Afterwards they cleaned their fingers on his handkerchief.
“May I—again?” he asked. He gestured to the spiral of peel. She nodded.
He reached for the peel. The triumph Lorcan felt over the success of his gifts was nearly as unprecedented as the impulse to get them and the odd nerves he’d had about delivering them.
He’d talked Delacorte into selling him the astrolabe.
And while he was out tracking down an orange, he’d taken it upon himself to conduct another effort on her behalf. It was, in truth, more of an inquiry, delivered in a strategic ear, with a request to pass the message on through appropriate channels. Specifically the English Channel. Had she known about what he’d done, she might feel considerably less charitable toward him right now. Or perhaps not.
He didn’t know yet whether he’d been successful in his endeavor. He might never know. But he’d been driven to try.
He held the peel to his nose again and inhaled deeply again. “It helps to have a great large beak with which to sniff,” he told her. “Thank you.”
He handed it back to her.
She accepted it, put it gently down again, and studied him curiously. “Lorcan . . . have you been laboring under the delusion that symmetry is equal to beauty?”
“Laboring under the delusion that symmetry is equal to beauty,” he repeated slowly. “You do say the filthiest things, Miss Worth.”
How she fought it. But it was a joy to watch her lose a battle with a smile. “What I mean is—”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, lass, I know what it means. I always know what you mean. I was just taking a moment to savor that sentence. Every word so precise and glittering and perfectly chosen, like a diamond. And probably capable of flaying lesser men to ribbons. I’ve come to quite like it.”
Daphne gave a stunned little laugh.
“Mind you, it’s an acquired taste. A bit like how blowfish—the Japanese call it fugu—are a delicacy but they can also kill you if you don’t prepare it exactly perfectly.”
“First I’m a diamond, now I’m a blowfish?”
“Only the properly cooked sort.”
She gave a little shout of laughter, then covered her mouth with her hands, as if loath to wake the house. “And here I was so close to being charmed.”
The firelight laid a burnished path along her hair, along her smooth throat. The tips of her thick eyelashes were gold, the rest chestnut.
He found her beautiful.
The realization arrived less like a bolt from the blue and more like a feather he’d been watching drift to a landing for days now.
“Oh, you’re charmed,” he said quietly.
She went abruptly silent.
But she did not deny it.
He absently reached over and tugged the hem of her night rail over her bare toes, which were peeping out.
“Aye, Daphne, you see, I am not Hardy or Bolt. When a woman imagines a prince coming to their rescue, those are the kinds of faces they picture, aye? But I know full well the nature of my appeal to a woman, and it’s this. Have you ever stood at the edge of a cliff and looked down at the ocean crashing and foaming against it, and some mad little inner voice urges you to jump in, just to be part of something bigger and wilder and more dangerous than you are? Some mad part of you wants to know what it’s like to just . . . surrender.”
She was watching him in something like a thrall.
“It’s the appeal of a night by the docks, inky black and danger in every corner. It’s the appeal of shinnying out of a window on knotted bedsheets, even though you have no idea what might await you out there in the dark.”
He realized his voice had dropped to a mesmerist’s cadence.
She took this in. “Be that as it may . . .”
He smiled slowly at this.
“. . . objectively you are not.”
During the rather long wordless interval that followed, neither one of them blinked, and neither one of them shifted their gaze.
“Are you flirting with me, Daphne Worth?”
“I’m correcting a misapprehension.” She said it gravely.
“I see.”
A strange, unmistakable thrill was banking in him. In her way, with her honesty and precision, she was as relentless as he was. He’d never realized how erotic it could be.
“Lorcan . . . who first told you that you were ugly?”
And for a moment he pretended he hadn’t heard her.
His expression—a little smile, the relaxed crinkle at the corners of his eyes—he was certain none of it changed.
But his beat of hesitation surely revealed to her that some inner mark had been hit.
She’d surprised him.
“What makes you think anyone told me I was ugly?” he finally said. Pleasantly enough.
“The way you use the word . . . I’m reminded it’s after a fashion a sort of shield. It’s a bit like . . . oh, if someone throws a stick at you, you snatch it up and say ‘thank you for the weapon.’”
He was so stunned for a moment he couldn’t answer. It was not a question he’d ever before been posed.
