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groaned as she gripped the back of his head. Her hands slipped against the short corn silk of his pale
hair.
Tell me to stop, sweetheart, he muttered against her cheek. Just say the word if we re going too
fast.
His body said something else though, as he ground harder against her.
It said, please, please.
She stroked the wide arc of his back as she whispered in his ear, You are my mate. I could never
say no to you.
His head reared back. He stared at her in astonishment.
For one terrible moment, dread darkened her vision and her heart gave a sickened lurch. She
thought, I cannot be so wrong. I cannot live with it if I am so deluded.
The joy that came over his face was so incandescent, it blinded her. That s what it means, he
said. True north.
She broke into a bout of reactive shivering. What?
He leaned on one elbow to caress her face. When I looked at you for the first time, the world
changed. It all but knocked me off my feet. I ve been thinking it was like true north had shifted, the
magnetic pull from the one direction you use in navigation, but it s more like the primary force from
your card spread. I ve been trying to figure out what it meant. All I knew was that it was you you
had become my true north, my primary force. Just like that, from one moment to the next.
She closed her eyes and swallowed hard as the world came back into focus. Yes, that s what
happened to me too.
He bent down to nuzzle her neck. It reminds me of a quote from a French philosopher. The heart
has reasons that reason cannot know. Do you know it?
She wound her arms around his neck, and she let her frightened heart find ease and grow full of
him. I do now.
I dreamed a dream of incomparable rarity and loveliness.
Then I woke to find it true.
Chapter Six
Sacrifice
Gideon stared at the woman in his arms. She was so gorgeous it took his breath. He had thought her
beauty was understated and intelligent, but right at that moment she was so flagrant with color and
voluptuousness he could only gaze at her in passionate awe.
Her cocoa-and-cream skin turned a deep rich gold in the light of the fire, and her vivid eyes shone
blue and green. Those fabulous gold-tipped corkscrew curls spilled extravagantly over his hands, and
her pale yellow nightgown moved like silk against his overheated skin. Her breasts were full and
generous, and the dark areola of her erect nipples pushed against the thin material.
He imagined watching her grow older, a pale sprinkling of frost touching those curls, the laugh
lines growing at the corners of her eyes and that delicate, sensitive mouth. The images in his
imagination drew him at a fundamental level. She could only become lovelier to him as he grew to
know her with the intimacy of the passing years.
He bent his head and caressed the slender arc of her golden neck with his lips. He felt the sigh of
pleasure that shuddered through her, the sexy shift of her body molding to fit his, and oh holy gods, he
was the one who did that to her, great hulking brute that he was. The wonder of it closed his throat.
He knew too much about how to kill and hardly anything about how to live in peace. Hell, he
hardly knew how to stay indoors for any length of time. She was too good for him, too refined. She
put cloth napkins on her table, read books of poetry, and taught small children. The quilts she created
were works of art that nurtured the soul.
He put bullets in clips to load his guns, and read files on unsolved crimes and treatises on war. He
taught recruits how to wait, how to obey orders, and how to kill, and he played chess because it was
a battle of wits that kept his mind sharp.
He put his forehead to her breast. His hands fisted in her nightgown.
He needed to come home but he didn t know how. He hadn t even known where home was until he
looked in her face for the first time. He needed to be welcomed, but he wasn t sure he deserved it.
She had fled her bedroom and her nightmare with a look of surprised horror. But he knew the
nightmare she d had. That nightmare was an old acquaintance of his. The details might change, along
with the faces of the victims, but the story remained the same. It was a tale of a fire so dark it burned
the soul black.
He was that nightmare for some people.
She stroked his hair. Gideon?
Christ, now he was responsible for putting that uncertainty in her voice, right at the time when she
should be drenched in the knowledge of how lovely, how desirable he found her. He struggled to tell
her something, anything, to let her know it could never be anything wrong with her. It was all about
what was wrong with him.
He whispered, I want to be a good man.
Her hands stilled. Then she brought them under his jaw to coax his head up. She searched his
expression, her beautiful gaze troubled. Why would you think you re not a good man? she asked in
a gentle voice.
I ve spent almost a hundred years in the army, he said, his voice strangled. I ve seen things. I ve
done things you can t imagine. I don t ever want you to be able to imagine them. You deserve
someone so much better than me, someone finer who knows how to live your life.
How do you know you re not that man? she asked. She reached up to kiss him, the delicate curve
of her lips caressing his. The heart has its reasons, remember?
A tremor ran through his body. You don t know, you don t understand.
You re right, I don t, she told him.
Alice stroked his face and passed a hand down the broad expanse of his back, trying to soothe him.
This was the same distress that shook through him earlier at the dining table. It was hard to watch him
suffer, especially when she wasn t sure he realized how much he was hurting. I can t possibly
understand.
I chose it, he said. I thrived in the army. I was good at it.
He would have been. She could see it. Strong, responsible, stable, reliable as the earth. He would
have been the first in battle and the last to pull out, and the need for all of that would have been so
self-evident to him, he never would have seen it as sacrifice. True nobility never recognized itself.
She might have acknowledged him as her mate yesterday, but it was in that moment that she fell in
love with him.
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