Chapter Thirteen
Bea’s heart pounded so loudly she could hardly think.Nicholas Archer stood close enough to disrupt her breathing.
Every breath felt too shallow.Every flutter beneath her ribs far too noticeable.And every nerve she possessed seemed suddenly alive in his presence.
“Now you’re being rude,” she informed him, lifting her chin in what she prayed resembled dignity.
“Oh?”he said, leaning just the slightest bit closer, in a way that made her tilt her head back to keep his gaze in view.“How so?”
Her mouth flattened into a razor-thin line.“If you think for even one moment that I am some sort of harlot who will?—”
He raised both hands, palms out, stopping her mid-sentence with an ease that made her want to bite him.
“On the contrary,” he said softly.“I think nothing of the sort.”
And his voice—devil take the man—lost its teasing edge and warmed into something unexpectedly sincere.“In fact, I have the utmost respect for you.”
She crossed her arms tightly to hide the faint, mortifying tremor in her fingers.Her body felt too warm, too aware, too everything.
“If you respected me,” she said sharply, “you wouldn’t think I could be so easily seduced.”
His brow arched, slow, amused, wicked.“I never said I thought it would be easy.”
Her breath hitched traitorously.Which his keen eyes caught instantly.Of course they did.He noticed everything.Every twitch.Every swallow.Every unguarded reaction she prayed he had missed.
He looked entirely too pleased by all of it, moonlight catching in his dark hair, his lips curving in that maddening half-smile that made her stomach misbehave like an unruly child.
“And here I thought you wanted to marry me,” she managed.
“I do,” he drawled, rich and smooth as melted chocolate poured over an ice.
A shiver trailed down her spine at the sound.Her knees wobbled.Absolutely wobbled.Good heavens.Pull yourself together, Bea.
“You are not making any sense,” she said, though her voice came out thinner than she meant.“One does not seduce one’s future wife.”
Nicholas’s smile deepened, slow and devastating, the sort designed to make a woman’s knees consider additional wobbliness.“According to whom?”
Her mind produced an entire chorus of scandalized authorities:My mother.All mothers.Every etiquette book ever written.Society.The Archbishop?—
But what came out instead was an embarrassingly strangled, “Why…why would one try to seduce one’s future wife?”
He took one more deliberate step closer.
Just one.
But it was enough for her to feel the heat of his body.Enough to make her lips part in a breath she could not disguise.Enough to make her wonder—furiously—why her pulse responded to him so readily.
“One does what one must…” he said quietly.“Especially when one’s future wife seems determined to resist her own inclinations.”
Her chest tightened.
Because there it was again, that quiet, unnerving truth he wielded as though he’d been reading her for years.Perhaps he had.
That terrifying thought struck her with more force than his nearness.
How was it that a man she had barely spared polite attention to all these years could now look at her and see…everything?Her bravado.Her defiance.Her hunger for something more than the life laid out for her.Her unanswered wants.
Her breath trembled.She prayed he hadn’t noticed.
