In fact, he supposed, everything about his life had felt incomprehensible for a good long while. He could pinpoint the last time his life had run upon a smooth, even keel, and it had been about thirty seconds before he’d walked into Lord Denham’s sculpture garden and met Matilda Halifax.
He was so damned frustrated he could not work. Matilda had informed him one night after dinner that Bea refused to leave Northumberland, and he hadn’t the faintest idea what to do about it. He wanted to ask Matilda for advice, but he was afraid to be alone with her.
He scarcely saw her all day, though they lived in the same house. He counted the goddamned minutes until dinner. He prayed for her to look away from him so he could drink in the sight of her flame-colored hair, the soft curve of her cheek and the more generous curves everywhere else. And then when she granted his wish and did not look at him, he wanted her to turn her eyes back.
Not only had she brought a damned cat into his house, she had summoned forth a whole bloodylitter.
He could barely think straight. When he wrapped his fingers around his aching cock at night, he imagined he could smell her.
In fact, as he looked around the wreckage of what had once been his library, he thought he could discern that delicate floral scent right now.
“Matilda,” he said warningly, “what in hell is going on?”
The heavy dark drapes had been pulled down and lay in heaps on the floor. The windows in the library were small—relics of the estate’s history as a battle fortification—but even still, weak wintry sunlight poured in.
It illuminated piles of frankly terrifying proportions.
He could scarcely see the books that lined the walls. Furnishings from all over the house had been shoved together, chairs stacked atop one another, some upside down. There were at least three stacks of medieval weaponry leaning crazily against one another. He thought he saw a battle-axe the size of a small hedge. He thought he saw the cat.
He did not see Matilda anywhere, but there was not a single whisper of doubt in his mind that she was responsible for the disarrangement of his house. The utter disruption of his life. The tangled-up instincts of his body, which shrieked at him alternately to strangle her, kiss her, and wrap her wrists in his hands as he tupped her up against the wall.
“Christian,” she said from somewhere off to his left. Her soothing tone made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “Ah—well. Welcome back. I’m sure this looks—er, a bit startling.”
“A bit startling?” He started to track her voice, but then he paused.
He looked at the library door for a long moment.
And then he shut it. And before he could think too hard about what he was doing, he turned the key.
“If you would but give me a few days,” Matilda was saying, blithely unaware of the very dark thoughts he’d begun to entertain, “I can have everything set to rights. Better, really, Christian, you must see—”
He followed the sound, winding between a set of heavy mahogany end tables stacked three high. How had she evenliftedthem? “You can havewhatset to rights?”
“Er,” she said, “your house. The furnishings.”
“What in hellhappenedto the furnishings?” He was closer now. Her dusky voice grew clearer in his ears.
“I am redecorating. I’ve moved some things into the library for now. It’s my, er, Christmas present. To you and Bea. Mrs. Perkins gave me three footmen to help.”
He found her, finally, a flash of pink dress and red hair at the far end of the library, where she’d been shielded by a substantial stand of potted palms and a suit of armor.
Actually, no. They werefakepotted palms. Why in hell did his house possess six fake potted palms?
She was balanced, he noted with a faint wellspring of terror, atop the back of a taxidermied boar. She was in her stockings—God knew where her shoes had gone—and his eyes fixed on the delicate arches of her feet as she stretched up to pull a dreadfully ugly still life off the wall.
She leaned out over the boar’s bristled black back, one freckled arm planted on the wall, the other maneuvering beneath a heavy gilt frame. Her hair was pinned up in a neat coil, exposing the pale nape of her neck.
He wanted to drag her down off the boar and bite her neck. He wanted to run his hands from those elegantly arched feet all the way up to the dimpled curve of her thighs. He wanted to bite her there too. He wanted—
“You might help,” she said dryly, “instead of just standing there.”
“Stop.”
She paused at the sound of his voice, dark and grating. Only her eyes moved, wide and blue, flying up to meet his.
“Stop,” he said again, and somewhere inside he knew he’d meant it for himself.Stop,he told himself.Don’t go any closer. This cannot end well.
But he didn’t listen. Only Matilda followed his command, her body frozen, her lips parted, blood rushing to her cheeks and neck and the triangle of bare skin he could see where she’d unbuttoned the high pleated collar of her dress.
