“Why?”
She glared at him. “Why do you have so many questions?” she burst out. “Why are you always watching everyone?”
His eyebrows lifted at the unexpected outburst. “Am I?”
She huffed out a breath. “Please don’t play me for a fool. Of course you are, I see it every time you’re in a room. You look through me, you look through everyone. Like you’re trying to see everything.”
He shifted slightly, and for a moment she saw a slip of the mask he always wore. His eyes darted away from hers. So he didn’t like to be seen, even if he could see. Well, it served him right.
He cleared his throat. “Perhaps we all have different ways of…coping.”
She was shocked at the response, given so softly and so directly. “Coping?” she repeated.
He shrugged, and she saw his struggle in maintaining a nonchalant distance at this topic. “Of course. You hide. I…see. They’re both ways to keep the darkness away, aren’t they?”
Her breath was short. She could hardly find it as she stood staring up at this man. This utterly confusing, fascinating man who shouldn’t be in her library. Who shouldn’t call her by her first name. Who shouldn’t speak of darkness because it wasn’t a polite dinner topic.
But he did and was all of those things.
“For a while,” she admitted.
There was a flutter of a smile on his face, but it was not accompanied by pleasure. No, it was a pained expression. “I suppose we are both finding that out. Demons are a difficult thing.”
She edged a little closer. They were still three long paces apart, but it felt like the room shrank every time either one of them took any quarter.
“What are your demons, Morgan Banfield?” she asked, even though she shouldn’t want to know. Shouldn’t pry.
He arched a brow and leaned a little closer. “I’m not sure you want to know the answer to that question,Lizzie.”
That nickname was a slur from his lips. An accusation that she was too innocent to understand.
So she stepped up once more, closing the gap further, and put her hands on her hips.
“I asked the question. Perhapsyouare too afraid to answer it.”
There was a fire in Elizabeth’s eyes that Morgan hadn’t seen before. A challenge to answer his own when he had expected a retreat. People so rarely surprised him that he wasn’t prepared for this slip of a woman who rocked him on his heels.
No one ever asked him about his life. No one ever saw past the façade he had so carefully crafted during years and years of necessity. But here Elizabeth was. And he felt the strangest urge to…tell her. To strip himself open and let her see everything ugly. Maybe it would be better for both of them in the end, at that.
She would surely run if she knew the truth. Stop stalking him across the library with those blue eyes like sapphires.
“You must be able to guess, my lady,” he drawled, reverting to casual flirtation because it was his safest place. “With a brother like mine. With a father like mine. I’m an infamous bastard, Elizabeth. Isn’t that demon enough?”
She lifted her chin, and now it was she who peered closer, deeper. His trick, turned against him by a woman he had underestimated. She was quiet, but it was evident she was watching all the time, just as he did. Noticing while she remained unnoticed. Except by him.
“For some men, I would say it was demon enough. Butyouseem to revel in the reputation of your family.”
“Do I?” he asked. “Have I done so here?”
“Well…no. You’ve been nothing but proper here. And yet I’ve heard talk. Rumor. You were brought here because of your wild side, weren’t you?”
He shook his head slowly. Seemed his brother would talk, even if he pretended to want to help Morgan. He would poison this woman to him, perhaps her family, too.
“I suppose I was,” he admitted.
“And thatneverseems to trouble you. So I think your demon is something deeper.”
He flinched. “You know so little, here in your ivory tower where your brother lets nothing touch you.”