“Oh, I first heard it from me da. ‘Git up, ye ugly little git.’ ‘That ugly wee bastard will amount to nothing.’ ’Twas part of my name. Ugly Wee Lorcan. Till the day he died. Didna see myself in a mirror until I was nine years old, and do you know . . . I learned something important that day. And it was that my father was wrong, for damned if I could see anything to complain about.”
She smiled at that. “So you had an epiphany.”
“Oh, certainly. If you say so.”
Her left eyebrow lifted.
“You are dying to tell me what it means, Daphne, so tell me.”
“It means a revelation, of sorts. An insight.”
“And a pretty word it is, too. Feel better now?”
She mimed mopping her brow, and he smiled.
“And an epiphany indeed it was. For if me da was wrong about that, then what manner of other things might he be wrong about? From that day forward I questioned all authority. And when I was big enough, I resisted all authority. And then . . . I made damned sure I became all authority. And then . . . I made my own laws.”
He paused, then huffed a short laugh.
“So I suppose you’re right, Daphne: every time he said that word, he handed me a weapon.”
She was quiet a moment.
“I should like to say . . .” she began carefully, “that I’m very sorry you were compelled to endure such unkindness. I imagine it was like being pelted with sharp little rocks all the time.”
Lorcan had, in fact, been pelted with sharp little rocks before as a child, because he grew up among little heathens like himself, and it was just one of the many things they did both for fun and for defense.
But the analogy disarmed him. It was apt. But he found himself hoping she’d said it because her imagination could not extend to worse violence. He wanted to shelter her naivete about such things in the way he’d never been able to protect the hopeful child he’d so briefly been.
And her eyes were haunted.
“Aye, but I warrant few of us get through life without needing to endure something, lass,” he said gently. “Or lots of somethings. Endurance builds muscle, aye? Until your very soul is brawny.” By way of illustration, he languidly curled his forearm.
Gratifyingly, her eyes fixed on the rising bulge of his bicep as if she were present for the birth of a mountain range.
“I’ll wager there’s naught I can’t endure now.” He shrugged.
She rested her cheek against her knees a moment and considered this. Then lifted her head.
“I have wondered . . .” She hesitated. Her voice lowered. “Is it muscle . . . or is it scar?”
She turned to him.
He went still. Suddenly he was wary.
“Both are useful,” he said shortly. “After a fashion.”
She flicked her eyes over his features. Then she gave a short nod—agreeing with him or merely taking in his words, he could not say—and turned back toward the fire. He felt, oddly, that she’d been seeking an answer to a question that had dogged her, and had not yet found the right person to ask.
He wondered if she was disappointed in his answer.
He was disconcerted to realize he found the notion of disappointing her distasteful.
Even cowardly.
It was a new way to feel about himself, and he didn’t like it.
And yet. These exchanges of little intimacies formed a mesh from which it was difficult to escape. His entire life so far had been predicated on knowing the routes of escape. He did not see any advantage to letting Daphne Worth take a look at his fluffy insides, so to speak.
A log languidly tipped in the fire, succumbing to its fate: consumed in flames.
He gave a short, not entirely amused laugh. “You’re not a restful woman, are you, Daphne?”
Her head whipped back toward him. Her eyes went wide and alarmed as if he’d caught her in the midst of picking his pocket.
She settled her shoulders resolutely.
“No,” she admitted, on a frayed hush. She sounded resigned, almost sorrowful. Perhaps a little bemused. As if this was some cardinal truth, something which simply could not be helped.
But she didn’t sound sorry.
And for some reason this both amused him and made him powerfully glad.
He leaned forward and suddenly, almost before he knew he was doing it, slowly drew a fingertip along the gleaming, clean line of her jaw. It was a reflex; it seemed necessary to touch the source of his confusion, his fascination, his restless irritation. The way he might attempt to puzzle out any mysterious found treasure.
She went abruptly still. As though her breath had ceased in her lungs.
But she didn’t flinch away.
Her eyes remained fixed on him.
And as his fingertips slowly glided along her skin he felt a jolt in the vicinity of his heart. Like someone had kicked in a rusty door. He was assailed by a strange, sudden rush of emotion. He could not sort out whether it was anger or impatience or yearning; it felt like a blend of all of those. It was pure and brilliant and new to him.
