His breathing went shallow.
Fate was such abastard. A rush of fury at feeling like its plaything. It had fitted him with an iron-clad sense of honor and presented him with the cruelest of temptations. Even now, a rationalization was forming: she wanted him. It was a torment. He could ease it.
And she might have a good sense of the mechanics of sex—that was easy enough for anyone to learn, even the sheltered daughter of an earl. But he’d wager his life that she didn’t fully understand the rest of it: the complications. The way it could make you lose your reason. He would be damned if he would be her experiment.
He took a subtle breath. “While I don’t doubt that,” he managed evenly, with just enough regret to protect her pride, “I will not be relieving you of the balance of your naivete.”
The effort cost him. And she likely knew. She studied him, her mouth quirked. She did turn sharply away again, taking one last look at the spires from this height.
Then she briskly tucked some of the loose strands of hair behind her ears and stood. Healmost smiled. She was made of sterner stuff than anyone would have suspected.
“I’ll go down first to make sure you don’t fall,” he said.
“All right.”
There was really no hope for her modesty or his sanity at this point, but there wasn’t another choice, either. He was going to get a look up her night rail. But as it turned out—and this amused him—she’d put pantaloons on beneath it. And while they were in essence an undergarment, there was nothing particularly erotic about frilly muslin trousers. He hadn’t heard that women were wearing them with any stylistic conviction yet under their dresses.
Oddly, the fact that she’d thought to don them made him think she might actually possess more than a grain or two of sense to go along with the intelligence. He imagined at the planning process: lacing on the sturdy boots, seizing up the sturdy shawl, then tippy-toeing through the dark to the ladder.
He caught that glimpse but he didn’t keep looking. He wouldn’t look when a woman was vulnerable, or when her safety was in his care. His eyes were on her feet.
Rung by rung, they went back the way they came. He watched carefully, breath held, making sure her feet found the rungs, every now and then pausing, hand raised in midair, as it seemed she might need a little assistance to find the next rung. But she never did, and he didn’t know why he should feel proud of that fact, but it somehow was a relief to consider that if she ever took it into her head to do such a thing some other time, when he was back home inAmerica and she was God knows where, perhaps in the library of the duke she was bound to marry, climbing up to the tallest shelves, well, maybe she wouldn’t break her neck.
And together they descended more or less with alacrity. From the world of the roof and sky back into the Annex.
As his foot settled on the last rung it groaned.
And then made an ominous cracking sound.
He yanked his foot back and looked down.
Confronted with a final rung comprised of two jagged, splintered, dangling pieces of wood.
“Lillias, stop,” he said.
She froze midstep and peered back down at him, her face a pale blur, half shadowed.
The jump was about three feet. Easy enough for him.
Potentially perilous to the ankles of a smaller person in a night rail and a shawl.
There was no hope for it.
“I’m going to lift you down.”
He knew at once that touching her would be like Persephone and the pomegranate seeds. There would be no going back.
She paused to study him, gauging the distance over her shoulder.
Then she turned, carefully, and contemplated him, perhaps entertaining an objection and recognizing its absurdity. They both understood she was at his mercy.
He knew a surge of possibly unworthy, purely primal pleasure at this realization.
He reached up for her and she leaned into him, his hands fitting the notch of her waist, her ribs,and he lifted. She was so light in his arms, and so at once trusting he was shocked by a ferocious wave of tenderness.
She sailed lightly, her hair braid brushing against his cheek.
Seconds in duration, a hundred impressions held him fast.
