She laughed. “I will not argue with you, and you forget, I am Freddy now. No ‘my lady’ here.”
He grinned.
She swept her fingers back and forth on the counterpane. “You never met him, then? Your father?”
“He wasn’t my father. Not really. The man who raised me as his son was also a trick rider. Better than me.”
“Are both your parents”—she swallowed, looked down—“gone?”
He nodded. Then he straightened away from the bedpost and sauntered back toward the hip bath. He disappeared behind the screen, and bent down, his shadow on the screen going from strong line to compressed ball.
“Warm enough,” he announced.
He stood, and the screen began to move, sliding to the side until the hip bath and Grant stood revealed to her gaze.
He grinned. “Do you have a preference for how I should disrobe?”
She shook her head, pushed further back into the shadows of the bed. “Do as you please.” But her mind was still worried over the man who stood before her. Trick rider and flirt? Or some peer’s bastard? Both.
And, oh, she’d have to knit her heart back together again because knowing him better quite split it in two. She squirmed. It was difficult to view someone as a body, as a means to pleasure, when you knew their secrets, knew the hidden bits they kept close. But wasn’t knowing him why she had chosen him? He was a comfort. A friend. She thought she’d known him well enough. But she’d only known the surface man he chose to show the world.
He stood naked before her—metaphorically for now, literally quite soon—and she was the one who felt stripped. He’d chosen to show her more, and she held the knowledge he’d gifted her with close. She would keep it safe. It changed nothing about her desire for him. She wished to make the orphan bastard of a peer her lover just as she had wished to make the master horse rider.
The orange, leaping blaze in the grate outlined his body beside the hip bath. He was halfway done untying his cravat, and he whirled it round his head in smooth rhythmic motions. Done with the baring of his neck, he let the crumpled linen slide slow through his fingers until it pooled on the floor, a discarded snake’s skin.
He played with her. That grin and the perfectly angled position of his body. The dance of his cravat and the sensuous release of it. He played with her, and he played her. Like an instrument tuned just for his pleasure.
Freddy’s heart skipped a beat. She should see a doctor about that.
He shrugged out of his waistcoat and his shirtsleeves with just as much methodical precision as he maneuvered a horse around the amphitheatre. Each movement an act in three parts—the discovery of the edge of the piece of clothing, the peeling of that clothing from the body in delectable inches that revealed new measures of his muscles, and finally the toss or the drop of the crumpled garment. It was as if he had choreographed the entire thing, stealing shy peeks at her here and there, as if he weren’t the boldest, most sensuous man in London, and staring at her other times as he wiggled and flexed, his every movement conspiring to make her writhe.
When he came to his fall, his fingers moved expertly across the buttons, flicking each open until his breeches settled low and scandalous on his hips, almost revealing all. But not quite.
“Are you sure, Freddy darling?” A flicker of the fire behind him burning to inferno heights in his eyes.
She nodded.
“At this stage in the play,” he said, sauntering toward her, “I would request you disrobe as well, but since this is for your delectation, I’ll let you sit there, prim and proper, and watch.”
“Yes.” She managed the single word despite the summer-day dry of her throat.
That sounded perfect. A way to ease into this even though she wished to jump into it like from a bridge into the Thames. But hopefully more pleasant than that muddy, odiferous water.
Still without removing his britches, he walked back to the hip bath, knelt, and swirled his fingers around the water. He made a sound in his throat like the kind one makes when tasting the most delicious food in the world.
“Just right,” he said. Then he stood and faced the fire, offering Freddy his backside. And what a fine backside it was. All flexed muscle, the hard contours limned by the firelight, and tightened her own muscles into anticipatory knots only his touch could un-bunch.
His britches dropped all at once. No dance, no choreography, no pretense. He stepped out of the wool and into the hip bath before she could do more than stare open-mouthed at his tight muscular backside. Water sloshed over the edge, and he sat, submerging the lower regions of his body before she could see … everything. She almost protested. But she held back her words. She had time.
He sluiced water over one shoulder, and it rushed down his back, leaving beads on his golden skin. Then he treated the other shoulder to the same, and—oh … he missed a spot.
She bunched her muscles, preparing to leave the bed, to help.
No. Too much too soon. Intimidation made her limbs heavy and pinned her to the bed. She curled her fingernails into the palms of her hands and curled her feet beneath her. She made a stout boulder of a shape, the better to anchor herself to the bed. That was where she wanted to be anyway. Was it not?
The bed was the natural habitat of lovers. Not hip tubs. Was that correct? She’d only ever made love in a bed. But perhaps she’d merely lacked imagination. Thinking on it now … why not other locations? He certainly seemed to think the bath an erotic part of the dance.
Well, she would sit back and watch and learn before she joined. He made short work of his ablutions—scrubbing his hair with soap, rinsing it out, drawing lines of soap between the muscles of his body in those firm fascinating indentations. When he stood, too soon, she could think only of Poseidon rising from the sea. Surely that is what the god looked like—the man before her poised and powerful, cocky and beautiful.