He curved his hand, slid it back until his fingers threaded into her hair.
And because her breath was suddenly swift and warm against his palm, and because she ever so slightly tipped her head to better fit against the cradle of it, he kissed her.
What the bloody hell are you doing, you daft cove, St. Leger thought.
He truly didn’t know. He knew how to kiss a woman senseless when their mutual goal was to be naked with her legs hooked over his shoulders within minutes.
He’d never kissed a woman in order to express something he did not know how to put into words.
Her lips felt like innocence and decadence. Crushable as petals, seductive as a feather bed. The contradiction did his head in. He felt at once like a common thief. As though this rare pleasure, like so many others before, was not meant for him.
And then her eyes fluttered closed. And at that sweet, primal signal of complicity, of desire, anticipation tensed his every muscle.
Hadn’t his credo always been “take what you can get when you can get it”?
He eased her deeper into that kiss as if it were a bath of honey and cognac. Slow, slow. So she could pull away, if she chose. So he could come to his senses, if he chose.
So that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world when her lips softly parted beneath his. And when his tongue touched hers for the first time, that little sound she made, that helpless catch in her throat—he knew it was lust hitting her blood like a drug.
That sound went straight to his cock.
He kept the pace slow. Punishingly, maddeningly—for him—so. He could not ever before remember luxuriating in a kiss, of deliberately teasing his desire to a fine, stiletto point. His cock was soon painfully hard, and this seemed an exquisite torment. They both shifted, restlessly, on the settee, accommodating ramping need. Soon their breaths mingled in swift, rough gusts, as their lips touched, and slid, and nipped and met and parted, met again.
And when her head fell back into his hands and her fingers curled into his shirt he made a thorough, lascivious plunder of the hot, wet satin of her mouth.
She met him with devastating instinct.
Every stroke of their tongues danced him closer to the very ends of his control. Until he found himself at the edge of what he sensed was a deep shocking seam of need.
That’s when his survival instincts burned through the fog of lust. Something told him if they plummeted into that there would be no getting out.
He ended the kiss as he started it: gently.
Pulled his fingers free of the silky net of her hair.
Astounded to realize his hand was trembling a little. Such were the rough tides of his blood.
He sat all the way back against the settee.
And stared at her while the room spun in lazy circles.
He watched her shoulders rise and fall as she pulled in a long breath.
Which audibly shuddered as she released it.
Like water settling when the kettle is taken off the boil.
Oh, you felt me, lass. You felt me in your body the same as I felt you.
He drew in a breath against a fresh wave of lust.
Tentatively, she rested her fingers against her lips.
Her eyes were hazed and huge, and somber, and intent.
For a second or two, they adapted to this new world. One in which, improbably and inadvisably, the two of them now knew the taste of each other.
“It will perhaps come as no surprise to you that no one finds me a restful man,” he said finally. His voice was a husk.
She didn’t reply. But her mouth did curve a very little.
And she didn’t turn away.
By now he knew she wasn’t the sort to turn away from what undid her, even if she wanted the respite.
This was the thing he’d sensed in her from the beginning, he realized. That shone from her eyes. She fair pulsed with passion. So far, her life hadn’t required any of it from her. Or perhaps life had stifled it.
He remained still so she could study him.
“Should I apologize?” He said this quietly.
Or perhaps it merely seemed quiet over the rushing of blood in his ears.
She seemed to consider this. Then she shook her head very slowly. He suspected the room was spinning for her, too.
“But I think I shall go to bed now. Good night, Lorcan.”
“Good night, Daphne,” he said politely.
He would have stood, but his cock was currently tenting his trousers.
She stood gracefully, and she moved past him toward her room, trailing the knitted coverlet like a queen in an ermine robe.
He fancied that her walk was a trifle less steady than usual.
Daphne closed the bedroom behind her.
She moved very slowly across the room, then gingerly, in stages, lowered herself to the bed as though she’d just been given a brand-new body and was still familiarizing herself with its ways of locomotion.
The kiss wasn’t done with her.
