“How did it get so tangled?” he asked, surveying the mess. At this rate, they would be trapped in this room for ages. He might as well let her cut it all off.
“Don’t know,” she said, her voice devoid of color. “See what a mess I’ve made? You should permit me to cut it.”
How like her to cut and run the moment things became difficult, or another opportunity emerged. He’d been cut like those frayed ends the moment a richer, more powerful protector had emerged. A duke. What was the heir to a viscount, living on a carefully allocated allowance, to a duke? According to Letitia herself, as she departed his bachelor lodgings for the last time: precisely nothing.
He grunted rather than vent his spleen and give himself away.
“Why are you wearing a mask, Protector?”
Anthony’s hand stilled.
“You needn’t with me. I won’t tell anyone who you are,” she said.
Older and broken, but still blessed with a seductive tongue. His Letitia was everything he’d imagined her to be in those lonely years since she’d fled in the duke’s carriage and left him with a broken heart and hard cock in those cozy rooms where he’d thought them to be so happy and content.
“But I don’t know you,” he said. “So it would be impossible to trust you.”
He thought he heard her breath hitch, but maybe it was simply because of easing loose the first of a million knots in her long locks. How many times had he done her this service before the fire? Before braiding her hair for the night, lying her on the rug, and feasting on her cunt until she sobbed with pleasure.
The mask burned against his skin. Must be the dyes used to get the silk such a perfect black. Anthony wished he could order Letitia to cover her eyes, rip the thing from his face, and quickly finish this thankless task.
Would it be so bad to give Letitia her way and cut the tangled mass off? It would certainly be easier than dealing with this slow torture.
He flipped the unknotted skein of hair over Letitia’s shoulder to keep it separate from the mess on which he worked.
And then she did something that surprised him: without even looking at the strands, she whipped her hair into a braid. But not just any braid; it was the pattern he’d favored after receiving careful instructions from his sister.
Letitia might have run from him, but he was still woven into her very being. He didn’t know that it made him feel any better.
Chapter 4
Anthony wears a maskin his own home so he need not converse with me,Letitia thought.Such is the depth of his hatred. And I’m supposed to enjoy his hospitality while saying nothing of this odd affectation. What a farce.
She’d been roused in the middle of an admittedly gentle cleansing of her hair, shocked awake by the feeling of water dripping on her face.
Letitia knew not to attempt to wash without a careful brushing, but she’d been too dizzy after the flight from that strange townhouse and carriage ride to Anthony’s home to pay much attention to what was happening around her. She was exhausted and resolved to sleep until the climbing vines on the exterior of the house snaked their way inside her window and covered her over. Somewhere in the process, she’d lost her half-mask, and her face was now exposed to Anthony. Blast.
She suddenly remembered her papa taking her to see a chalk horse carved into the hillside in Uffington. They’d walked from their home outside Wantage, and Papa had carried her when she grew tired. Upon returning to her bed, Letitia had slept for an entire day, dreaming of those arcing white lines within the turf. Such a strange thing to recall after so long, that very white horse.
“Would you mind terribly if I rose to fetch something from my bag?” she asked. He was gentle as ever with the brush, but she felt unnerved and wanted to return to her pleasant lolling.
Anthony’s hands stilled. “What is it you plan to fetch?”
That was hardly his business!
She was preparing a calm set-down when he continued. “Your favored cordial is laudanum, is it not?”
Presumptuous man! He wished to weave stories about her, did he? Luckily, she knew how to feed him a tale. Even if his assumptions were correct, that didn’t make them any less rude.
“Why, yes,” she said in a low, seductive voice. “However did you know? Won’t you be a dear and fetch it for me?”
Letitia thought she saw his eyes flash behind that mask, but he rose to where someone had placed her reticule on a handsome writing desk.
“In here?” he asked, pausing as if he was uncertain about going through a lady’s things. How innocent he was in some ways; anyone could see that she was not a lady.
She held out her hand for the bottle, and Anthony took that as a sign he should root around in that bag of tricks for her disappearing serum. At last, he pulled it from her reticule.
“That’s it,” she said, gesturing for him to put it in her hand.
