“We’ll discuss this properly,” he said, expecting her to throw her weight behind the wood and force him out.
“Which is precisely what we should have done before yourode to London at dawn.” She marched upstairs, leaving the door ajar.
He entered, braced for what awaited him above.
The boards creaked as he crossed the landing.
He’d prefer pistols at dawn to this.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a woman?” she said when he ducked beneath the low lintel into her chamber.
It sounded like a trick question.
“You’re not invisible to me if that’s the implication. You were uppermost in my thoughts today.”
She pulled Ramsey’s wet coat off her shoulders and hung it over the wooden chair. “If that were true, you would have woken me. Given me the choice to accompany you. Is that so difficult?”
“Yes, because I know what men see when they look at you.” He knew every curve of her by heart. Knew the effect she had on him.
She blinked, her mouth softening, but then she flicked her hand at the spreading puddle at his boots. “You’re dripping water all over the boards.”
“I’m not leaving.” He shrugged out of his greatcoat, opened the small window, and tossed the sodden garment into the rain.
“It’s best you do. You’ve lost your wits.”
“I lost them in Templeton’s ballroom.”
“I didn’t ask you to ruin me.”
“But you’re glad I did.”
She snatched a towel from the washstand and pulled the comb from her hair. He watched as the damp locks tumbled loose around her shoulders.
Bloody hell.
“You wore another man’s coat today.” He’d be the only man to shelter her from a storm.
“Because you weren’t there.”
He stepped closer. “Mrs Buckley told you something.”
She patted the ends of her hair with the linen. “That she adds almond essence when she glazes her scones.”
“I know. I settle her accounts.”
She paused. “How endearing.”
He took another step, forcing her to tilt her chin to meet his gaze. “You’ll tell me what she said. I have a right to know.” He meant to hold her with a hard stare, but his gaze slid to the raindrop tracing the line of her throat. “Why go to my mother’s grave?”
The sharp question did nothing to quell the heat coiling low as she drew the linen over her neck and the slope of her shoulders.
“Perhaps I went looking for your heart.”
“I doubt you’ll find it.”
She looked at him with blue eyes he could drown in. “I glimpsed it in the garden last night. I suspect it’s never far.”
It had been buried in hallowed ground until he met her.
