He could take her again.
Now.
But he wouldn’t. They’d already been pushingtheir luck with a single tryst. Twice would be utterly irresponsible. It wouldn’t be his reputation that suffered, but hers, if they were found out. He wouldn’t subject Valentina to that shame.
He began to dress, as did she, silence stretching between them. When he finally knotted his cravat and put the finishing touches on his hasty toilette, he faced her. She was dressed, but she looked slightly…askew.
“Let me…” He closed the few feet between them. “I have sisters.”
Efficiently, he set to work straightening her out—untwisting her bodice, brushing the wrinkles from her skirts with his hand, plucking an ivy leaf from her hair. “There,” he said, at last, stepping back and surveying his handiwork. Still, something felt off or missing, and he couldn’t quite grasp what it was.
“So,” she began and stopped. She looked suddenly shy of him.
Too late for that.
“So,” he responded.
Like a dolt.
She looked as if she were building up to say something more, and finally she did. “How do you make me so wild for you, Archie?”
“That isn’tme, Valentina.” He needed her to understand. “It’sus.”
He had more to say to this woman.
Too much more.
Which was the problem.
Where to start?
It was she who started without him. “About tomorrow.”
“Yes?” he asked, impatient. He didn’t want to talk about tomorrow. He wanted to talk about the here and now before it drifted away into the night and was lost to them.
“Nestor has the money?”
“Yes.” He didn’t want to talk about money, either.
He wanted to talk about this feeling currently clogging his chest and making it impossible for him to breathe properly.
“Then it will be done,” she said.
“And once it’s done?” he asked.
She blinked.
Thiswas what he wanted to talk about. “We could have an arrangement.”
Her brow crinkled. “An arrangement?”
“Where we keep seeing each other.”
“As lovers?”
He nodded, even as a feeling crept in that this was turning down awrong, wrong, wrongpath.
But he was powerless to stop the momentum.
