“Is it?” she asked, just a breath on the air, so soft, he might have missed it. “I didn’t know.”
“Guess what I’m saying silently,” he persisted, reaching up to touch one of those wayward curls that had worked its way loose just over her ear, wrapping his finger around it. “Go on.”
“You want…” she managed, her breath catching when he touched her hair.
“Yes?” he said, his own gaze traveling over her face now, noting the delicate pulse in her throat, the shallowness of her breath, the color in her cheeks. “What do I want?”
“I don’t…” she said as he leaned closer, his thumb tracing the line of her cheek.
“Yes, you do,” he replied, soft and firm, just the way she’d tried to force his hands to speak to her on that little port glass. “You do.”
He wondered if she would taste the way she smelled. Like a spiced dessert, forbidden and foreign and just a little bit incorrect. He could find out right now, he realized. He could answer an impulse that had hounded him for half of his life.
Or …
He pulled back, dropping his hand away, his heart roaring in his ears, and watched the blink of confusion, the scatter of gooseflesh that arose on her throat and collarbones and crept down to the tantalizing swell of her bosom.
“When you have a guess,” he said softly, pushing himself to stand, “I look forward to hearing it.”
“Elias?” she managed, evidently dumbfounded.
He stifled a false yawn, glancing over her head at the window by her washbasin. “We ought to get some sleep,” he told her, relishing in this rare feeling, in her presence at least, of being good at something right away. Good at something that she was not.
And there was something else.
Something he could not quite name, but it was damned endearing in the locus of her pouting and fretting about the matter.
He grinned at her. “It is getting very late. I think I’ll sleep well tonight.”
And he turned to leave as quickly as he could, before he looked at her for a single moment more, rumpled and flushed and waiting for him on the edge of a warm bed.
He left before he could lose his resolve.
Chapter Twelve
By luncheon thenext day, Hattie had written no fewer than three full orations dedicated to one Elias Selwyn, Baron Selwyn, denier of pleasures and purveyor of cruelty.
She had skipped breakfast, pacing about her room as she muttered to herself, pulling tresses free from her braid as she thought of all the things she wished to say to him after he’d left her there last night, ablaze and flustered, without so much as a peck on the cheek for her trouble.
What on earth was his aim, doing such a thing?
She’d have preferred another dip in the ocean!
When a rap sounded at her door, thinking it must have been he who’d delivered such torment, she had stomped to it immediately and wrenched it open, with all three of her opening salvos colliding on the curl of her tongue, ready to be unleashed like the cracks on a whip as soon as she got the damned hinges to cooperate.
But it was not Elias on her threshold.
It was Ruby Little.
Who was also red-faced.
“Will you please,” Ruby immediately exploded, pushing into the room in a flurry of skirts and ichor, “tell your newcookthat this is myhomeas much as it isyours? And that when Idemandshe hand over the jar of vanilla beans so that I may… I say, you aren’t dressed.”
Hattie stared at Ruby, who now stood in the center of her room, and released the doorknob. “I’m not,” she agreed as the door swung shut with a pitiful click behind her.
Ruby frowned, looking about the room until her eyes fell on the vanity. “Aha!” she said, marching over and snapping up the bottle ofeau de toilettefrom its perch. “I knew you were almost out! How in the blazes am I to make more without the damned vanilla beans, Hattie? Make her give them to me!”
“There’s vanilla in that?” Hattie asked, baffled.