Her blood was lava and champagne. She ached—throbbed—between her legs. Her nipples were so hard it felt as though she were smuggling pearls beneath her night rail, and the whole of her night rail was suddenly an erotic caress against her humming skin. Her stomach was unsettled. She was beset by a sense of incompletion. Her entire body felt now like a treasure map to seduction: touch me here, and here, and here, it was saying. Glory awaits.
What “glory” entailed . . . well, she remained in the dark about that.
The very thought of Lorcan touching all of those parts sent such a rush of blood to her head she nearly swayed.
Imagine that. All this time, her quiet disdain for the notion of swooning had really only been ignorance. She just hadn’t been properly kissed before.
She had an even greater respect for the dangers impressed upon women now. One taste of this and a weaker woman might see ruin as a perfectly reasonable risk.
Henry had kissed her the day he’d proposed. Time and again over the years she had conjured the feeling of his lips against hers.
But his kiss had not made her feel . . . combustible. Or as though a dozen different dungeon doors hidden inside her had just been flung open.
She’d never once thought of Henry in terms of danger at all. And still he had destroyed her.
She could not, would not now imagine the Earl of Athelboro kissing her.
Lorcan might well be a former criminal from St. Giles. They were indeed different species. He was alarming and fierce both inside and outside of his clothes.
But that kiss had hardly been inevitable. She was not naturally coy. She’d had the option at any point to remove herself from the risk. She realized she had stayed awake tonight, deliberately waiting.
She’d simply wanted to be kissed by him.
And so seldom did she take what she wanted that she’d scarcely noticed that this was precisely what she’d been doing.
He had brought her an orange and an astrolabe. And he’d gently, absently, tucked her night rail over her bare toes.
Somehow this last thing seemed far more dangerous than the kiss.
The following morning, almost without thinking, Daphne spooned a little sugar into Lorcan’s cup and poured his coffee.
“Thank you,” he said. He silently gestured with a little knife that apparently practically was one of his appendages, so easily was he able to access it, and she nodded, and he cut her scone into little pieces so she could see its fluffy insides.
His scone vanished apace while hers was carefully enjoyed. Perhaps more slowly than usual, because he’d come to the table with his sleeves rolled. She was riveted by the dark hairs curling at the wrists. The glint of copper in them.
She recalled his fingers sliding along her jaw, lacing through her hair. She had to force herself not to brush her own fingers against her cheek, to relive the sensation.
They’d each had an evening to more or less soberly reflect upon the advisability of kissing each other. The answer was, of course: not advisable at all.
And because she wanted to be brave, she met his eyes, to see what she might discover there.
His gaze kindled and his lips turned up just a little at the corners. His eyes flickered to her mouth, and lingered, and his pupils flared.
He didn’t free her from his gaze until she dropped her eyes.
Heat moved into her cheeks.
And finally she stood and wandered to the window to gaze out at the ceaseless wall of rain.
She didn’t turn when he came to stand behind her. He was very close, but was careful not to touch her at all.
He was in many ways a surprisingly subtle man. As not touching her was perhaps more powerfully seductive than seizing her in his arms.
“Are you concerned about your father?” he asked.
“I suppose I am. He expected me home two days ago. Doubtless he knows the roads are impassable. But I shouldn’t want him to worry. He’s there alone, with just two servants.”
“Only two,” Lorcan mourned. Not entirely unsympathetically. Gently teasing.
By now she knew this. She quirked the corner of her mouth. The way she thought about her father was in the process of uncomfortably, irrevocably transforming. But he was still her father.
“I need to try to go out into that weather again,” he said. “A bit of legal business regarding getting paid for our last ship seized. It might be a long day.”
“Perhaps you’ll be careful about diving into any more bodies of water?”
She found that she meant it.
There was a little pause. “Would it be such a trial to remove my clothes again?”
He said it softly, conversationally. He sounded deadly serious.
She tried a laugh. It emerged somewhere between a wheeze and a sigh.
Her senses were engulfed by him. The heat of his body sank into her skin. She felt as though she echoed with longing, like struck crystal.
They stood like that in absolutely absorbed silence, their bodies silently communicating.
She heard him inhale. Slowly, at length. As if he were breathing her in.
As he went out the door, she knew it was not a question of if he kissed her again.
It was a question of when.
