And she found she wanted to be caught. Desperately.
Jackson—yes, of course she bloody well knew who he was—never took his eyes off her. His brown eyes darkened, danced with merriment, victory, and something… darker.
Jackson had never been a creature of the shadows. He joked and grinned and bounced about when he wasn’t nose-deep in books or dirt. She adored watching him burrow and bounce. But she hid her adoration well.
She hid nothing tonight. With the domino strapped tightly across her face, she stared her fill—openly, admiringly—enjoying the masculine square of his jaw and the wave of his yellow hair backward from his forehead. His own domino threw his high cheekbones into stark relief and honed her attention on his lips—firm and chiseled and perfect for kissing. She’d always wondered about that. Tonight, sheknew. Definitely divine for kissing, no matter her previous protestations.
His chin and cheeks were clean-shaven, and she wished it otherwise. How many times had she looked at him across the prow of a boat or over a campfire, seen him shaggy and unshaven, and wanted to rake her fingernails through the scruff? Too many to count.
He leaned a shoulder against the tall carved bedpost, as if to lure her in that direction. She’d sketched the carving just under his right shoulder yesterday. Over hundred years old, it was. Baron Eaden would want to see it. And she did what he wished because he’d saved her life.
And Jackson had given her life joy.
But she could give him nothing in return.
She did not doubt he knew her. His hand clutching her waist in the garden had felt likefinally, and she’d seen longing in his eyes for years. For as many years as she’d hid the longing from her own.
She stopped just out of his reach. “Tell me… why did you come here this evening?”
“Why does anyone come to a masquerade? To be seen yet not seen.” He sketched a courtly bow, one leg extended, arms unfolding gracefully wide. When he stood upright, he did so with a slinky step toward her. “To be someone else entirely for an evening.”
That’s why she’d attended the event. She’d not intended to, despite the duchess’s insistence that she enjoy some of her time in Paris. The older woman had worked long and hard on the masquerade, was proud of it, and she’d been kind to Gwendolyn and Jackson as they’d mined the contents of her family’s archives. In the end, Gwendolyn had felt not only an obligation to the widow, a kindness, but also a curiosity. She’d never attended such an affair, and she’d thought for a single night, masked and costumed, she could be herself. She played someone else every day of her life—Miss GwendolynSmith. A lie. But who she lied about being during the daytime did not matter tonight.
“Why did you come?” he asked.
“I came tonight to be me.” She could give him a truth. Wanted to, even.
He sauntered toward the window and propped his shoulder on the stone wall beside it. The man knew how to lounge. Did he know how well it set his muscled body off for appreciation? Likely not. He’d always seemed oblivious to every woman who batted her eyes at him, more interested in books and old bits and bobs. His disinterest had made her feel safe. She could not have him. But at least he wanted no one else.
She clutched the bedpost, her legs weak at the thought of wanting and of getting what she wanted. Finally. She searched for something to cut the butter-thick lust surrounding them. “I think I know who you are.”
“Oh?” A lift of a golden brow over the domino.
“Oh yes. You are the duchess’s son, Pierre.”
“The half-wit who goes about drunk day in and day out, who dropped his trousers in the ballroom an hour hence? Good God, Mistress Midnight, I’m insulted.”
She chuckled, surprised by her own momentary levity. He did that to her—raised her up when she least expected it. “He’s such an arse, isn’t he? I feel sorry for the duchesse. Do not you?”
“Supremely. It’s why I came tonight. Thought it might cheer her up.”
She couldn’t help it. She grinned. “Me as well.”
“We are alike, you and I. Mischief and Midnight have always gone well together.”
She could not look at him, merely rubbed her sweating palms down her skirts and stared at the dusty darkness before her.
That was her future—a dusty darkness.
Jackson offered light and family. He was Baron Eaden’s nephew and had two much younger brothers—twins. Scamps the both of them. Gwendolyn wanted to run riot with them and laugh till her belly ached at their antics, but she could never let them close. Never let anyone close. She’d spend the rest of her days traveling the world, discovering the secrets the dead had left behind about their lives because the present held nothing for her.
Not even Jackson.
So why not take tonight? What did it matter if sharing a bed with him changed their easy, companionable relationship? She could not have him.
But she could have one night. He held it out to her, a gift more precious than he could understand. Tonight, they could be Mistress Midnight and Lord Mischief, bold and passionate lovers. And tomorrow, when they met over the breakfast table, they could go back to being Gweny and Jack, friends and colleagues.
Quicker than shadows, he moved across the slight space between them and hoisted her into the air, cradling her in his arms as his lips crashed into her. His arms felt like home and his kiss tasted like heaven. The blood rushed through her limbs with lightning violence, pooling at the already-heated apex of her legs, and her fingers found the base of his skull, the silken tangle of his hair, and she used them both to deepen the kiss, to pull him to his home—her.
