“Nate,” Theo whispered. There was something so achingly vulnerable in the sound of his name that he looked at her again and held out a hand.
“I’m sorry.”
She took it and pressed it against her lips. “There’s nothing to apologise for. I just feelhereisn’t perhaps the best place, and while you’re still recovering—”
“You don’t need to explain yourself,” he said with a wry smile. “I should not have been so . . . carried away.”
She edged closer, and placed his hand against her cheek. Her skin was warm and flushed, and it took every modicum of willpower not to lose himself in her again. “When you’re better,” she said, dropping her gaze so she didn’t meet his, “I would like it if you got carried away again.”
He could have told her that there was every chance he would get carried away every day for the rest of their life together. He could have told her that he submitted to her in every way; that over their seven months of marriage, she had stolen his heart in a way no other woman had or could.
There were so many things he could have told her, but just as he didn’t intend on taking her in a carriage, rumbling along the main road to London, he didn’t plan on confessing his feelings in such an inauspicious location.
So he smiled and kissed her fingertips. “When I’m better,” he promised, “I will show you just how difficult waiting has been.”
Pink suffused her cheeks and she glanced away in pleasure and embarrassment. Nathanial watched the way her lips curved into an involuntary smile, and wondered what he could do to make her smile like that again.
As soon as they knew who was behind these attacks, he would find out, in painstaking detail.
Until then, he would have to learn patience, no matter how little he wanted to.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It was enough to drive any woman mad, to know her ill and still-recovering husband was intending on investigating an attempted murder when he wasn’t even well enough to—
Well, never mind what he wasn’t well enough to do. He wasn’t doing it and that was that. And if she had any say in the matter, he wasn’t going to have a chance to strain himself in an entirelydifferentway.
“Your Graces,” Jarvis said as they finally arrived at Norfolk House that evening. “It’s good to have you back.”
“Thank you, Jarvis,” Nathanial said, his voice surprisingly easy, though she knew he was in pain from the tight press of his mouth.
The idiotic man, thinking he was well enough for any sort of intimacy in a moving carriage. If she hadn’t enjoyed it so much, and if the warmth of being so desperately wanted wasn’t still in the pit of her stomach, she would have told him what for.
“Dinner will be served in half an hour,” the butler said. “If that suits Your Graces.”
For the first time, irritation escaped into Nathanial’s expression. “Of course,” he said. “We can dress in that time.”
Theocould dress in that time. Nathanial, on the other hand, looked as though he needed to lie down awhile before he would be ready to eat.
“I can order your dinner to be brought up to your room on a tray,” she said anxiously as they parted to their separate dressing rooms.
“Ourroom,” he said. “I’ll keep my room made up for appearances’ sake, but I have no intention of sleeping alone.”
Warmth spread across her cheeks, but she just tipped her head back so she was looking full into his face. “Do you think you can contain yourself?”
“Wretch,” he said, but his eyes darkened as they dropped to her mouth, and the now-familiar curl of anticipation unfurled in her stomach. “I suppose I can count on you to stop me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” she murmured. In a bed, which already felt alarmingly intimate, there was rather less incentive to stop than in a rocking carriage. And last time, the only reason shehadstopped was because she’d hurt him.
He leant down until his lips were a hair’s breadth from hers, and when he spoke, his breath danced across her mouth in an agony of temptation. “Perhaps we should skip dinner after all.”
And he had the audacity to callhera wretch. She was but human, and he was too close—or perhaps not close enough.
But he was injured and tired and they’d been travelling all day.
She wanted to groan at the unfairness of it.
As though he sensed her indecision, and nothing less than full commitment would have prevailed upon him to kiss her, he eased back. “We should dress for dinner or we’ll be late.”
