What was he doing? Fixated on a wrist, a set of bare fingers? He knew better. She did not want his attentions, and he could not give them.
He cleared his throat, gestured to the knife she held. “This is a better weight for a novice. It is what I started out with when my father began to teach me. I was ten, and I was temperamental. A bit wild.” He guided her hand around the hilt. “Thumb just there, remember.” He positioned her in front of the target. “I had too many emotions and no idea what to do with them.”
“I remember being like that as well.” She stood stiff in the ring of his arms, shoulders like buttresses. The neck of her gown scooped a wide curve from one side of her neck to the other, and he could only just see the cream of her skin through the flimsy fichu.
If he touched her—only to relax her, only that—he would not even be touching her skin.
Do. Not.
He did. Stroking a line down the center of her neck, over one shoulder, and all the way down her arm to her wrist. Her bare wrist. What was that about not touching skin? He’d found some, hadn’t he, and bloody hell, it was warm.
“Relax everything,” he said. Still his voice sounded like that of a man on the edge of pleasure.
Was this all because of the dream he’d had last night? The one where they’d been alone in Hyde Park, and he’d peeled her out of the blue velvet she’d worn yesterday and laid her on her bench and—
Hell. Now he was the one taut and vibrating. “Relax,” he said again, more to himself than to her.
“Impossible.” The word a low bedroom exhalation.
He was not going to survive this. Somehow, he managed a light chuckle. “Come along.” He jiggled her arm, his fingerslightly shackled around her wrist. “Loosen up.” Her bare, warm, pulse-rapid wrist.
She heaved a breath that was born part sigh and let her body go limp.
“Excellent.” He released her arm. Easier to focus now. Yes, focus on the task. Or she’d get hurt. That drained his lust right quick. “My father always told me to let my worries drain away as I relaxed, to toss them out of me with the knife.”
She tilted her chin toward her shoulder, flicked a glance at him. “What worried you so?”
“Who knows? That all feels rather unreal now. A fairy tale, not real life.”
“What worries do you toss out of you now?” She bit her lip like she knew she should not have asked him.
“I suppose you could hazard an accurate guess.”
“Likely. You worry you do not do enough. You worry you have done more harm than good. You worry aboutthem.”
He curved his fingers into his palm to keep from cupping her cheek. “I knew you would know. You possess the same worries.”
“Aye.”
“Well, then, for a moment at least, let them go.” He stepped behind her—he shouldn’t—and lined her body with his. A mistake. His chest pressed lightly against her shoulders, his belly met the length of her back, and his interested cock twitched inches away from her perfectly rounded arse. Horrible idea. Every bit of this no good.
He was too damn tired to fight this rising need. He would take nothing else from her but a memory of how perfectly their bodies settled into one another. But hewouldtake that memory.
He stretched his arm out along the length of hers and corrected the angle of her wrist, the placement of her fingers. “It is best to have good aim so you can maim an attacker before they reach you. If they reach you, your odds of escaping unscathedare lower than otherwise. Aim, Lady Emma, throw, hit your target without mercy, and run.”
“You think I might need to know this?”
He nodded, his cheek brushing against the soft, red curls near her ear. “If you do, you will know how.”
“I do not possess a knife.”
“You will. Now bring the knife back here.” He bent her arm, cupping her elbow. “Next to your face. When you release your arm forward, use the thumb to guide it. Are you ready?”
She swallowed, nodded. Was that her heart he heard, almost felt, beating so wildly? Or was it his own?
“Relax.”
She did. And then she threw the knife. Its hilt hit the tree, and it clattered to the ground.
