“I apologize!” he called after her. “Don’t go.” She did not stop, and damn but the woman could swim quickly. Those thick limbs harbored strong muscle. He had to kick harder to keep up. “Where did you learn to swim?” Said more to himself than to her, but she slowed and then stopped, then looked at him over her shoulder. She seemed to have found some footing on the lake bottom, and she no longer had to work to tread the water.
She ducked low beneath it, though, the waves lapping just above her breasts. “My father taught me how. I grew up in the country. How doyouknow how to swim?”
“I may be a London lad, but my father has—”A country seat with a lake twice this size on the property.Couldn’t say that, though, could he? “A brother, my uncle, with a farm. We used to visit as children in the summer. No one taught me. I seem to have a knack for it, though.” That much true at least. He swam a few inches closer and reached for the lake bottom with his foot. Yes, just there, silty and cool.
She turned toward shore, and he needed more than air, more than soap, to keep her just where she was, not quite within arm’s reach inside that lake.
“Do you have brothers and sisters?” he cried out. Then swallowed a groan. Of course she had a brother. He knew that. She knew he knew that.
When she turned back to him, merriment made her eyes glow. “One brother.”
“Yes, of course. Perhaps he should inspect my mental capacities. My wits seem to have sunk to the bottom of the lake.”
“Do you? Have brothers and sisters?”
“One sister.”
“Oh. Is she well? Your face fell when I asked, and…” Miss Jones chewed her bottom lip.
“No, I do not think she is well. But I have high hopes she will be. She is smart and strong, and I find I greatly admire her.”
“You seem surprised about that.”
“I am a bit. And that’s a shame.” He ran a hand through his dripping hair, slicking it back against his skull. “I know we’re not supposed to speak of the ladies who come here, but… I can’t help but wonder, where do they go… after?”
She looked up to the sky and shivered. “All over the place and wherever they wish. Wherever they feel safest. Some seek out family. Others cross the ocean to pursue new lives in different lands. They go where they are wanted and where they will be loved. Hopefully.” That last word an afterthought, a crack in her armor.
“Hopefully?”
“We can never know for sure what the future holds for us. Love or… something else.”
“No. I suppose we can’t.” He’d certainly never expected to be talking to a mostly naked woman in a lake while mostlynaked himself. And not even flirting but discussing the cruel inconsistency of life. Good God, heneverthought aboutlife.
But… maybe he… should? “What will you do when you leave here?”
“Marry. And you?”
“I will… I will…” Return to drinking and whoring and infidelity and duels at dawn and dying. Slowly. Surely. Tedious day by tedious day. Why did he do it? Why did he run thoughtlessly through life like a drunk man swinging about a sabre? Did he mean that metaphorically or literally? He had been drunk once at Griff’s place. His friend, the Earl of Finley, had been trying to pry another bottle from his hands. And once Keats’s hands had been freed of drink, he’d busied them with something else, jerking an antique sabre off the wall. He’d swung it about wildly, stumbled… Griff wore a scar on his jaw to this day where Keats had slashed him well and good.
Some damage could not be undone.
“Well?” Her eyes were brown. He’d not seen her in enough light until now to notice it. A light brown, burning gold at the edges. He’d never seen their like, so clear and confident. That more mesmerizing than the color. The way she watched him over the water’s edge as if she studied him from across a ballroom. She would rule there, throwing every rake and rogue into a tizzy because she’d see right through them.
Did she see right through him? Hell. He should keep his distance.
“Well?” she said once more.
Well what? Oh, yes. “I’ll find another lark, I suppose. When I leave my… position here.” But he didn’t feel like larking. Not anymore.
Every goddamn thing changed in less than twenty-four hours. Anger, irrational and boiling, rippled through him like the water circling rings around him in tiny, lapping waves.
Heknewwho he was—a rogue. And he knew what he wanted—her.
And rogues took what they wanted. Always. He surged through the water, meeting her widening eyes, and grasped an arm around her waist. He yanked her tight against him and, before she could so much as gasp, devoured her mouth in a hungry kiss.
That taught him more than he’d learned in all his eight and twenty years. Not about kissing. Of that she seemed to know very little, certainly not enough to teach. But about passion and about himself, who he was and what mattered to him.
Because she kissed him back, her arms wedged between their bodies. Her kiss seemed a punishment. She offered it like she might a parting laugh, one that would leave him shattered.
