Winnie crept guiltily from the room and closed the door behind her.
Eleanor sat on the bed, her hands clenched in her lap.
This is why you came here. To get his secrets.
“Not this,” she whispered to the empty room. “Not this secret.”
She tried to shut her mind to the truth, tried to shy away from it even as her brain calculated numbers. Ages. Years.
Reginald West couldn’t have taken Lindenhurst from Cam and his mother unless Cam’s father hadn’t been here to prevent it.
He hadn’t been here, then. He’d left, or he’d died . . .before Amelia was born.
Years before.
One hot tear slid down her cheek, but Eleanor swiped it angrily away and refused to allow the others to fall.
For pity’s sake. Don’t cry.You just got exactly what you wanted.
Chapter Seventeen
Cam flung himself onto an overstuffed leather sofa and dropped one heavy boot on top of the low table in front of him. This isnothow he’d imagined his evening would unfold.
And hehadimagined it—at length. He’d indulged in one heated seduction scenario after another, each with the same outcome, but not once had he imagined he’d spend his evening playing a game of hide and seek with Eleanor Sutherland.
Where the devil was she? She hadn’t been at cards in the drawing room with the rest of the party, and she hadn’t been in her bedchamber. She’d been at dinner, for God’s sake. How could a flesh and blood woman vanish in the brief half hour the gentlemen had been at their port?
Flesh. Pale at first, then flushed with desire, her skin smooth, silky. Just a glimpse of the tender white flesh at the inside of her arm drove him mad. He could spend hours on just her wrist, worshipping it with his mouth, tasting her pulse as it fluttered wildly under his tongue . . .
Damn it. Not again. He dropped his foot to the floor and shifted against the sofa to ease the uncomfortable tightness in his breeches. How many times a day could a man ignore an erection before it began to affect his health?
Surely he’d reached his limit.
He peered into the dark corners of the library, but he could discern only shadows, and none of them were shaped like the maddening female who’d managed to slip his grasp this evening.
He’d know that shape, for he’d spent all day thinking about it.Her. He’d been so distracted it was a wonder he hadn’t stumbled into a covey and been shot by one of his future brothers-in-law. Had either of them known what Cam was planning to do to their sister, they’d have shot him on purpose. Through the eyes.
Or between the legs.
First he’d envisioned a bedchamber seduction—her bedchamber, then his. Commonplace, perhaps, a seduction in a bedchamber, but private too, which was important, as there were sure to be . . . noises.
That fantasy had given way to another more imaginative one that involved a slippery frolic in the bath, and yet another where he took her atop the wide mahogany desk in his uncle’s study. Still clothed. Him, not her. She’d been unclothed in that one. In all of them.
Gloriously so. Not just her wrists, either. All of her.
Cam made a disgusted noise in his throat and slammed his boot back onto the table.
Christ.Hide and seek.
Not that the idea didn’t titillate. It did. Though in his current state, anything would. Still, one sought with an expectation of finding, and as it was, his grand seduction was still missing one essential element.
Eleanor.
Should he check behind the draperies?Damn it, where in the bloody hell—
“I suppose I can conclude from that ferocious frown you’re not yet betrothed.”
Cam leapt to his feet and whirled around. Julian stood there, a wide grin on his face. One of the glass doors leading from the library onto a secluded stone terrace stood partway open.
