Other nights, he could not see the edge of fabric, which meant she was wearing the second nightgown. The shorter one. He harbored a number of vivid and specific fantasies about where on her body the hem of the garment fell.
Her calves? Above her knees? Higher?
If he was not thinking about her legs or her smile or her bloody nightclothes, he was thinking about his brother, andherbrother, and where the deceptions stopped and started. By the time the sun rose each morning, Arthur was an exhausted, aroused, deeply unpleasant shell of himself. Lydia now rang for tea before even greeting him.
All of which explained why, when he woke just before dawn on their sixth day at Kilbride House, it was with a fogged brain and a rampant erection.
“Arthur—wake up!”
Yes, it was Lydia’s urgent whisper that had roused him. He flipped over in the bed, trying simultaneously to protect her with his body and arm himself against an intruder.
“What’s wrong?” he murmured, pitching his voice as low as hers had been.
“I heard something. Not—ouch—not here in the bed, for heaven’s sake! At the door. I think there’s someone at the door.”
She scrambled out of bed and launched herself in the direction of the room’s entrance, the daft woman. He followed. She was small but quick, and in a moment she had herself pressed upagainst the crack between the door and the wooden jamb, evidently trying to peer through.
He came up behind her. “What—” he tried to hiss, but she gave him a forbidding glare and put her finger to her lips.
For Christ’s sake. The woman did not attract trouble, as he’d previously believed. She flung herself at it. He glowered at her and then put his eye to the crack as well, his chin above the top of her head.
If she’d heard someone at their door, there was no one there now. But from the tiny gap where the door’s iron hinge abutted the jamb, he could see someone across the hall, fiddling with the door to the room that had been Lydia’s.
It was not an intruder. It was a chambermaid. As he watched, a buxom woman in the navy-and-gold livery of the Kilbride House staff shifted the copper coal scuttle on her hip and tugged harder at the door handle, easing the door open with a heavy creak before slipping into the room.
“Oh,” Lydia whispered, “I’m so sorry. What an idiot I am.”
“You’re no idiot. Perhaps a reckless bampot for throwing yourself at the door when we didn’t know whether there was a primed pistol on the other side. But not an idiot.”
She shifted, still watching the empty hallway through the crack in the door, and Arthur was suddenly aware of her position: pressed against the surface of the door while he stood behind her, his hands braced on either side of her head.
He could smell the soft, sweet scent of her body. He would only have to bend his head to bury his face in the autumn-colored spill of her hair. He would barely have to move to be touching her.
Her voice, when she spoke, was still a whisper. “It’s onlythat—well, the chambermaid doesn’t usually come for hours yet. I was not expecting to hear anything, and when I did—”
“You did the right thing.” He hoped she attributed the sudden rasp in his voice to the remnants of sleep.
“Shall we wait until she comes back out? To be certain everything is as it should be?”
Say, “No,”he thought.Say, “Get back in bed. I’ll keep the watch.”
But he’d lost his brains and his willpower and other things he was not thinking about, because instead he said, “Aye. Let’s bide here a moment.”
And as Lydia pressed her face to the crack in the door again, he let himself look down at her.
There was only a glint of dawn light in the room. He could just make out the brilliant copper of her braid. Little wisps of curls escaped all along the length of that thick braid; his gaze skimmed down to the tail, tied off with a scrap of lace. It rested along the back of her night rail, which was—
He barely restrained a rough, greedy sound.
She wore the shorter night rail, and it clung to her decadent curves, mapping the contours of her body in a whisper of—blue? lavender?—silk. It was too dark to tell the precise color. It was too dark to make out all of her, but he tried anyway, his eyes falling upon the taut silk across her buttocks, the pale slide of her calf.
He was desperately aroused. He could feel blood beating in his cock. He wanted to press into her body, spin her around, and push her up against the door. He wanted to see the blue of her eyes while he buried himself inside her.
He knew there was a reason he ought not do it, and yet he could not recall what it was.
“Arthur,” she whispered. She started to shift, to turn toward him in between his arms. “Do you think—”
He caught one of her hands in his and pressed it to the surface of the door.
