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“You wanted,” Griff repeated, picking up on her use of the past tense.
She raised her chin. “No point in crying after what you can’t have.”
His eyes darkened. “I am sorry for the…change in your circumstances.”
“Don’t be. It’s my own fault.”
His brows lowered. “How is it your fault?”
“I’m ruined,” Emma explained, and maybe it was the wine talking, and maybe it was relief that she was alive and not headed to Canada, after all, to work twelve months on a farm, and maybe she was just tired of pretending she was in control and everything was all right.
Griff said nothing.
“I thought he loved me,” she bumbled on. “I thought—” Her throat closed with remembered pain and embarrassment. Tears pricked her eyes.
“I wanted to,” she insisted. “He said I did. But he didn’t love me, after all, and it was horrible. Disappointing, he said.”
Her voice broke on the word. Her vision blurred. She did not see Griff move. But somehow he was there beside her on the bed, his arms warm and strong around her, his chest hard and close. She turned her face into his smooth, warm throat and cried.
His large hand cradled her head against his shoulder. He didn’t say anything, only held her as she gasped and wept, her hot tears smearing her face and his throat. She inhaled the musk of his skin and let everything else boil out, all her pain, her rage, and her grief. She cried for her lost dreams and her violated trust. She cried for her friend and mentor Letitia, who had turned her out, and her family, who had turned their backs on her. She cried until she was heavy and hollow and limp, lying against him.
He never spoke a word. And his silence gave her courage to admit the secret she had not confessed even to herself, the betrayal more shameful than Paul’s.
“I’m ruined,” she said bitterly. “And I didn’t even enjoy it.”
Griff was silent.
Humiliation seared her. Women were not supposed to enjoy it.
It was only her own perverse nature that led her to imagine she might.
“I wanted to feel close to him.” As if any explanation could excuse her. “And instead I felt used. Empty.”
Griff got up, the mattress shifting from the sudden removal of his weight, and set the tray outside in the hall.
Emma stared at him, her throat aching and her eyes puffy. Confused and bereft. “What are you doing?”
He shut the door and smiled at her, and the warm intent in his eyes thumped her in the stomach. “Let me fill you, lass. I will not disappoint you.”
FOUR
“Let me fill you.”
Emma gaped. Impossible to mistake his meaning. Irresistible to imagine, for one taut moment, how it might be, his body covering hers, his legs pressing and parting her thighs, his weight pinning her as he stretched her, filled her, hurt her—
The memory clenched her body. No.
“No!” She scrambled off the bed in panic.
Griff didn’t move.
Her heart pounded. She struggled for composure. He was in her room, where she had invited him. She was to blame, just as Paul had said.
But Griff was not Paul. Emma was sure—almost sure—he would not take advantage of her momentary weakness, her lapse in judgment, to force her.
“It’s all right, lass,” Griff said, his very dryness soothing. “I can hear ‘no’ even without the knife.”
Emma flushed. “It’s just—” I’m afraid. Of him, of herself. “I won’t be used again.”
