What had he thought to do with her? Tup her on the desk? Take her virtue and trap her into marrying him?
Christ, she would think him a fortune hunter. She would think him no better than Davis.
He wouldbeno better than Davis, if he used her that way. Had they not taken enough from her already, he and his brother? He had seen the tears in her eyes upon the revelation of Davis’s deception. He had already trapped her here in this godforsaken castle, waiting for news and trying to help track down his brother and the weapon. He would not be party to harming her further.
It did not matter how much he wanted her. It did not matter how she looked—glowing and vibrant, tempting and real—or the way she felt beneath his hands.
He could not touch her again.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Your—er, are you well? Your cheek?”
Her fingers rose to caress the skin where his hand had been. He watched the movement, memorized it. Wished with foolish desperation it was his own hand.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “I’m perfectly well.”
There was something in her voice at odds with the crisp words. A kind of—wistfulness, perhaps? A ribbon of yearning that wound itself round and round inside his chest. That pulled tight with a tension that felt like heartache.
“Tomorrow,” he said shortly, “we’ll talk of Haddon Grange with the others.”
And then he turned on his heel and fled from her—from her big blue eyes and the heady, high-proof softness of her skin, and from the longing that rose in him when he looked at her.
Chapter 9
… Men being the Historians, they seldom condescend to record the great and good Actions of Women…
—from Lydia’s private copy ofTHE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, AS PROFESS’D BY A DAUGHTER OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND,annotated in her hand: “And so we must take up our pens.”
They gathered in the drawing room the following morning after breakfast. Huw and Bertie arrayed themselves around the desk. Georgiana and Lydia sat on the chaise longue, Bacon between them and Annabelle the degu at their feet. And Arthur—
Lydia tried not to look at Arthur, looming grumpily in the threshold like a bear roused from hibernation. Her eyes were gritty—she had not slept well. She had caught a glimpse of herself in the glass this morning and winced at the bruised-looking purple beneath her eyes. Her cursed skin was too revealing, her fears written out there on her face for the world to see.
No, she had not slept well. She had not been able to stop recalling their encounter in the drawing room, circling round andround the moment when Arthur’s thumb had caught the corner of her mouth and his hand had grasped her waist.
She had never been kissed. There was, of course, nothing wrong with never having been kissed at six-and-twenty, or at any other advanced age. There was no reason to be embarrassed by it—except that she was the sort of woman whowantedto be kissed, hard and thoroughly, and the opportunity had not presented itself, not even once, in her entire life.
She had never been kissed and yet, in that moment, she had been quite certain that Arthur’s mouth was going to descend upon hers. She hadwantedit, with a yearning that had stolen her breath.
She’d waited, wishing, hoping. And nothing had transpired after all. The man had dropped his hands and flung himself backward like she was hot to the touch, and she’d had nothing to do but leave the way she had come in.
There was no rational reason to be embarrassed—she had not done anything wrong. And yet she found she could not look at Arthur anyway, not at his eyes or his hands or the almost-pout of his mouth.
Especially not his mouth.
Arthur broke the silence that had descended upon the assembled group. “Miss Hope-Wallace has solved it.”
She gaped at him, no longer pretending not to look in his direction. She had… what? She was not sure she had heard him correctly.
Behind the desk, Bertie took on a proud, almost avuncular smile. “Of course she did. I knew she would.”
She felt heat rise in her cheeks. She hadn’t… not really… “No,” she protested, “I didn’t do anything in particular. His lordship was the one who—”
“Aye, you did,” said Arthur. “I merely did the labor. You saw the pattern in it. The whole project was your idea from the start.”
She did not know what to say. She felt revealed, every eye in the room fixed upon her.
And yet, strangely, there was none of the squirming discomfort that usually filled her in such a moment. Somehow, she felt not pinned to a wall, examined like a trapped and wriggling thing, butrecognized. Seen.
It was not an unpleasant sensation. Not at all.
