Beloved Beast

Chapter Nine

          Don stalked back to his chambers, every stiff, purposeful stride carrying him further from temptation. He sought to put distance between him and his alluring captive, needed to break away from the gravitation of her.

          Once within his chambers, he paced a groove into the floor, fisting his hands as his thoughts steadily raged to and fro; a constant battle of right and wrong, wearing away at his forbearance.

          Undo your hair. He was acting like a besotted, heartsick lad, looking for any reason to touch her, to be near her. He should have kept to the shadows, forever the obliging and menacing beast.

          He could just hear the sardonic whisper of Seraphine's voice on the dark cognizance of his mind.

          You are doomed to an eternity of unrequited desires.

          His jaw tightened. Seraphine was a poison in his veins; a murmur of menace against the walls of his mind. She corrupted every thought, every desire and want. He would never be rid of her – not in this life, or the fiery next.

          Elle was the sweetest anguish; her innocence and beauty splintering away at his armored walls. How easy it would be to take what he'd been denied for so long. Take her. His body demanded. You can't have her. Spat harsh rationality.

          His mind and body were not his own. Both were irrevocably enslaved by two women who held adverse dominion over him. He had made the grave mistake of letting a woman beguile him once before, and the result of that had cost him dearly. Now, a mere chance encounter with a beautiful maiden who couldn't see the truth of what he is threatened to breach the fences of everything that divides him from feeling.

          Dragging a breath into his lungs, Don stepped out onto the balcony, stopping short of the sunlight that eluded his chambers. He glared with reproachful eyes at the burning sun poised in an endless canvas of blue, divested of clouds. It bathed the countryside in a brilliant sweep of amber, bringing to light a range of colors that could never be found in the gray of his life. He could never walk freely amid the day for there were many terrible truths found in the light. And he feared those golden rays that would betray him to seeing eyes.

          He resented it as much as the woman who had cast him to the shadows. And now another would beseech him to abandon the comforts of his obscurity to a place that stood for so much heartache.

          She's your captive; a means to an end. Captors didn't grant their prisoners such liberties as visiting the sea.

          Don's eyes hardened on that skyline before pivoting back into his chambers. He crossed to a chair and settled into its wooden frame, his mien set with determination.

          And there he remained until dusk, watching as shadows slanted across the stone walls of his room.

***********

          As the hours came and went with Lord Rossetti's absence, Elle's expectancy of visiting the sea gradually diminished.

          She knew when nightfall came to rest, for it absorbed every bit of the warm, autumn sun, eliciting a chill that crept from the underside of the earth to whisk coldly throughout her chambers.

          Elle gripped her elbows as her legs carried her across the room to sink with despondency into a chair. How could she have been so gullible? She had let him undo her hair and that subtle intimacy now burned with humiliation on her face.