“Yes, I did.”
But his tongue betrayed him.
She appeared as shocked as he felt by the confession. Her dudgeon sagged before him like an ascension balloon on its way back down to earth. “I am amazed you admit it.”
Her opinion of him remained low, it would seem. Perhaps his decision to keep her locked in the duchess’s apartments had not served to enhance it. “Do I seem an unreasonable man to you?”
“You seem a proud man.” She tilted her head, considering him with that bright gaze. “A stubborn man. A man who still has not offered an explanation for locking me in my chamber, as it happens.”
“Because I did not dare trust you,” he bit out, brutal in his honesty.
She flinched, and the sight should not have cut through him with the precision of a blade, but it nevertheless did. “Do you trust me now, Leo?”
His name in her soft, sweet voice did things to him. Already he was feeling more alive than a man who had been laid low by fever likely ought to. He knew all too well he could not give in to the temptation she presented. His body was not strong enough for that yet.
Not to mention that it was a horrible, awful idea. An impossibility. He could engage in fantasy where she was concerned. He could employ his hand. But he must not allow it to progress any further.
“I shall consider your silence a resounding no,” she said, and the disappointment in her tone was undeniable.
Did he trust her?
She had tirelessly nursed him back to health. His own manservant Richland had attested to that fact when he had arrived to ready the bath, and Bridget had briefly returned to her own chamber to freshen up. She could have fled. Or even smothered him with his own pillow.
“You may consider it a reluctant yes.” If he sounded unwilling, as though the words had been torn from him, it was because he was and they had.
Also because he could scarcely believe it himself. But it was undeniable. Try though he might to ignore it, to suppress it, to avoid it, something had shifted. What he felt inside was akin to the same burst of surprise he’d had as a lad when he had risen in the morning to find the landscape newly covered in a fresh skin of white snow. The same brief moment of breathtaking appreciation filled him now as he held her eyes.
Her face, so lovely, so often guarded and closed off, changed. Smoothed and softened. Her smile reached the glittering depths of her gaze. “I am glad of it, Leo.”
Damn it all to hell.
The strangest thing about it was, he was too. As wrong as he knew it was, the deep, abiding bloom of rightness in his chest refused to be denied. He trusted Bridget O’Malley.
May the Lord have mercy upon his soul.
The Duke ofCarlisle trusted her.
Bridget ought to be filled with smug eagerness. Plotting the ways in which she would dupe him. How easy he had made it for her. How simple it would be to use his words and the knowledge against him. And yet, doing so was not even on her horizon.
Something unspoken and undefined existed between them. She felt it as he completed his ablutions while she watched, because he had told her he wanted her company. She felt it as his strong body rose from the tub, rivulets of water licking down his lean back and his buttocks. It simmered beneath their companionable silence as she helped to towel him dry and handed him a nightshirt to don. It hummed through her as she guided him back to his bed, their arms linked, his tall, broad form leaning into hers, searing her with heat.
It burned a path straight to her heart when she settled the bedclothes around him and glanced up from her task to find him watching her with a molten look. She stilled, palms frozen in the act of smoothing the counterpane over his chest. That gaze undid her. Confused her. Set off a fresh flurry of warmth inside her.
“I should return to my chamber now,” she told him, though in truth she hated to leave his side. Leaving meant their truce would be over, and she would meet him again in the morning with all their demons and ghosts keeping them apart. “You need to rest to regain your strength.”
He startled her by taking both her wrists in a gentle grip. “Don’t go.”
Her heart thudded. “I should.”
“I should let you go,” he agreed.
She licked her lips, willing away the ache deep inside her. A most troubling ache, because for the first time it was not just the burn of her desperate attraction for him but something far more true and deep. “Yes, you must.”
“I cannot.” His thumbs rubbed in slow, maddening circles over her inner wrists, tempting her with his words every bit as much as with his touch. “I am loath for our truce to end so soon. Stay with me?”
It was the most exposed she had ever seen him, including when she had seen his naked arse earlier. Bridget could not shake the feeling this was a time of reckoning for them. She could refuse him and leave, erect the necessary barriers once more. Or she could give in to what they both so clearly wanted. Perhaps even what they needed.
For tonight.
