She bit her lip. Torment and regret and apology flashed in her widened eyes.
His rank and ramping incredulity fair pulsed during the ensuing silence.
“If you think implying I’m not a gentleman will hurt my feelings, I’ve good news for you,” he said, his voice low and silky. “My heart is as hard as my thighs.” He paused, then added, “Howisyour hand this morning, by the way?”
A fresh swath of hot color joined the first over her cheekbones.
For a moment he thought he’d vanquished her aplomb.
“I confess I was less concerned about devastating you than I was about committing a lapse of good manners,” she said finally, coolly.
He hated to admit it, but he liked everything about this sentence, perverse man that he was. Its elegance, its humor, its bite.
“So, you’re suggesting one can’t be a gentleman while also strolling about with their sleeves rolled up to reveal their strong, sinewy forearms.” He feigned confusion.
“Not in front of women to whom they aren’t actually married.” She explained this gently and apologetically, a missionary to a Heathen.
Which might have been enraging, if it was not so hilarious.
He was peculiarly touched by her gentleness.
“Probably because their scrawny aristocratic forearms embarrass them,” he suggested.
They locked gazes for a tick or two.
“No doubt,” she humored.
He smiled at that.
And for a moment, she also seemed in danger of smiling, too. But she was clinging to tension the way she’d clung to that sheet out the window of the building she’d escaped.
He gestured to the chair opposite her, mutely asking for permission to sit. Lady Worth was just going to need to endure the primitive assault of his bare arms.
She nodded cautiously.
On the table sat two scones on two little white plates. Two cups flanked a carafe of coffee. A little bowl of sugar and the little pitcher of cream appeared untouched.
He peered and discovered that she took her coffee black. This was a little like discovering she drank whiskey neat.
He would usually take good coffee however he could get it, but he liked a pinch of sugar in his, so he spooned a bit into the bottom of his cup.
And to his surprise, she lifted the pot and poured for him.
Her wrists were delicate, her fingers slender. The deft prettiness of the gesture disarmed him, and he was not generally in favor of feeling disarmed.
“Thank you,” he said pointedly, to prove he was not an ape.
She nodded and returned to her letter. A little dent of concentration had appeared between her straight, slim, emphatic dark brows.
“By the way, if you’d rather not look at my arms, you can look me in the eyes, instead, Lady Worth.”
With a great ironic show of humoring him, she lowered her letter and tipped her head back.
Her eyes were almost golden in the morning light, and they canted a bit at the outer corners, like almonds, or perhaps teardrops. The elegant arch of her cheekbones reminded him of cathedral windows. Her mouth was wide and pale pink and soft looking, her jaw a clean, sharp angle, her nose straight and perhaps a bit long.
She wasn’t the sort of pretty everyone would agree upon, he decided. The uncontroversial, indisputable sort. The sort that their proprietresses, Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Durand, were.
He was reminded, for some reason, of a bust he’d once seen of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who’d been a powerful queen. Though he thought this was more about the way she held herself, and her general air of purposefulness and confidence, as though she was accustomed to never being free of either authority or burden.