“No modesty, Mrs. Dart. You must get warm. I assure you I have calmed down and am in my right mind now. I will not accost you again.”
Oh. The tears would come now, then? To compare their kiss to… to madness? She brushed the evidence of her sorrow away before he could see, and soon her stays fell to the floor, and with it her numb, mute obedience.
“No more.” She wrapped her arms around her chest and retreated from his seeking fingers. She pointed to the door. “You leave. I can care for myself.”
“No.” He spoke with such calm. Infuriating man.
“You can’t sayno. This is my chamber. My clothes. M-my body.”
“I came all the way here through hellish weather for answers, Mrs. Dart, and you will not leave my sight until I have them.”
“Ask them and go.”
“Are you marrying Mr. Tidsdale?”
She laughed. “No.”
“Are you leaving my employ to work at his new agency?”
She opened her mouth to say no but found she could not truthfully do so.
“Deny it now, Mrs. Dart.”
“I will not. I cannot. I have not yet arrived at a decision.”
He lurched backward, and his legs hit the bed behind him. He fell onto it and leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his thighs, then hung his head between his hands as he had in the entry hall earlier.
“Were you going to tell me?” A quiet question.
“Yes. If I accepted his offer. How did you find out?”
His head popped up, and there was more fire in his eyes than in the grate. “You should have told me. I found the letter.”
No use searching trunks and pockets. She’d found it. He’d found it.
“I should not have been so careless with it.”
He grunted. “You should not have been so careless withme.”
“You?” She risked a step toward him. Her hair, loose tendrils streaming wet down her back, made a mockery of her shift, a garment too thin for the coming winter weather. “Are you a man who needs gentle caring?”
The bed squeaked as he stood. “I’ll leave you to change. I’ve gotten what I came for. I’ll return to Manchester as soon as possible.”
She let him leave, clinging to the wet shift as she clung to her sanity, dropping into the chair he’d steered her away from. Somehow her hand made it to her mouth, covering the slightly parted lips, the barely-there breathing. What had just happened? She’d been sitting in her parlor, bored, irritated, pining as always for a man she couldn’t have. And then that man had burst into her home, wild-eyed as she’d never seen him and… and he’dkissedher. She gently traced her mouth with her fingers, still feeling the ghost of his lips against her own.
She knew why he’d come. She knew why he’d momentarily lost control. But why had he kissed her? To claim her in some brutish way? To mark her as his and not Tidsdale’s? To convince her to stay with him instead?
No. It had not been calculated. He’d apologized for it. Pure madness, unintentional impulse. The sort of fancy Lord Andrew never indulged in.
She clutched the events of the day to her chest and tried to breathe through the confusion. Fear. Elation. Shock. Desire.
He’d kissed her.
And she cried, shoulders heaving as her tears weighed down her soaked shift even more.
Something else to add to her list of reasons not to love Lord Andrew Bromley. He kissed a lady like she was the air necessary for life. Then apologized for it.
What a way to shatter her heart.
