What was Max thinking?
Hard to say. He had been perfectly pleasant all day. He’d placed a lingering kiss on the back of her head when she had arrived a tad flustered at breakfast—but as he was doing a splendid job of pretending to be her fiancé, he could have been acting. He had also been most solicitous during the long hours they had all spent digging, including her in conversations which two of the other gentlemen naturally excluded her from, helping her in and out of the trenches and offering her reassuring smiles throughout. But again, as her pretend fiancé he would do all those things, too, and in isolation they did not mean he was really as happy about everything as he looked.
As Eleanor had quite rightly pointed out—lust wasn’t love. And once again, her overactive imagination was running ahead of itself. Love did not happen overnight—unless you happened to be an Incomparable named Miranda—and it certainly was not something she could ask him about if she ever got him alone. Such declarations had to be offered freely, not prised out, and if she admitted she was falling hopelessly in love with him, he would probably baulk. She would most definitelynotbring that up if she ever cornered him alone again.
It was so frustrating! Twice, they had almost been alone. The first time he had leaned towards her, clearly about to say something about them or the kiss or both, but Percy had interrupted. The second time, he had caught her hand in the hallway, then a moment later Lord Denby had spirited him away. They had also shared a couple of meaningful glances over dinner, although Effie had no clue as to their real meaning. But when he had suggested the gentlemen did not abandon the ladies tonight and gazed at her, he had been boisterously cajoled into another game of billiards by Percy who declared that when a fellow had rinsed all the others of their coin the night before and then refused to give them the opportunity to win it back, it was very poor form. Obviously, Max had relented—what other choice did he have? But that did leave her and their potential third kiss in limbo.
She stared at her hair, still elaborately dressed and tamed by what felt like a thousand pins. Would a woman waiting to be kissed still have her hair styled so formally after two hours of waiting? Probably not. Nor would a woman on the cusp of thirty try to entice a gentleman to kiss her looking like the nervous dolt staring back at her now. Effie wanted to appear both confident and alluring like the fiancée who had captured his heart in just three short weeks. Max liked her hair down—at least she assumed he did because he had made short work of the loose bedtime plait last night before he had fisted his hands in it possessively.
Maybe she should take it down? Her scalp would certainly be happy if she did. All those pins were digging into it now and her head felt as heavy as her aching, needy breasts. She pulled out the pins and watched it tumble around her shoulders. If that wasn’t a blatant invitation, she didn’t know what was and, seeing as at this stage she was prepared to do almost anything to move things rapidly forward, she didn’t care if it was too obvious a gesture. Obvious was confident and confident, if Miranda was any gauge, was alluring.
But had she pushed him into the second kiss?
The question which had been niggling the most since she had shut her door last night made her pause again to consider it. The simple answer was most definitely—she had had ample opportunities to leave his bedchamber at the end and had taken none of them. But he had seemed to enjoy it regardless. He had been as breathless as she when she had ended it—it had been she who had necessarily ended it for certain, not he, because she couldn’t trust herself not to take things too far and scare him off. But she had felt his obvious desire through her nightgown pretty much from the outset. Surely he couldn’t fake that? Everything she had read about the male anatomy suggested such a feat wasn’t possible. Therefore she decided to trust the science and assume the kiss had affected him as much as it had affected her. He felt lust at least, if not affection, and that was a start.
However, the first time they had kissed he had seemed as overwhelmed by it as she was and then he had dismissed it as a heat-of-the-moment bumping of faces born out of the excitement of finding the shield. Maybe his passionate reaction this time stemmed from the sheer relief of getting through the first day of their charade without issue? And while he might well have said hewouldkiss her a third time today, after sleeping on it he could well have changed his mind.
But if he wasn’t averse to indulging in a third kiss, which she sincerely hoped he wasn’t, should she broach the subject of all the other things she had lain awake thinking about then incessantly pondered still or was it too soon? All-encompassing new feelings, desire, outright curiosity—and the future. Would such things scare the daylights out of him? She’d never had anyone to ask.
Common sense told her of course it was too soon even though she might feel the moment was right. What did she know about such things anyway? She usually got this sort of stuff wrong as her extensive lack of real friends and woeful shortage of eager beaus was testament to. Just because she was feeling all of these heady, thrilling and all-consuming things, just because she was tumbling head over heels into love, did not mean he was. In fact, so early into their ever-changing relationship and only two actual kisses in, there was every chance he hadn’t given any of it much thought. Max was clearly an expert in kissing and she certainly wasn’t his first. Therefore, it stood to reason that what they had shared thus far wasn’t the least bit significant as far as he was concerned.
Besides, and to give him the benefit of the doubt for his potential lack of similar angst, he’d had his hands full since yesterday pretending to be something he wasn’t. He’d been too busy charming Lord Denby into agreeing that her roundhouse was indeed a roundhouse, that one could clearly discern the remains of the long-rotted-away post holes in compacted mud and that the amazing finds which had emerged from the site so far indicated the Celtic dwelling was considerably older than the Roman ruins nearby.
And he was doing all that for her. Which suggested he must care in some way, although it was which way he cared that consumed her. She sincerely doubted Miranda would have needed to ask. Or needed any reassurance of her abilities to snare him. She would have known—or perhaps assumed, as Eleanor had intimated. Maybe that was what was needed here?
Perhaps if she behaved a little more like the sort of woman Max was obviously drawn to—the confident, flirty, effortless seductress rather than the clueless oddity with her head buried in a hole—then she might convince him to be similarly besotted with her.
How hard could it be to be a seductress anyway?
She had the basic equipment if the compliments were anything to go by and she had certainly read enough romantic books to be able to mimic some of the techniques from the pages. She could start right this second by using this time to rehearse her words. Not questions which demanded answers but assumptions which told him in no uncertain terms that a third heated kiss and everything beyond was a foregone conclusion.
Hello, Max... I’ve been waiting for you.
Too bold?
Hello, Max... I couldn’t sleep.
Which sounded as though that was his fault—which might be good. Or it might come across as pathetic and whiny. It was probably all in the tone and the facial expressions. She practised a few sultry looks in the mirror and, when she found one she liked which involved her twirling her finger in her hair, she rehearsed her lines again, dropping her voice to a breathy whisper.
Hello, Max...
Perfect!
Ambiguous, but hinting at promise...except... Drat it! She’d knotted her finger in her messy hair! Thank goodness this was just a rehearsal as the calculated Miranda would have known she should have brushed the tangled mess first before fiddling with it.
Effie had only just unknotted her finger and grabbed the brush when she heard his feet on the stairs, then practically jumped out of her skin as nerves took over. This was it! There was no more time to procrastinate. No more time to prepare herself. It was time to make him fall in love with her.
Wide-eyed, she took a last look at her reflection in the mirror and her heart sank at the ridiculous state of her hair. What had she been thinking to take out all the pins and destroy a perfectly lovely hairstyle?
In desperation, she gathered it all up and twisted it into a knot, then blindly rummaged for her hairpins. She jabbed a few in, but when they stubbornly refused to work resorted to her trusty old faithful. He had said he preferred her pencil and so a pencil it would have to be! She cast her eyes frantically about for the slippers she had kicked off the second she had entered the room, but when she located only one realised she had no choice but to go to him barefoot.
Bare feet and a pencil! Heaven help her if those were the only weapons she had in her seductress’s arsenal! At this rate, they’d never bump faces again.
She heard his door click shut and realised she was in grave danger of losing the moment. If she left it any longer, he’d be in bed and that certainly wouldn’t be proper.
Proper!
As if anything about this was proper.
