Page 52 of Devil in Her Details

Lilly had a foreboding suspicion about this man on her bed.

He hadn’t moved.

Hadn’t made any indication that he intended to move.

He had settled in as though he had simply decided that this was where he belonged and the matter was done. No apology. No acknowledgment that this was, in fact, her chamber. Just that steady presence that seemed to expand to fill whatever room he occupied, and those dark eyes tracking her every movement with the patience of a man who had nowhere else to be.

She also had foreboding about the frantic beat of her heart, too. That whatever thrill had taken hold at the prospect would win over good sense. Something she still refused to examine directly. The way one refused to look straight at the sun. She was fairly certain that if she looked at it directly, she would have to acknowledge something she had absolutely no intention of acknowledging tonight.

“Do you mean to spend the night?” she asked directly.

“I do.”

Hah. She’d dealt with devils before. The biggest one being Calvington. By every measure, Dagger Fury ought to tower over him in that regard. By all rights, he was the more frightening prospect. And yet he wasn’t. He was a peculiarity that defied all sense, since he felt like the smallest devil.

A deception of the eye.

A handsome optical illusion.

A phantom of the imagination.

He was all those things. Deceptive. Handsome. Phantom.

But she was not scared.

She could be just as shameless.

She reached for the tin, pried the lid open, and dipped her finger into the salve with the businesslike efficiency of a woman who was absolutely, completely unaffected. She settled beside him on the bed, the mattress shifting beneath her weight, her body moving almost imperceptibly toward his—gravity, nothing more!—and the heat of his body beckoned her even closer.

Lord, Lilly! You’ve tended wounds before.

She repeated this over and over as she applied the salve to the bruise with careful, even strokes.

But those eyes . . . Oh how they burned! The man said nothing, but she could feel his gaze hot on her.

He was as hard as he looked.

That was her first observation. The second was that the bruise was an almost incongruous mark on skin pulled taut over muscle that had clearly been earned in back alleys or the like rather than gentlemen’s pursuits. And yet the flesh underneath her fingertip was smooth. Smoother than she’d expected.

“Does it hurt?” she said without looking up.

“Would you stop if it did?”

“No.” She bit the inside of her lip, once again becoming acutely aware that he had not looked away from her. “You could close your eyes,” she muttered.

He chuckled, and she felt the sound beneath her fingers.

“Why would I do that?”

To begin with, “It would be less distracting.”

“For you? Because I quite like the distraction.”

She had no answer for that. Insufferable panther. She smoothed the salve with perhaps more focus than strictly necessary, very deliberately not looking at his face, which meant she was looking at everything else instead.

This had been a terrible idea. A shameless, terrible idea that she had walked into with her eyes open. Her gaze took in the rest of his chest, almost wishing—no, definitely wanting to drag her fingers over the planes of all the muscle. Should she? Could she? Dare she?

Yes, she dared. And she did just that.