Page 74 of Devil in Her Details

Lilly padded across the room to her dressing table and retrieved her brush. She turned and held it out to him. He stared at it a moment before slowly making his way to her, taking it from her hand, their fingers brushing. She turned her back to him and settled onto the stool. After a moment passed, she glanced over her shoulder and arched a brow.

The man cursed and nodded.

With a smile, Lilly turned her head back. The heat of him enveloped her from behind before he even touched her, the sheer size of him swallowing the space around her. He reached around her shoulders first, gathering the loose strands that had fallen forward and drawing them back, sending a wave of gooseflesh rioting down both arms, a thousand more sparks erupting at the first stroke through her hair.

He began brushing her strands out with a gentleness that was hard to believe belonged to a man like him.

“Who did your brothers marry?” Lilly asked in another effort to distract herself as her scalp erupted with soft prickles, too.

“Calliope and Violet. Those aren’t their real names, but I doubt you’d know them. They lived hard lives before coming to Brighton.”

“When you said you had connections to nobles, I didn’t realize how deep,” Lilly said, her eyes shutting in pleasure.

“Not deep,” he denied. “Just enough for a favor here and there.”

“Somehow, I don’t believe it’s that simple. If your father’s a duke—”

“He’s dead, if that wasn’t clear. We have a half-brother who is the duke now, but we’re not close.”

“But he knows about you?”

The hand brushing her hair paused before starting up again. “Don’t dream us up to be something we’re not, Lilly.” His lips were suddenly on her ear. “We work outside of every law you could think of.”

Her heart missed a beat, but she still managed to quip, “Not the laws of marriage.”

He paused again, then chuckled, straightening. “You have me there.”

“And the laws of brotherhood,” she added confidently.

Another chuckle. “But that’s not a real law.”

“A law is a law, whether it’s real or not.”

“That’s too simple of a way of thinking,” he murmured.

“Is it?” Lilly countered. “You make your own laws, I take it? They’re not real, and yet I wager you abide by them.”

“You’re too smart for your own good.”

“Just keep brushing my hair.”

“I’ll wait with bated breath for my payment.”

“Certainly,” Lilly said without thinking, lulled by the warmth of him at her back, the careful way he handled her hair. A man with hands built for daggers had absolutely no right to be this gentle. It ought to be a sin, she decided. “Simply ask, and I shall provide.”

“Dangerous words, little lynx.”

“Only dangerous in the wrong hands.”

His lips were at her ear again, this time, she felt the scrape of teeth against the soft shell before a thoroughly wicked whisper. “Who says my hands aren’t the wrong hands?”

Sensibility quietly packed its things and fled.

*

Dagger’s mouth was still dry. Should he have insisted on his own chamber? A full-out war would have been less arduous than lying next to Lilly, a wall of pillows between them, knowing she was wearing his shirt.

He stared at the canopy above him in the dark and listened to her breathe. Not the breathing of a woman asleep. More like the breathing of a woman calculating. He was aware of her the way he was aware of every blade on his body when he wore them. She wore his shirt. His. The knowledge burned in his cock like an ember refusing to die.