She turned back to him, her smile still in place.
“Why do you want me?”
She went still. She studied him, lamplight turning her eyes into enigmatic pools.
And then she just curved her lips in a little smile.
And then she pushed back her chair and stood to leave.
As she passed him, she bent slightly and whispered in his ear, “Because you wantme.”
Chapter Sixteen
It was a negotiation now. Of that, Tristan was certain.
Should nothappen again, she’d said.Ought notwas also true.
Will nothad not been said by either of them, and this was the lever he would use.
She would notbehave heedlessly. She was a grown woman, and hardly a virgin. And it wasn’t heedless, if one deliberately made a choice to take a lover.
He suspected she knew that well.
She wasn’t to know that he was a ruthlessly subtle negotiator and he knew how to identify an opportunity and take the advantage.
Which was what he did the very next morning. He’d just turned the key in the lock of his room and was about to run downstairs to meet Massey when he saw her.
Arms full of folded linens.
She’d paused in a rectangle of wan light thrown in from the windows in the alcove on his floor. She was staring down at the street wearing a complicated expression. Wry, wistful. Pale shadows beneath her eyes.
“Tolerable day, isn’t it, Lady Derring?”
It was the best one could say about London weather at most times.
She gave a start. Her face lit, then went uncertain, then turned swiftly back toward the window, cheeks a little pink.
“The gentleman who relieved himself against the building certainly thought so.”
“If only he’d had a chamber pot painted in periwinkles, it might have been more picturesque.”
She gave a short laugh. But her expression remained wistful. Her posture was a trifle tense. It was both his presence, he suspected, and the fact that Lady Derring wanted the world to be one way, and it wasn’t. A list of rules notwithstanding.
“Have you plans for the day, Captain Hardy?” Her voice had gone lulled and soft. This was what his presence did to her now.
“Oh, yes. Various bits of business about town. I’m to meet a friend for a meal.”
How did it happen that the distance between them all but dissolved in a few seconds? He hadn’t moved and neither had she, not perceptibly. But suddenly he could feel the heat of her body against his. Like water sinking into earth.
But he closed his eyes briefly, and breathed her in.
A strand of hair had slipped from her cap to lie against her cheek. And his fingers, as if of their own accord, went up to delicately lift it away, tucking it behind her ear, then trailing down her throat. Which was as precisely as satiny as he’d dreamed.
Her eyes fluttered closed; her lashes shuddered on her cheeks.
And her breath was coming short.
“Imagine,” he whispered close to her ear, as his finger delicately traced the whorls of it, then skimmed to where her heart swiftly thumped. He watched the gooseflesh rise along her throat. “That my fingers are my tongue, and my lips. Imagine that there is nothing at all between you and me, not nankeen, not muslin. Just my skin against yours. My hands and mouth discovering every part of your body. Imagine me taking you here... now... where anyone may come upon us.”