He looked up and held her gaze fast. His voice was low and even. “What do you think will happen if we’re alone together for any length of time? You’re intelligent. And I know you won’t lie to me, either. What is it you truly want? Be honest with yourself. And answer me truthfully.”
She couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud, but she was certain he read the answer in her face.
“Precisely,” he said, as if her silence said it all. “It simply cannot happen again. Surely you understand this. I’m afraid we can’t put this particular genie back in the lamp, Keating. This is for the best. It’s for your own safety as well as mine. I think you know this. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.”
She wished she could see a way in which it was not the truth. Because it meant she would lose his friendship. The notion of this caused a knot of panic in her stomach.
The day became dimmer somehow.
“It’s...” She swallowed. “The season is... well, it’s very lively now. I’m having a lovely time, for the most part. I’ve met many new people. But it’s... it’s somehow lonelier without you.”
A soft surge of enormous emotion rushed his features again before he caught himself.
He was silent for a moment longer. The sun through the window slashed him in two, makinghis eyes brilliant, making the threads of silver glint in his hair, leaving the rest of him in shadow.
“Keating...” he said wearily, after a moment. “I’m an old debaucher.”
“We both know you are neither of those things.
“Or at least not entirely,” she added, a moment later.
He was unable to help himself: The corner of his mouth lifted. Rueful, ironically proud of her. Amused.
“And I’m a rake,” he continued evenly, relentlessly.
“You say that as though it’s an immutable quality, like being Welsh. What does it even mean? I’ve yet to witness you raking.”
A long wordless moment later, something like resolve settled over his features.
There was a sort of weary finality to his expression that made the back of her neck tingle with portent that frightened her.
“Do you know how I came to be staying here at The Grand Palace on the Thames?”
She shook her head slowly.
“My mistress, in a fit of pique, threw a lit lamp at me while I lay in bed. It knocked over a brandy snifter, which helped ignite the counterpane and burned my town house part of the way down. I’ve builders crawling about the place now.”
She felt as though a lamp had been hurled at her. Every single one of those words landed on her skin like fire. Her mind retreated from the shock, momentarily blank.
He waited with what seemed to her to be maddening patience after he’d said this extraordinary thing, which could not be unsaid or ever again unknown.
A well-bred girl ought to be appalled.
Well. She’d been warned.
His face was white. He seemed to be waiting, stoically, for a verdict, some reaction or rejection from her, like a man being fitted for a noose.
But instantly she thought of him in bed, naked.
And just like that, her breath came ever so slightly shorter, and her skin took up that sort of silent keening. The air against it suddenly unbearably sensual.
She understood that this need lately uncovered in her was something that men addressed matter-of-factly, which was a luxury that women simply didn’t have. She was neither stupid nor naive.
And yet, for her, it seemed tied to one man only. Never, never had she felt anything like this near any other man.
And so she stood, mutely entangled in an entirely inappropriate web of lust and black jealousy.
He waited.
