With a sigh of resignation, she replaced the cover and returned the chocolates to the exact spot of table where she’d found them—before her mind could twist the logic around and she convinced herself it would be all right to take a single, wee chocolate.
She crossed to the dining area—she needed some necessary distance between herself and the chocolates—where she found a gleaming mahogany table that seated six. In the center sat a silver bowl filled with apples and pears, which would’ve been procured from a greenhouse, for the fruit was yet a few months out of season.
On impulse, she grabbed an apple and took a bite before she could think better of it.
She moaned.
Crisp and sweet with a delightful edge of tartness, not a hint of mealiness, it was the most delicious apple she’d ever tasted.
She took another bite, this one better than the first.
A word came to her.
Forbidden.
So, this was how Eve felt.
Perhaps it was the forbidden quality of the apple that enhanced its deliciousness.
Crunching into her third bite, she entered his bedroom. She wasn’t certain what she’d been expecting, but it wasn’tthis. If pressed, she would’ve envisioned something resembling a bordello—all crimson velvets and gilded mirrors—even one on the ceiling. Not that she’d ever witnessed such a thing firsthand. But she didn’t lack for imagination.
Yet strangely, this room that saw Deverill at his most vulnerable felt utterly devoid of him.
Except for his scent.
That lingered, as ever.
She savored another bite of apple and wandered into the bathing room. Stark white marble and obsidian black. She didn’t stop, her feet carrying her into the dressing room. All clothing neatly hung or folded away. Nothing appeared to be out of place.
Deverill kept his life tidy.
Which rang true to her.
In the bathing room, her forefinger dragged along the lip of the tub and caught a large drop of water. This water would’ve come from his bath. Water that had touched his naked body. It felt like an unexpected sort of intimacy to be rubbing it between her fingers.
Her eyebrows crinkled, and she exhaled a sharp breath.
Her presence here was wrong.
And her reaction to being here… Frankly, it was getting a little strange.
She shouldn’t be eating his fruits and ambling through his rooms and touching the little that remained of his bath water.
Her curiosity, insatiable as it might be, didn’t give her the right.
She beheld the apple core in her right hand.
Blimey.
She’d eaten almost the entire, delicious thing.
Which she should regret.
But couldn’t quite.
She needed to leave—and was intent on doing precisely that when it caught her attention.
Over by the window, a draftsman’s table, large sheets of detailed mechanical drawings littering its surface. All done by Deverill’s hand, she knew instinctively. What she was beholding was his work. The very work that had made him an obscenely wealthy man. Though she knew nothing of invention or the mechanical arts, she did know talent when she saw it.
