She hadn’t seen him since he’d slipped through the night and left her chamber. Not that she had been looking for him. Indeed, she had spent the entirety of her day ensuring she wouldnotsee him, until she had finally acknowledged there was only so much shopping even she could indulge in during the course of one afternoon.
She wasn’t going to draw him.
She needed no reminders of what had passed between them, and when he was gone from Hunt House and nothing more than a regret looming in the darkest corners of her mind, she hardly would wish to page through her folio and see his face.
And yet, her crayon moved over the paper, seemingly with a will of its own. Despite her best intentions, there was soon the roughly outlined figure of a man looming on the salon’s threshold. Perhaps if she committed him to the page, she could expunge him from her mind, she reasoned, adding the broad lines of his shoulders, the long sweep of his legs.
She was so consumed by her task that she failed to hear the crunching of soles on gravel above the din of the splashing fountain until a long shadow fell across her folio. Pamela glanced up, expecting to see her brother, for Ridgely often joined her in the garden when she was drawing.
A cool, hauntingly familiar stare met hers, sending shock and awareness coursing through her.
He stopped, his angular countenance an impassive mask, and offered her a bow that would have put any lord to shame. “Lady Deering.”
She snapped her folio closed and rose from the bench, clutching it to her bodice, hoping he hadn’t taken note of the subject she had been sketching. “Sir. What are you doing in the gardens?”
He was the last person she had expected to intrude upon her solitude. And now that he was here, a queer sensation had begun, low in her belly. One she recognized as the prelude to desire. Curse him for the most unwanted effect he had upon her. If only he were not as handsome by the afternoon light as she had recalled. But he was only more compelling than she had remembered, exuding a magnetism that forced her to recall every second of last night, his body pinning hers to the wall, his mouth feeding her kisses until she had turned into a wanton she scarcely recognized.
“I’m searching them,” he said simply.
Pamela blinked, trying to call to her mind what they had been speaking of, and realizing belatedly that she had asked him why he was in the gardens.
“For me?” she asked, so startled by the notion that her voice emerged higher than was natural.
Good heavens, she sounded like a giddy girl, when she was a matronly widow. What was wrong with her?
That hazel gaze slid to her lips before flicking back to hers. “For intruders, my lady.”
How mortifying. Her cheeks went hot, and she was grateful she was wearing a bonnet to cover the evidence of her humiliation. All this silliness, over a trifling kiss or two. She was no inexperienced virgin. She had kissed before. Had been more than familiar with the marriage bed. What had happened between the two of them last night had been scarcely anything at all.
“Of course,” she murmured, doing her utmost to keep her embarrassment from showing. “I will leave you to your task.”
When she moved to skirt around him, however, he stepped before her, blocking her escape. “You needn’t go on my account. I’ll be gone soon enough, leaving you to your drawing.”
He had seen her sketching, then. She hoped he hadn’t looked closely at the page. That he hadn’t realized she had been drawing him. That she had been thinking of him or chasing thoughts of him from her mind almost every waking second since their encounter. And every sleeping one, too.
She tilted up her chin, pinning him with the cold look she gave to anyone who dared to overstep. “Were you spying on me?”
His lips—so full and perfectly formed, sinfully so—twitched, as if he suppressed a smile. “Why should I wish to do that, Marchioness?”
She wished he would call her something else. No one referred to her asMarchioness. It felt wrong, particularly after the intimacies they had shared. But she could hardly ask him to be familiar, to use her Christian name.
She stifled the impulse.
“I cannot say, sir.” She tilted her head, considering him. “Perhaps you ought to tell me. It seems rather as if you have been following me since your arrival. I can only suppose why.”
Another quirk of his mouth. Just the corners. She wondered if he evertrulysmiled. There was something harsh about his face, as if mirth would break him. He was like a forbidding statue, hewn from cold, impenetrable marble. Only, she knew how very hot he was to the touch.
“Following you, my lady?”
It was a ridiculous accusation, and she had known it when her pride had forced it from her tongue. How much easier it would be to pretend their every interaction had been spurred by him. To feign icy disinterest. To act as if she were entirely unaffected by his presence when secretly, her heart was pounding hard and fast, and desire had begun slithering through her, as insidious as any serpent.
“Yes,” she responded crisply. “How else do you explain your continued presence when it is least wanted?”
What a liar she was. Already, she could feel awareness settling over her like a mantle. Gliding down her spine like warm honey. Her mouth tingled with remembrance of his possessive, masterful kisses, and every part of her longed for his touch.
“As I recall it, last night, you were the one following me,” he pointed out, cocking his head so that the faint strains of sun filtering through the gray skies overhead caught in his hair, bringing out strands of gold that were mixed with the rich brown. “And brandishing a fire iron with the intent to maim me.”
Why wasn’t he wearing a hat as an ordinary gentleman would do? She had no wish to take note of such intricacies of detail. She had no use for them.
