Page 39 of Better Off Wed

With a sigh, he threw his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. “I’ll fetch your gown.”

“Oh, don’t bother,” she replied airily. “A dressing gown will do. More authentic to the part, don’t you agree?”

He didn’t bother to ask which part she fancied herself performing at present, didn’t bother to argue at all. Instead, he fumbled his way into the dressing room, lit a candle, and returned bearing it and her borrowed dressing gown draped over one forearm.

Her face glowed with eagerness. “We’re going to find something, I just know it. You’ll have to carry me down the stairs, I’m afraid,” she said as she took the heavy silk garment from him and draped it around her shoulders. “I can hobble across the floor, but the steps—”

“Need I remind you that hobbling across the floor nearly got you concussed?”

She made a dismissive noise and shook back the overlong sleeves to hold up her arms as she had last night, like a child demanding to be lifted. “Ready?”

Absent a second dressing gown, he was still clad only in breeches and shirt, not even stockings. “Don’t you think I ought to dress, at least?”

Eyes sparkling mischievously, she looked him up and down—or perhaps that was only the flicker of candlelight in their pewter depths. “Not at all.”

With more force than necessary, he thumped the candlestick onto the bedside table, tossed back the coverlet, and scooped her from the bed. Ah, God. It was torture when she wriggled to settle herself in his arms, her curls tickling the underside of his chin, and his biceps burning.

The sweetest torture imaginable.

At his first step, she protested. “The candle?”

“Can you carry it without setting me on fire, do you think?”

She snagged her lip between her teeth, poorly disguising a grin. “Most likely.”

Against his better judgment, he let her snatch up the brass candlestick and light their way from the room. After all, if his judgment were sound, he would never have agreed to this midnight excursion in the first place.

Then again, would it have been any wiser to lie beside her in bed, holding her hand and dreaming impossible dreams?

* * * *

Lord Thornton’s library was a spectacle unlike any Laura had ever seen; yet she had eyes only for Jeremy.

He had deposited her on a cushioned window seat and set about lighting more candles, his bare feet padding across the thick Turkish carpet in near silence. She could see the dusting of dark hair on his calves and on his forearms where he’d rolled back the billowing sleeves of his shirt. The thought that she’d invited—nay, insisted upon—such shocking dishabille ought to have made her blush. But only when he turned toward her again did she tear her gaze away, focusing instead on her fingers, tangled in the tie of her dressing gown.

She could have found fault with him, if she’d wished. Even with his perfect face, for she’d glimpsed the tiniest thread of a silvery scar above one eyebrow, and his smile was ever so slightly crooked. He was slender of build and not much above average height; whence came the strength to lift and carry her with such ease, she was not sure, though she had her suspicions. If she were ever fortunate enough to see him in nothing more than the fitted white breeches of his officer’s uniform, she was wicked enough to believe those suspicions would be proved right.

And of course, his biggest fault was that he had not yet been entirely honest with her, about why he’d come after Lady Sterling or what he was meant to do with her now that he’d found her.

Not this, she felt certain, as he began to peruse the shelves on her behalf, not even knowing what he sought.

She took no particular pleasure in finding fault with men. Frequently, she wished they did not make it so easy to do. Her father, his perpetually drunken chums, every man from whom she’d stolen: Penhurst, Thornton, and the rest—any one of them would have been sufficient explanation for her determined spinsterhood.

But the truth was, she still nursed a flicker of hope in her breast—the foolish, foolish hope that she might one day meet a man who deserved her. A man of humor, grace, a modicum of intelligence. A man who believed in justice, and in Lady Sterling’s cause.

And something about Lord Sterling—oh, but the gods did like a laugh now and again, didn’t they?—had fanned a near-dying ember to full flame.

He reached for a book on a high shelf, and through the fine cambric of his shirt, she watched the muscles of his back bunch and stretch.

Or perhaps that heat at her core, curling into her limbs, setting her cheeks aflame…perhaps it was not hope. Perhaps it had another source entirely.

She set her attention to the room, scolding herself for forgetting why they’d come. The candlelight was insufficient to make out many details, but Thornton’s taste was not subtle. She imagined the twisted delight such a man would take in ordering a girl like Dora to the library to fetch his tea, or suggesting poor Miss Godfrey search for a book for her pupils’ lessons.

Laura was no prude. If Miss Godfrey sneaked down from the schoolroom of an afternoon to study the painting on the opposite wall, or the maids argued over whose turn it was to build up the library fire because they wished to gawk at the pair—or perhaps it was a trio?—of sculpted figures on the mantel, Laura saw no shame in it. But to have such sights thrust upon them, unknowing and unwilling, and then to have that experience followed by Thornton thrusting his—

“Are you chilly there by the window?”

Her thoughts, not the temperature, had made her shudder. “A little. But I’ll be all right.”