MY RUIN: In Love With My Step-Uncle-Chapter 39 - Thirty-Nine: The Walk Back

//CLARA//

Casimir had turned away again, working at his own shirt with mechanical precision.

"The truth serves no one." He buttoned what buttons remained, adjusted his coat to hide the worst of the damage.

"We were walking. You fell near the creek. I assisted you. Your dress tore on a branch." He faced me, and his expression had settled into something mask-like, controlled. "It’s plausible enough."

"And if Aunt Cornelia notices the bruises?"

"She won’t." His voice wavered, just slightly, on the denial. "She’s still too busy sulking in her room. That will give us temporary peace."

I studied him. The man who had held me against a tree and demanded I touch myself while he watched, who had confessed to spying on me through my window, who had spilled himself across my back with a groan that seemed to tear something vital from his chest—this man was assembling himself back into respectability, piece by piece, and I hated it.

"Casimir." I stepped close enough to catch his scent again, musk and sweat and the green smell of crushed moss. "Look at me."

He did. His eyes were careful now, guarded, and I saw him preparing distance, preparing the narrative that would let him sleep tonight—that I had been impulsive, that he had been weak, that we would never speak of this again.

I reached up and took his jaw in my hands, the way he had taken mine when he wanted to control my mouth. His skin was rough with stubble I hadn’t noticed before, warm despite the cold air, and I felt him tense under my touch.

"You don’t get to disappear," I said. "You don’t get to stay away from me. Not after this. Not after you made me—"

I stopped, the words catching. Not shame. Never shame. But the intensity of what he’d drawn from me, the way I’d shattered around him, the way I’d begged—that belonged to us now, whether he wanted it or not.

His throat moved under my thumbs. "Clara—"

"No. I don’t want your guilt."

I pulled his face down to mine, close enough that our breath mingled, that I could see the individual lashes framing the storm in his eyes.

"I don’t want your penance. If you touch me again, it will be because I ask. Because I demand. Because you want it too. Not because you’ve decided to sacrifice yourself on the altar of my ruined reputation."

His hands came up, not to push me away, but to grip my waist like I was the only thing keeping him from floating away.

"You don’t know what you’re asking."

"I know exactly what I’m asking." I pressed closer, feeling his coat buttons dig into my sternum, feeling the heat of him through layers of wool and linen and the pretense we were both still clinging to.

"I want you to look at me and see Clara. Not your ward. Not your sin." I tightened my fingers on his jaw. "Can you do that?"

He didn’t answer. His eyes searched mine, looking for the trap, the trick, the hidden cost of my demand, and I watched him find nothing—watched the guardedness crack, just slightly, just enough.

Then he kissed me.

It was nothing like before. No struggle, no war for dominance fought with tongues and pressure. His lips brushed mine so lightly I might have imagined it—a ghost of a question, a tentative reaching out from the wreckage.

When I didn’t pull away, he did it again. Softer. Slower. As if I were something precious. Something fragile. Something that required the kind of care a man like him only gave to things he was afraid to break.

I hated it.

I hated the reverence in it. I hated the way his hands, usually so certain, now trembled against my jaw as if he were touching a miracle or a crime. It was a kiss of penance, a devastating, quiet surrender that felt like he was mourning me even as he held me.

So I took it back.

I leaned into him, my fingers tangling in his damp hair, pulling him down until the gentleman cracked and the man was forced to resurface. The kiss deepened, shifting from a question into a visceral, gut-punching demand. I felt the exact moment his resolve splintered—that sharp, fractured intake of breath against my lips as he finally stopped trying to save my soul and started trying to save himself.

He crumbled. I could feel it in the way his weight suddenly slumped into me, his forehead pressing against mine as he drank me in like a dying man finding water. It was a deeper, more desperate collision, stripped of all restraint. He was drowning in me, his mouth moving over mine with agonizing passion that said everything his pride wouldn’t allow.

I bit his lower lip, hard enough to draw a sound from him, and felt his hands convulse at my waist.

"Don’t." I pulled back. "Don’t you dare handle me like glass. I am not broken. I am not—"

I struggled for the word, for the concept he couldn’t seem to grasp. "I am not diminished. Touch me like you mean it, or don’t touch me at all."

He stared at me. The creek roared between us, around us, through the space where words should have been, and I saw him wrestling with it—saw the moment where his nineteenth-century chivalry collided with what I was actually asking for.

His hands tightened at my waist. Not crushing, but certain.

"I could take you again." His voice had dropped to something rough, something that resonated in my still-tender core. "Here. Against this tree. I could—"

He stopped, jaw tight with restraint. "We have to go back. Before I—"

"Before you what?"

"Before I prove you right."

He released me, stepping back with visible effort, his hands curling into fists at his sides.

"Before I become exactly the monster I accused myself of being. Before I take you again because I can’t—" He broke off, turning away. "The estate. Now. Before I forget why we shouldn’t."

I watched him walk toward the path, his shoulders rigid again, his stride measured. I followed him. The cold settled deeper into my bones with each step, and I could feel the ache of him between my legs, the tenderness of bruises forming, the ghost of his mouth on my throat.

Every step was a reminder of what we’d done, and I welcomed it—the discomfort, the evidence, the refusal to let this be sanitized into a story we could both forget.

He waited at the tree line, not looking back, and I caught up to walk beside him in silence.

The estate loomed ahead, a jagged silhouette of grey stone and judgment cutting into the mist. It looked less like a home and more like a fortress designed to keep the world out—or us in.

As we stepped from the wild, unkempt grass of the woods onto the crushed gravel of the servant’s path, the sound of our footsteps changed, becoming loud, rhythmic, and terrifyingly real.

Let them look.

Let the maids whisper behind their lace-cuffed hands. Let the stable boys guess at the mud on my hem. I had chosen this. I had chosen him, and I refused to let him bury the fire of what we’d done beneath the cold, suffocating weight of his guilt.

Casimir’s hand brushed mine as we walked.

It was a ghost of a contact, a fleeting friction of skin against skin that could have been an accident or a desperate reach for ground. I couldn’t tell. But I felt the tremor in his fingers before he jerked his hand away, tucking it back into the stiff, dark wool of his coat.

We had not finished this. Not by a long shot. The thought settled in the center of my chest, a warm and dangerous weight that pulsed in time with the ache between my thighs. As the shadow of the Guggenheim manor finally fell across us both, it felt like a shroud, yet I felt more alive than I ever had in the 21st century.

We approached the back door, the iron-bolted slab of oak that waited for us. By the standards of his world, we were ruined, two shipwrecks washed up in the morning light.

But I felt vibrant and I refused to be anything other than the woman who had just dismantled in the mud.

He reached for the brass handle, his knuckles white, his posture already hardening back into the rigid, impenetrable mask he perfected. I didn’t let him.

I caught his wrist one last time.

My fingers clamped over the bone, my palm flat against the heat of his skin. I felt it instantly—his pulse jumping against my thumb, betraying the stone-cold stillness of his face.

I held him there, anchored to me, refusing to let him retreat into the house until he was forced to turn.

When he finally met my eyes, the grey of his iris was almost black, a storm held back by a crumbling dam.

"Clara," I reminded him.

His throat moved as he swallowed, his gaze dropping to my mouth for one agonizing second before he found the strength to pull the handle.

"Clara," he repeated, and in a way that felt like the true beginning of whatever came next.

The door opened, and as we stepped through, the Eleanor he had tried to protect was officially dead.