He let out a relieved sigh. Thank God she had slept through his attempted ravishing. “Fine. I…I must have had a nightmare.”

Lottie stared at him. “You were asleep?”

Alec shot up off the floor. “You weren’t?”

Her brows rose in shock and she sat back on her knees. He took in the deep flush on her cheeks and lips, and in the early-morning light the rosy tips of her nipples were just barely visible beneath her sheer cotton chemise. Alec’s fingers twitched and he turned around as his cock began to stir again, as if he was nothing more than a randy schoolboy. But wasn’t this the very stuff of a schoolboy’s dreams? Alec pressed a hand roughly against the front of his trousers and took a calming breath as an unsettling thought came to him: Had any of it been a dream?

He whirled back around. Lottie hadn’t moved from her place on the bed—and still looked freshly tumbled.

“Alec,” she murmured. Her voice, husky from sleep, sounded exactly as it had in his dream; like the very devil herself was calling to him. But if Alec took so much as a step toward her now, it would be all over. He would not stop until he wrenched everything from her, from them both. Lottie had no idea how deep the rot inside him went. Not a clue. And he needed to keep it from her.

I imagine I will like anything you do.

Alec ignored the throbbing between his thighs and raked a hand through his hair.

“I’m sorry if I—I violated you in any way,” he said. “This is entirely my fault. I should have slept on the chair.”

She reared back in confusion. “Violated?”

Alec let out a desperate huff and placed his hands on his hips. Her reaction was not helping matters. She should be mortified. Outraged. Disgusted. Not—not hurt. “Well, what else would you call it?”

“You didn’t force yourself on me,” Lottie insisted. “I thought you meant—” she began, then seemed to think better of it and shut her mouth.

“What?” he demanded, his voice tight with anxiety. “Did I say something?”

God damn it, if he had spoken any of it aloud, and if she questioned him on it now, he would fall apart.

Lottie’s eyes widened. She hesitated, wetting her lips, their fate on the tip of her tongue, but then she shook her head. “No. You didn’t.”

Alec let out a sigh, but the relief was cold comfort. Barely a taste of her, and it was already miles better than anything he had experienced.

He turned his head away. “Then for God’s sake I wish you had.”

Lottie winced at the anguish in his voice. She didn’t know which felt worse: his worry over her reaction, or his very palpable regret for having touched her in the first place, however briefly.