“Well—well—” A little furrow of frustration knit her brows. “I thought I could just…”
“Break in,” he suggested mildly. Probably that was the whisky. Everything had gone just a bit fuzzy at the edges. Pleasant and warm. A bit softer all around than life had been just lately.
“You weren’t meant to be awake!” Her hands wrenched themselves apart, and her fingers performed an agitated flutter. “The house looked dark. I thought for certain everyone would be asleep. And, truly, I only meant to retrieve Tansy.”
“So you thought you could just slip into my house, recover your cat, and I would be none the wiser?”
“You never have been before,” she blurted out, and jerked at the realization of what she had admitted, clapping one hand over her mouth to stifle the wild little gasp that slipped across her lips.
In another time, another life—which was to say, a week ago on the outside—probably he would have been furious. Heshouldhave been furious, regardless. Instead he scraped his hand across his mouth to erase the shred of a smile that wanted to tug at his lips. “So you’ve done it before. How many times?”
She gave a little lift of her shoulders; a dismissive shrug, as if the question was meritless on its face. “Only a few,” she said, in that sweet tone of innocence which he now knew to be false. And her nose had twitched; a tell that he suspected only he was truly aware of. Which meant she’d probably let herself into his home a dozen times or more. And he’d never known.
A quizzical frown pulled the golden arches of her brows down. “What are you doing, awake at this hour?”
“Drinking,” he said. “Seemed a proper time for it. Devil of aday, you know.” His fingers drifted down to tug at the knot of his cravat, which he abruptly recalled he was not wearing.Hell. He’d retired to his study directly after he’d returned from the dinner party. At some point during the remainder of the evening, he’d consumed a great deal of whisky and discarded certain crucial pieces of his evening wear.
But she was here—in her wrapper. Fair was fair. He pushed himself away from the door, took another step toward her. She’d left her hair down, and the mass of it had turned silver in the low light. Probably she’d been preparing for bed when she had decided to embark upon her little housebreaking adventure.
That dark velvet clung to every one of her ample curves as if it had been poured over her, practically inviting a touch. A caress.
“I don’t know,” she said, and he thought he heard a sliver of offense within the threads of her voice. “I thought it went rather well, honestly.”
Rather well? Ratherwell? “You were very nearly caught,” he said. “You threw yourself out of a third floor window—”
“I did not,” she protested. “I climbed down a tree.”
“Because the alternative was to be caught red-handed ransacking my uncle’s study.” A little flair of the fear and anxiety that had precipitated his drinking this evening sparked behind his ribs; a strange ache that had nothing to do with the potential of losing his title and everything to do with losingher. “I never meant for you to come so close to ruin,” he said. “Do you realize what would have happened if I hadn’t seen you there at the window? If I had left the room only moments earlier? How had you expected to re-enter the house once you’d left it?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she snapped waspishly. “The same way I entered yours this evening!” She shoved one fist into the pocket of her dressing gown and withdrew a long, thin piece of metal. The dim light slid along the length of it, a glint cast into his eyes.“I’m not so foolish as to go in unprepared,” she said. “I have always got a contingency. It was convenient to have you let me in, but not strictly necessary. This is a jemmy; it is very good for opening windows that people would prefer to remain closed, though sometimes it leaves a bit of damage in its wake. If you had not been there to let me in, I would simply have found an unoccupied room and let myself in.”
But the danger had still been real. Real enough to have put the fear of God into him, to have sent him searching for a bottle with trembling hands the moment he’d returned home. Real enough that he had agonized for hours over what might have become of her, the consequences she might have suffered.
Onhisaccount.
That remembered fear sank its claws into some overly sensitive corner of his heart and yanked. “Be that as it may,” he said as he closed the gap between them. “Cemeteries are littered with souls who thought they knew best. Prisons are populated with people convinced they were untouchable.”
She folded her arms over her bosom. That wrapper gaped at the neck, and the frilly lace lining the nightgown beneath was just barely visible.
Henry passed a hand over his mouth, felt the fierce pant of his breath against his fingers, and couldn’t be certain to what he ought to attribute it—anxiety or arousal. “If something had happened to you—”
The distant light of the lamp he’d left burning in his study painted her skin a luminous gold and shadowed her collarbones and the hint of cleavage revealed by the deep neck of her wrapper.
Henry cleared his throat. “I will not have you—”
Her bare toes peeked out from beneath her skirt, curling into the carpet beneath her feet.
He tried again. “Grace, youcannot—”
Her hair smelled like jasmine.
Henry braced one hand on the wall beside Grace’s head, breathed deeply through his nose. A mistake. Good God, that dizzying scent scrambled his senses. “You’re not to—” Was he ever going to manage to complete a single thought?
She tilted her face to his, and—no. No, he wasn’t.
Chapter Twelve
Grace had found herself embroiled in any number of risky ventures across her twenty-four years of life. She had pick-pocketed the well-to-do, had burglarized homes, had experienced a brief stint in jail. She and danger were old friends; they had walked hand-in-hand more times than she could count.
