noose, I’ve done a remarkable job of it.”
He laughed at the old-fashioned phrase. “The parson’s noose?”
“Very ominous.”
“Not ominous,” he said. “Simply not for me.”
His words shifted the mood, and they both grew serious. He could see the question in her eyes, unspoken. Why?
Show me, she’d asked him earlier, when he’d told her she was too good for this place. And he ached to do just that. To tell someone why he was the man he was. To share his past.
He could tell her.
He could show her.
He tangled his fingers in hers, his thumb stroking across her soft skin, his gaze on a collection of little brown freckles that marked the base of her hand. “I left when I was eighteen.”
She stilled in his lap, but did not speak. Did not rush him for fear that he would change his mind, and there was nothing in the world she wanted more in that moment than for him to continue.
He did. “I was home from school for the summer. Like any boy of my age, I hated being here in the quiet. I wanted to spend the summer drinking and—”
She smiled. “You don’t need to hide what eighteen-year-old boys wish they were doing.”
The dimple in his right cheek flashed. “What do you know about eighteen-year-old boys?”
“Enough to know that drinking isn’t the worst thing you wished to do that summer.”
“I was too old to fish in the river and while away the days.”
She imagined him younger, leaner, his long body not quite what it was now, his face freer of the character it held now. Handsome, but nothing like he was now. The bones of the man he would become. Her smile widened as she settled into his arms. “I should like to have fished with you.”