“You always were a hardheaded termagant,” he mumbled.
She’d show him termagant. “I see you are also not wed. And you are… what? Five and thirty?” She whistled. “Even for a man, that is rather advanced in age for bachelorhood.”
“I’ve not yet met a woman without a head hard as a brick.”
“Yes, I can see how that is a difficulty. I have not met a woman with a soft enough brain to consider marrying you.”
He made the tiniest little sound, low and long and rumbling in his throat. “I see you have not lost your sharp tongue.”
“And you have not lost your dull wit.”
Mr. Clark stepped closer, licked his fine, fine lips for a length of time that made her squirm. He crossed his arms slowly over his chest, forcing her to realize—the cad—that he had lost none of the muscle of his youth. In fact, he seemed to have acquiredmoreof it. Did that… did that seam of his jacket actuallystrain? If she looked hard enough at it, she might see thread pulled tight as a hard string, singing her toward seduction.
She swallowed the lump in her throat. His chest wouldnotaffect her.
Nor would the way his jacket sleeves barely contained the bulging biceps of his arms.
Nor the way his white cravat rushed against skin kissed by the sun.
Nor the way his hands were sinewy and strong, dark hair dusted across the tops of them.
Nor would the impossible memory of all that… maleness homing in on her, dropping kisses sweetly on her lips…
Another lump in her throat. Curses.
He leaned slightly away from her, something pleased in the angle of his lips. “I must apologize.”
“Oh yes, I’m sure you—” Wait. “Pardon?” The flutter of denied physical attraction dropped like a stone in her belly.
“I must apologize for my actions the last time we met.”
“Which actions?” she snapped. “So many of them were reprehensible.” Or rather, she wished she thought them so. “The…” She lowered her voice. “Kiss?”
His brows pulled together. “What kiss? You must be confusing me with someone else.”
Oh God, he was going to play it that way. How humiliating. “Yes, I must be.”
He uncrossed his arms and held his hands palms up for a moment before rounding his shoulders forward and sticking them in his pockets. A lock of dark hair fell in front of his eye. How could he appear both rakish and boyish at the same time?
“Seven years ago. I yelled at you.” His voice was gruff like an unused hinge. “It was not sporting of me. It was ungentlemanly, and I have long regretted it.”
“I doubt that.”
“Of course you do. But I was right then.”
He’d refused to explain to her seven years ago why he was so certain of that fact, and she would not ask now. It did not matter.
He scratched a hand through his hair, pushing the rogue lock of it into line with the others. Why couldn’t his hair have thinned over the years, retreated from his brow. It still waved thick and touchable above his ears, and as if it knew her every thought, that lock fell right back into place over his eye. Taunting her.
“I hope, Miss Bell, that we can be comfortable with one another. For John and Evelina’s sake. We are here for them, are we not?” He stuck out a hand. “Truce?”
That, not a hand extended in friendship. That, a snake, sharp teeth eager for a bite. It hissed.
She clasped her hands behind her back. He would not fool her a second time. “No need for a truce with someone whose existence I barely acknowledge.”
“You will really be so childish?” He still offered his hand, taut like a blade. His jaw knife sharp, too, and wariness in his eyes that said he was the one being cut, not her.
“It’s not childish. Simply not necessary.”
