She looked delighted. “Oh, what a fine idea! They’re all a bit different, you know,” she said proudly. “But all equally comfortable. I’ll send Dot to give you a tour if you like.”
One got the sense that she’d been dying to show her rooms to guests who had yet to appear. She didn’t sound the least bit as though she was attempting to hide heaps of contraband cigars.
“Thank you. It would be most appreciated. I’m amazed that youcan’thear Delacorte snoring from where you sleep at the very top of the house.”
“We can, at that, hear it a bit, sometimes. It sounds a bit like Gordon, from that distance.”
A rogue wave of shocking jealousy stopped his breath. Who the devil was—
“Gordon is our tiger cat,” she expounded, “who rumbles when he’s purring, or when the cook has given him a nice bit of liver. He snores, too, when he sleeps.”
He did not one bit like the relief that swept in; he did not one bit like the sense that his emotions seemed to be attached to a pendulum. He was usually compared to a rock, and he’d always found the comparison flattering.
“I haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting him, but I believe I heard him galloping down the hall. The building shifts and creaks a good deal in the middle of the night, doesn’t it?”
“Isn’t it lovely?” she said in all seriousness. “So cozy, those sounds.”
He was charmed. “It’s a bit like listening to someone attempting to digest a rich meal. I’ve heard a particular muffled thunk. As if the building swallowed something that won’t go down properly.”
She laughed. “Oh, we’ve heard that, too. Once before we all moved in. Once after. We haven’t been able to discover what it is. Perhaps a large r—”
She stopped. Pressed her lips together.
“You were going to sayrat,” he said.
“We haven’t any rats, thanks to Gordon.”
He could have sworn she was surreptitiously crossing her fingers in the folds of her skirt.
He gave her a slow, crooked, intimate smile. Amused.
She smiled, too. Suddenly, acutely, he saw her as curves and textures, all as alluring as a crooked finger. Her lips. Her long throat. The skin that glowed like a pearl in this light and probably felt like petals beneath one’s fingertips. The dark hair spiraling against her temple, and her lashes. The swell of her breasts, which looked precisely designed to fit into each of his hands, neatly.
The bands of muscles across his stomach tightened as if they were struggling to contain that sudden surge of lust.
The notion of seducing her made him breathless, because he thought it was both possible and inadvisable for a dozen reasons. If he applied himself, he could rationalize those reasons out of existence.
“Whatareyou doing on this floor, Captain Hardy? Oh! Were you going to visit Mr. Delacorte?” All at once she was radiant with hope. “Did the two of you become friends? I know he likes to play chess. He’s loud but he’s clever and quite a nice fellow all in all, I think. But he’s already gone down to breakfast, I’m afraid.”
She sounded like a mother whosohoped someone found her slow son likable. And he remembered her expression—the fleeting bleakness—when he’d asked her if she had a child. Lady Derring was trying to create a family of sorts here, he was fairly certain.
He was hopelessly charmed. “My chess skills are moderate at best and if I’m going to lose at something I’d rather put up a more respectable fight.”
“I don’t suppose you often lose at anything, Captain Hardy.”
“Not since that one time, lo these many years ago.”
He allowed himself a moment of basking in her smile. Like the fluffy pillows here at the boardinghouse, pleasures like her smile were so rare in his life as to qualify as luxuries.
“But if you’re not looking for Mr. Delacorte, then, Captain Hardy, what brings you to this floor? I should think you’d have mastered navigation by now.”
She was dogged.
“I must have inadvertently headed out one flight too soon in my eagerness to get to my comfortable blue room.”
He’d said that to make her face glow, and it did, even if she was a trifle skeptical of the flattery.
“Speaking of winning... by the way, whoisthe lucky bas—who is the person who managed to reserve this suite before I could? And when will we meet him or her?”