He sighed.“Zinc.Ah, well.I’ll remember next time.”
She sat upright and folded her hands primly in her lap.“I’m afraid you do not take the scholarly side of alchemy seriously enough.”
He sat up, too, contorting to put his stockings back on as he glanced out the window.“We’re close to Grantham.And I do too take it seriously.I’ll have you know I am a deep and philosophical thinker.”
She snorted.
“It is only that I did not learn the elements with my numbers and letters.One day, Miss Sybil,” he drawled out her name, making it longer than it was, making it sound somehow like a cat stretching in the sunlight, “you will learn as I have had to that what is considered easy and what is considered difficult is entirely different in East and West London.”
“Are you calling me naïve?”Outside the coach, buildings began to be clustered more closely together than before.She snatched her boots up and slipped them on.
“I never insult a lady.”
“Only try to kill them.”She ended the tease with a little laugh.
He did not echo it.She looked up from her feet to find his lips compressed into a grim line.
The air felt heavy between them, and the grooves of his face, between his brows, the brackets around his mouth, seemed to deepen.
In the thickening silence, she said, “Why did you do that?To Diana?”She’d spoken softly, but her words seemed deafeningly loud.She shouldn’t ask it, but she needed to know.She was traveling with him.And he’d rescued her, and he was offering her something no one else would, and he seemed, oh, not like a murderer at all.
His hands and gaze on his shoes, both absolutely still, he finally said, “I cannot explain it.Is it”—his throat bobbed—“enough to know I would not do it again?If I could go back—” He snapped his lips closed.His eyes, too.And a muscle in his jaw twitched.Slowly, so slowly it seemed as if his muscles worked through some sort of pain—his lips found a smile and he opened his eyes.They were blank, his face a mask of merriment.“Are you worried I’ll cut you up in your sleep, princess?”
“No.”Unbelievably, she was not.She had what he wanted, and he would keep her safe in his clutches until he got it.
One corner of his mouth hitched higher—a smirk that was born and died in the same moment.Then he looked out the window.“We’re here.”He curved his back forward, stretching it, then fell into the cushioned corner of the conveyance, his attention still out the window, his arms limp at his sides.
Sybil was struck by his fingernails.They were well kept, and he lacked the calluses of many of her set, the ones that her brother seemed to have had from birth.His shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbow, and he had removed his jacket long ago.His forearms were nice.Terribly nice.She’d never seen Stone’s forearms, oddly enough, but she imagined that Apollo‘s were less bulky.Certainly he lacked muscle when compared with her brothers, but that did not make him—or his forearms—less… nice.
“Nice?”he drawled.
“Pardon?”she asked, her attention shooting up to his face.
“You just said the wordnice.You cannot be talking to me.I am certainly notnice.”
True.And even when she tried to apply the word to a very acceptable part of his body, his forearms, his fingers, his hands with those big warm palms, nice still did not quite do.Not at all.
“I… I do not know what I was saying.”Each word snapped against the last.“I mean, I don’t know what I was thinking.”Now they mumbled along in a trudging line, barely audible.“Never mind.”
She’d felt odd since last night.Since she’d found Apollo’s disk of gold laying on the floor, where it had dropped from her skirt pocket.When she’d picked it up, a bolt of lust so pure and hot she’d almost melted to the floor had shot through her.Her breasts had tightened, and an achy need had twisted her belly.Low.Pulsing.Insistent.
The same need, subdued somewhat, stretched and wakened in her now.She’d spent all day in the coach pushing it down, suffocating it.But every time she looked at him, and every time he made her laugh, which was disconcertingly often, that lazy lust took another breath.And that breath filled her lungs.Filled everywhere else, too.
Much too flustered, she focused on the sights outside the gently rolling coach.“Two inns.We should have luck tonight getting a fireplace.”
He gathered his satchel into his lap.
“What is in that thing?”she asked.Whatever it was pushed the exterior of the bag out at odd angles.It was large and bulky and unusually shaped.
“Not much.”But the way he said it, as if he was trying to convince her.
“Liar.”
“Well, yes, but not about?—”
She grabbed for the bag.When he didn’t try to stop her, she dragged it all the way onto her lap and, holding his gaze, opened it up.
He slunk down into the seat and flicked his wrist at her.“Go ahead.”
