She wanted to…
Why, she wanted toseducehim.
She perked up. Right here in this study, take control and prove to him that passion and profession did not have to be separated by steel bars? She could try. Shemusttry. Her future depended upon it. She’d agreed to return with him. Only a few days left, and if she must leave what she’d discovered about him, about herself and them together here when they returned… Her stomach churned.
She must try to show him they could have both. She was not foolish enough to hope for marriage. He was not a man to wed except for the benefit of his business. And she had not thought of marriage for many years. Except for when his brothers wed. Except for when she wore pink and put flowers in her hair.
She shook her head. She did not think of marriage now. An affair. A continuation of their current affair. For that, she’d have to seduce him.
She stood and rounded the desk.
“Is something amiss?” he asked, never taking his eyes from the ledger. The glasses, however, had stopped swinging from between his teeth.
“Just stretching my legs a bit.” She strolled across the room. Pretending idleness. Shut the door. Locked it. “I have a theory.”
His shoulders lifted, fell, with a single huff. “Do you now?”
“Would you like to hear it?”
“I assumed you would tell me whether I wished it or not.” She strode toward him, stood with his desk between them, thenreached across it. Finally, he looked up at her, curiosity clear in his pale-blue eyes. One dark brow winged upward, and his hand twirling the glasses dropped to the desk. “Yes?”
She snapped the glasses up so quickly he did not have time to stop her. “These,” she said, pushing the earpieces into her hair and settling them on her ears, the bridge on her nose. “Are fake.” She gasped, rounded the desk to stand by his chair and grin down at him. “I’m right. There’s no magnification.”
He leaned back into the chair and stared up at her, folding his hands behind his head. “I never said otherwise.”
“Bah. As if it’s not a purposeful deception. But why? That is what I want to know.” She acted before she could stop herself, hitching up her skirts and lifting a leg, crossing it over his body. She held his shoulders as she situated herself upon his lap. Straddling him and nestling her bent knees on either side of his body, the capacious chair offering enough room for her to kneel and settle herself atop him. So close to him. She knew the very moment his heart kicked into frantic fluttering, his hands settled around her waist, that he’d push her aside, tell her to get back to work. She made her fingers claws on the thick wool of his jacket. She wouldnotbe removed.
But he did not set her aside. He pulled her closer, his lips curving into a smirk.
Now her heart became a bird, a bit frantic. But its song one of complete elation. She removed his glasses from her ears and turned them, placed them back on his ears, his nose, brushing the sandy-brown locks away from his temples. Behind the plain glass, his eyes seemed paler than before, colder.
Ah. Was that why?
“Do you wear them, perchance, to control the image you present to the world?”
He kissed her lips, a quick peck. “Right in one.” He removed the spectacles and turned them about, studied them in thedaylight flooding through the windows. “Harder to read a man’s expression when it’s cluttered with other shapes and substances. And they make me look a bit more studious. Less the odd marquess’s son and more my own man, a trustworthy man.”
She kissed him, another quick peck, her lips to his. “I like you without them.” She took them once more, donned them once more. “Do you like me?”
He tilted his head, scratched his chin as if he truly considered the question. “You look like a prim and proper proprietress of an educational employment agency.”
Blast. Not the intended effect. “Perhaps I should buy a pair for Mrs. Dart.” She tried to keep the disappointment from her voice. A seductress, she was not, apparently.
Before she could remove the spectacles, though, he’d removed them for her, tossed them across the room where they shattered.
She yelped and turned. Little bits of glass littered the doorway. Dangerous, that. “We’ll have to clean it up immediately. Why would you?—”
He pushed her chin away from her shoulder, forcing her gaze to meet his. Molten. If sapphires could melt, they would resemble his eyes. “No glasses for you. I do not like that bit of glass between me and your gaze.” His hand stroked up and down her side, from ribs to hip, and back again. Then he cupped the back of her head and drew her forward, kissing her, teasing her mouth open, and slipping his tongue between her lips.
He’d lost control. The chains had slipped loose. She’d done it. Perhaps she was passable at seduction, then. She speared her hands through his hair and held on tight, giving back every caress he gave to her.
A knock on the door.
“Go away,” he growled, breaking away from her. She smothered a laugh with her hand. This was what she wanted,stolen scandals in the middle of the afternoon. He rested his forehead against hers. “You should return to your desk. This is neither the time nor the place.”
Blast. She was losing him. She must do something quick. Something drastic. Something he could not say no to. She riffled through her memories of the last week, of their every intimacy, finally finding one that she never said no to since he’d first introduced it to her.
She grasped his jacket lapels and held him tight. “I’ve a question.”
