He didn’t reach for his shirt.
She was fairly certain he didn’t even pull in a breath. Those magnificent shoulders, that broad chest, didn’t appear to be moving.
He just stood in that shaft of sunlight pouring through the little gap in the roof, like a wild animal caught in a clearing, fully, gloriously illuminated. Or like some pagan god. Half-naked and gleaming with sweat.
She turned her head swiftly away, heat roaring through her like a flame up a fuse. Her hair would surely ignite. She squeezed her eyes closed.
Centuries of propriety ran in her veins. It did put up a bit of a fight. All of her female ancestors had been taught to be chaste and modest. She understood at once the very good reasons for that.
Because in seconds she flung modesty out the window like slops, and her head was turning of its own accord.
Her muscles tightened as if the shape of him were being stamped upon her, as if she were wax, or a coin. Marked by him. He was made of distinct lines cutting his torso into sections of muscle and gleaming slopes and curves; a slim trail of ferny dark hair divided his ribs and vanished into the waist of his buckskins. And scars—a white slash across his torso, a darker round mark where a bullet must have struck. Battered and beautiful and all too alarmingly real.
Her skin burned and hummed as though eachcell was keening softly in recognition. As if she were born already knowing how his skin would feel pressed against hers and craved it.
She could hear her own breath in her ears.
Even from this distance his eyes were as blue as a distant sea. Perhaps as blue as that lake viewed from his land in the Hudson River Valley.
What did Mr. Cassidy see when he looked at her? Parted lips, scarlet cheeks, virginal shock?
His expression was inscrutable. He still didn’t pull his shirt on, and a gentleman most decidedly would have.
He was making a point.
But she thought there was a hint of a question in the angle of his head. Something fierce—a yearning, suppressed—in the tension of his features.
He knew precisely what she was feeling.
And for that reason, he’d already won.
She didn’t quite understand why she felt a thwarted sense of fury. Which, in fact, inched toward despair.
He reached for his shirt.
She watched the slide of muscles beneath his skin as he swiftly stretched upward; furry armpits were exposed, and then all of that disappeared beneath his shirt.
She backed away. Leaned against the wall.
She closed her eyes and drew in a shivering breath.
Less than twenty seconds. Twenty seconds that altered her notions of perfection forever and drew a line beneath precisely how dangerous this game was.
She whipped around and ran back up the stairs.
She said she was not prone to hysterics. He was inclined to believe her.
He wasn’t particularly worried that he’d be evicted from The Grand Palace on the Thames for emerging, half naked, from a hole in the roof, for the riveted audience of the daughter of an earl.
But both he and Lillias were subdued that evening in the little sitting room.
She carefully did not meet his eyes. It called to mind the way one might, out of an excess of caution, avoid looking directly at an eclipse. She seemed contemplative. Perhaps even a little sullen. As though she’d gone confident and well-armed into a sword fight only to discover her opponent had a secret weapon, like the ability to shoot quills.
She was wearing a blue wool dress and a loosely draped shawl.
He could have told her that the pearly expanse of skin between her bodice and chin was enough to drive him to his knees. That he could well extrapolate about the rest of her from there. That he could close his eyes, and had, and followed in his mind’s eye the curve of her lips, the angle of her jaw, the arc of her throat as it sloped to her collarbone to the swell of her breasts, then down, down along that sensual violin curve of her waist to her hips. All the places he would follow with his tongue and fingers if he could.
That he could have himself hard in seconds if he imagined it.
