The voice in her ear was a low whisper, sinister and alarming, and it brought Victoria crashing back to the moment. In her shock, she let go of the book, and she began to let out a startled yell of fear…
A big hand covered her mouth, catching the sound she had been about to make. Another hand appeared and caught the book she had dropped neatly before it could hit the floor.
"Hush," James said. "You'll wake the staff. You don't want to do that, do you?"
She didn't. She shook her head slowly.
"I'm going to uncover your mouth," James told her. "No yelling."
He peeled his hand away slowly.
Victoria stepped quickly away from him. Her heart was pounding like a drum.
She hated being caught by surprise by someone's touch like that, though a part of her acknowledged that there was no way he could have known how unpleasant she would find that.
But she was also shocked to realize that shehadn'tfound it all that unpleasant. She had enjoyed it, in a strange way. There was a shiver of delight that he had put a hand on her face, and she could still feel the warmth where he'd touched her.
She had to get away from him. She couldn't let him see that he had provoked these feelings in her.
"What did you do that for?" she demanded once she was satisfied with the distance between the two of them.
"I've just told you," James said. "You were about to yell and wake up the whole house. I had to stop you." The smirk on his face made him all the more handsome, accenting his bold features, and it was maddening.
"You must know that isn't what I mean," Victoria snapped. "Why did you sneak up behind me and breathe in my ear like that? Anybody would have been frightened."
"You really were off in your own little world, not to have even noticed me come in," he said. "What were you reading, anyway?" He looked at the book in his hand, and his eyes widened slightly. "Voltaire?"
"Does that surprise you?"
"I didn't realize ladies ever read Voltaire," he said.
"I imagine ladies read all sorts of things," Veronica said dryly. "As for me, I read whatever catches my interest, and today that happened to be Voltaire. At least, I was interested in it until you snuck up on me and ruined the experience. What are you doing out of bed at this hour?"
"I might ask you the same question," James retorted.
"You might," she agreed, "but I asked it first, so you wouldn't get an answer unless I got my answer first."
"I see. You're very deft sometimes, you know. Very good at negotiation. That's a skill that will serve you well in your marriage."
Victoria hated that he had mentioned her marriage. It felt worse than usual, though she couldn't have said exactly why.
"I can't believe you'd have the nerve to say that to me right now, after you just snuck up on me. You scared the daylights out of me, you know," Victoria told him. "I was reading very peacefully until you did that. And I really didn't need a scare like that tonight."
"I just can't believe that scared you," James said, a wicked twinkle in his eye. "What with all the ghosts running around this place, I would have expected that you would be impossible to scare. I would have thought that you would be used to things sneaking up on you."
He was mocking her. She could tell by the look in his eyes and by the way his lips quivered, as if he was trying not to smile. It was clear now that he had never believed there were any ghosts in this house. He hadn't believed her story when she had tried to tell him, and he hadn't meant the things he had said to her in response, either.
Fury flared up within her. Even though she was dimly aware that they had done exactly the same thing to one another, she couldn't help it—she was still angry with him for it. "It's ghosts I'm used to," she said. "Not arrogant dukes who march about my home as if they own the place and deliberately try to frighten me in the middle of the night. I'll never get used tothatsort of thing. And thankfully, I don't have to get used to it, because there are so few people in the world who act the way you do."
"You're very naive if you believe that everyone in the world is going to be nice to you," James said. Her comment had clearly nettled him.
"I don't think everyone is going to be nice to me," Victoria said. Images flashed through her mind—Jonathan, the man she'd once thought she would marry; the late duke, looking her up and down and telling her how lucky he was to have a young wife all to himself; her father, knowing how badly she wanted to escape marriage to the duke and refusing to step in on her behalf even when he could have done it. She wished she'd had the luxury of believing that the world was a place that would take care of her, but she hadn't. That had never been her life. It bothered her immensely that James would assumed she'd lived that way when she hadn't.
"If you didn't think that, you wouldn't be so shaken by a little teasing," James said.
"I know that people are unkind in this world," Victoria said. "But most of that unkindness comes out when a person sees something they want. Something they might gain. You're different. I think you're unpleasant to me out of habit, or because you enjoy making me unhappy. But it's not a path to anything you truly want. You're not bothering me in the library tonight because it helps you in some way to plague me in the middle of the night."
He frowned. "You're speaking out of turn."
