“That moment happened right here,” she yelled, pointing at the chair. “Do you honestly think I would simply give myself to anyone? To a man I didn’t…didn’t want?”

That slowed him down. He glared at the chair, fragments of memory assaulting him and arousing him instantly. Hot little cries of pleasure in his ear, her nails raking down his back… Dangerous thoughts. They turned him from his purpose, made him forget everything he needed to remember about her. The duchess had been raised to play games. She excelled at them. And somehow, what he wanted from her was not just to win, not anymore. This had become more than a game. “It didn’t mean anything. You said so yourself.”

“I lied. It meant more to me!” she cried, her eyes glittering with fierceness and rage and…something that made his gut muscles clench as if for a blow. “Why are you angry with me? Do you want me to tell the truth? I wanted this to happen. I’ve wanted it for years!”

“Why are you angry with me?” he countered with arms flung wide, though his breath caught. He couldn’t let himself believe it… Because if she was lying to him… “You were the one who said you didn’t want me, that I had no hold over you. So why be angry now? Isn’t this what you want?”

Mina cupped her palms around her upper arms as if to brace herself against the words echoing in the room. “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know what you want from me.”

Did he dare answer that? The words were a strangled admission of something he’d never let himself admit. “You know what I want.”

Someone to give a damn about him. Someone to care. A warm bed to crawl into when he returned home from court in the early hours of the morning. Soft, welcoming arms and a sleepy, murmured greeting. A smile in the darkness as he tipped her face up to his to kiss it.

Everything that he saw in Blade’s face when he looked at Honoria, or Lena’s tender smile when she cupped her hand against Will’s cheek when she thought they were alone. He wanted that. He wanted it so fiercely that sometimes he thought he’d choke on it, and yet he’d never dared put it into words.

Those bright eyes closed, her head lowering. “Then perhaps I don’t know how to give it.”

A pregnant pause thickened the air between them, full of want and need and everything unspoken. This was the precipice. The moment in which either of them could take a step forward to meet somewhere in the middle…or never meet at all. A moment full of risk, but he felt stronger now because of a hope there that hadn’t existed before.

He hadn’t understood the depths he’d sunk to until then. A bleak place full of shadows that threatened to envelop him. But there was a light now. A glint of a future. He just had to take it by both hands.

And so he did. He stepped forward, his hands cupping her cheeks and tipping her chin up. Mina looked at him, her eyes full of something he’d never seen there before. “Why?” Her voice was raw. “Why me?”

His thumbs stroked the silk of her cheeks. “Because it was always you.”

Again more silence as she digested the words, her eyes so far away that he felt for a moment as if he’d lost her. The light from the window reflected in her irises.

“I like it when you call me ‘Mina,’” she admitted. “It drove me insane at first that you would dare, but…I miss it. You’re the only one who does, did you know that? The only one with the courage to do so. You always push me. Always. And sometimes I’m not ready to be pushed. Sometimes it scares me that you get under my skin the way you do.” She took a shaky breath, hands curling in his shirt. “You frighten me, but I’m trying…I’m trying to stop pushing you away. It’s not easy for me.”

With her hair tumbled down around her shoulders and her hands clinging to his shirt, she looked far younger than she ever had.

He’d never, ever expected her to yield. But she had. And that was all he’d been asking for, really, for her to meet him halfway. Halfway to…whatever the hell this was.

Leo slid his arms around her, crushing her against his chest, his hand cradling her scalp. So small in his arms. As if that backbone of steel was finally threatening to crumble…and he didn’t want it to. Curling his fingers in her hair, he tipped her face up to his and pressed a kiss to her lips, tasting the sweet heat of her mouth.

And that spark between them hissed to life again. A connection he’d never been able to fight, no matter how much he knew this was a fool’s dream. Moaning deep in his throat, he pressed her back against the wall, following her with his hands and mouth. Mina was liquid fire in his arms. Everything changed. Everything. No more holding back. Her teeth bumped his in their desperate attempt to consume each other. Lashes fluttered against his cheeks as she sought to breathe, hand twining in his hair. Oh God, her breasts. His hands cupped them, mouth dropping to her throat, where he could taste the faint saltiness of her skin, lower, nipping at her collarbone…

A hand pushed against the middle of his chest and he drew back, gasping for breath, his blood a conflagration of need.

But the look on her face stopped him from taking more, the way she searched his eyes as if looking for the answer to some question he didn’t know. Mina licked her lips, face paling. “There’s something I need to tell you. And if I don’t tell you now…”

The air between them charged with something potent, something dangerous. He studied her gaze. “What?”

“For the last ten years,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper, “I’ve been working to overthrow the prince consort. I have the means to do it too, if I can find the manpower.”

The entire floor dropped out from beneath him.

Part Three

The Tower

Twenty

“So you been workin’ to overthrow the prince consort for years.” Blade leaned against the fireplace in the parlor.

“Yes,” the duchess replied. Blade’s enormous tomcat, Puss, jumped into her lap. Mina hesitantly scratched its scarred ears and it leered at her, if cats could be said to leer. There was something sad in her eyes as she dragged the cat into her arms, her chest vibrating with its purr. “It began the year I ascended to the duchy.”

She’d lost her cat, Leo recalled. Found its body butchered in the center of her bed. He stretched his arm out along the back of the daybed, his fingers brushing against her shoulder. Just that, but she gave him a grateful look.