She was being thrust into too many new experiences over and over, and each one a fresh shock, a bit like his dip in the Thames.
But she was hardly a child.
So then. Time to rapidly strip naked the big, strange man she’d locked out of the suite the night before.
“Do you mind if I...?” she asked shortly. She knew she was already blushing.
“B-b-believe me, if I’d a choice...” he said grimly.
She shifted the coverlet she’d flung over him to hang off his back like a cape. He clutched it in one hand.
She pulled in a long breath, as if she was about to enter an airless cave, and got right to it. Her fingers clumsy with nerves, she peeled up the long tails of his shirt from where it clung like seaweed to his trousers. She could feel him quaking. Sympathy knotted her stomach.
Submitting to her help was probably well nigh unendurable for him.
From there she was compelled to pluck the shirt free from where it clung transparently to muscles which, from the looks of things, were as hard and precisely hewn as the ruby in his earring. He quivered where her fingers brushed his chilled flesh. His skin was shockingly soft over all of that hard muscle.
Her breath snagged at the contrast. Her eyes burned with peculiar emotion, not all of which was embarrassment.
Her heart clenched.
It seemed wrong. By rights he ought to have been made of iron.
And just like that, her hands were like leaves in a windstorm. Visibly trembling.
Moreover, there was no way he wouldn’t notice.
She wished she could transfer some of the heatin her cheeks into the huge shivering man. The fact that she could not speed through the whole affair, and was compelled instead to painstakingly peel his shirt upward like a venetian blind, gave the whole thing an absurd air of ceremony, as if she was unveiling a statue.
She tried crossing her eyes to spare him any ogling she was tempted to do while he was in this vulnerable state. She succeeded only in moderately blurring the gradual reveal of great curving mounds of chest lightly furred with the manliest of black, curly hair. More of which, dear God, trailed up from the band of his trousers.
It was all searingly new and almost wholly unanticipated to her. Unnervingly, primitively magnificent, equal parts beautiful and ugly, intimidating in its implicit raw power. It flooded her senses; she braced herself against it, tensing every muscle, clenching her teeth.
She couldn’t repress her sigh of relief once she got the shirt up around his clavicle.
“Lorcan, can you raise your arms?” Her voice sounded strange in her own ears.
He tried. They were stiff; he needed help.
Together they levered his big arms up as if they were pump handles.
The massive gleaming mounds of his shoulders were revealed. Her head officially went as light as if she’d been punched.
She cleared her throat. “All right, that’s done. Let’s have this all the way off.” She’d tried for brisk and jocular.
But her voice emerged at a flutelike pitch.
She took a fortifying breath. And then another. As if she was preparing to rescue him from the Thames.
She averted her eyes from the vast, stunning bareness of his torso as she pulled up his shirt only to meet the gaze of Gordon the cat, who was unabashedly staring at her.
For a fraught moment Lorcan’s face vanished in the wet, white folds of linen, like a mummy or a ghost. Dot might have indeed fainted clean away if she’d gotten a look at him.
“Help,” he said through the shroud.
After a harrowing moment of struggle, Daphne was able to reach up and pull the shirt over the back of his head, where it swung damply. Briefly he resembled a large hairy nun before it dropped to the floor.
His cravat was quickly dispensed with, as well.