“Quite the opposite, I am afraid. I am utterly, perfectly sane.” He allowed himself the tender pass of his hand down her forearm from the stern prominence of her elbow. “For one evening, at least until you are assured the villain will not return to your home and commit a worse crime than riffling about in your husband’s study, I insist that you stay.”
“I will not do something so indecorous and scandalous,” she said.
But she had not moved away. He indulged in the luxury of running his hand along her inner arm, not stopping until their palms connected. No gloves. No propriety. Just bare skin on skin. His on hers, hers on his. Just all the memories they had both so studiously been trying to evade.
Awareness hovered in the air between them.
He did not move, and neither did she. The contact was fleeting, and yet he could not help but to feel it was the most significant touch of his entire damned existence. That if he had to choose but one touch for the rest of his life, it would be this one. It would be her.
Always, always, foreverher.
He swallowed a both unfamiliar and unwanted emotion. “There will be nothing untoward. You shall have the nurse. I will be on another floor of the house.”
He wouldneedto be on another floor. Better if there were stairs between them. Better still, an entire city. A bloody ocean. Was a goddamn solar system out of the question?
Her fingers wrapped around his tentatively. She was tense. So very tense. He understood. Of course she would be. She had just come face-to-face with the embodiment of her husband’s past dealings. Who knew what manner of man would go about trespassing in George Shaw’s study? Moreover what had he been seeking? Incriminating evidence, it was almost certain.
“What would it look like, should anyone discover I spent the night here?” Pippa asked softly.
She was faltering.
As he studied the complexity of her lovely face more closely, he realized that she looked exhausted. Beautiful, but worn after what she had been through in the last few days. There were dark circles beneath her eyes, and she had merely picked at her dinner earlier. The strain of the discoveries concerning her husband’s shadowy past was making itself known.
“Who gives a damn what it should look like?” he asked. “We shall know the truth, and the nurse can play chaperone. Your safety, and that of your daughter, is the primary concern now.”
She looked as if she intended to argue. But then, just as suddenly as she had burst into his home, the fight dissipated from her.
“I am afraid,” she admitted.
And the hitch in her voice when she confessed her fear, coupled with the candor of her expression and revelation, nearly unmanned him. Once more, he was swallowing knots. But this time, he was also blinking away the nettling sting in his eyes.
He laced his fingers with hers and delivered a squeeze of reassurance. Just one. It was all he would allow himself. Then he withdrew his touch, though he ached with the absence of her warmth.
“You need not fear,” he told her truthfully, fervently. “You will be safe here. As will your daughter and her nurse.”
“What do you suppose he could have wanted?”
It was the first sign that she suspected the intruder had been involved somehow in the mystery surrounding her husband.
He could take pity on her and pretend as if he did not believe the man who had been in her home this evening had been related to George Shaw. But that would be a lie. And regardless of what she believed of him, Roland was no prevaricator.
“One can only surmise that he wanted something he expected to find in your husband’s study, Mrs. Shaw.” Formality was once more in place.
He hated it.
But he also understood that he needed to cease being familiar if he wanted her to relent. And he very much wanted her to relent and agree to remain here for the evening. Heneededit. Not so that she could torture and tempt him by sleeping beneath the same roof as he, as beyond his reach as ever. But rather because he could not bear the thought of something happening to her on his watch. He needed to know she and her daughter were safe.
An eighty-year-old butler and two footmen were not sufficient protection from the sorts of scoundrels her husband had consorted with, and that was the plain, ugly truth.
Her tongue ran over her lower lip. “He may have begun his trespass in other chambers.”
He loathed himself for tracking the movement of that glistening tip. For wondering what else on her would be so deliciously pink.
Now is not the time, you dunderhead.
But then, no timewouldbe, would it?
He was not meant to entertain these deuced confounding feelings of lust and yearning for her.
