She gave a little shout of laughter, then covered her mouth with her hands, as if loath to wake the house. “And here I was so close to being charmed.”
The firelight laid a burnished path along her hair, along her smooth throat. The tips of her thick eyelashes were gold, the rest chestnut.
He found her beautiful.
The realization arrived less like a bolt from theblue and more like a feather he’d been watching drift to a landing for days now.
“Oh, you’re charmed,” he said quietly.
She went abruptly silent.
But she did not deny it.
He absently reached over and tugged the hem of her night rail over her bare toes, which were peeping out.
“Aye, Daphne, you see, I am not Hardy or Bolt. When a woman imagines a prince coming to their rescue, those are the kinds of faces they picture, aye? But I know full well the nature of my appeal to a woman, and it’s this. Have you ever stood at the edge of a cliff and looked down at the ocean crashing and foaming against it, and some mad little inner voice urges you to jump in, just to be part of something bigger and wilder and more dangerous than you are? Some mad part of you wants to know what it’s like to just... surrender.”
She was watching him in something like a thrall.
“It’s the appeal of a night by the docks, inky black and danger in every corner. It’s the appeal of shinnying out of a window on knotted bedsheets, even though you have no idea what might await you out there in the dark.”
He realized his voice had dropped to a mesmerist’s cadence.
She took this in. “Be that as it may...”
He smiled slowly at this.
“...objectively you are not.”
During the rather long wordless interval thatfollowed, neither one of them blinked, and neither one of them shifted their gaze.
“Are you flirting with me, Daphne Worth?”
“I’m correcting a misapprehension.” She said it gravely.
“Isee.”
A strange, unmistakable thrill was banking in him. In her way, with her honesty and precision, she was as relentless as he was. He’d never realized how erotic it could be.
“Lorcan... who first told you that you were ugly?”
And for a moment he pretended he hadn’t heard her.
His expression—a little smile, the relaxed crinkle at the corners of his eyes—he was certain none of it changed.
But his beat of hesitation surely revealed to her that some inner mark had been hit.
She’d surprised him.
“What makes you think anyone told me I was ugly?” he finally said. Pleasantly enough.
“The way you use the word... I’m reminded it’s after a fashion a sort of shield. It’s a bit like... oh, if someone throws a stick at you, you snatch it up and say ‘thank you for the weapon.’”
He was so stunned for a moment he couldn’t answer. It was not a question he’d ever before been posed.
“Oh, I first heard it from me da. ‘Git up, ye ugly little git.’ ‘That ugly wee bastard will amount to nothing.’ ’Twas part of my name. Ugly Wee Lorcan. Till the day he died. Didna see myself in amirror until I was nine years old, and do you know... I learned something important that day. And it was that my father was wrong, for damned if I could see anything to complain about.”
She smiled at that. “So you had an epiphany.”
