Page 53 of Seduced By a Scoundrel

He stood slowly. “Are you telling me someone tried to abduct you?”

“Just a little?”

“Who?”

She looked up at him, looming and menacing, and felt inexplicably warm. Downright cheerful.

How odd.

“Who was it, Sybil? I want a fucking name.”

“I don’t know who it was,” she said, blinking at his language. She was quite certain she had heard him curse more in the last five minutes than in the last five years. Not that they spent much time actually talking. Apparently, she had that effect on him. “They put a sack over my head.”

She had thought he was a mountain before, but now he was an avalanche, shivering on the precipice, ready to destroy entire villages, flatten anything in his way.

His jaw clenched and the tendons in his neck moved as he struggled to hold back a kind of primal storm she had not thought him capable of. And still, despite the icy fury in his eyes and the dangerous set of his mouth, he was indescribably gentle as he tugged her to her feet and brought her to the parlor, sitting her before the fire. He wrapped a blanket around her. Stared at her and added a second blanket. He had a third in his grasp when the housekeeper rolled in the tea cart.

“Thank you, Mrs. Hawkins,” Sybil said. She glanced at Keir after he growled at her when she dared put a hand outside of her blanket cocoon. “I am beginning to feel like a sausage roll baking in a skillet.”

“Just don’t move for a full minute,” he said, pouring her tea and bringing it to her even though he had a household of people hired to do just that. “A full minute where I know you are not racing horses in the snow or being grabbed off the damned street.”

“I really am fine,” she said before sipping her tea. It was too strong and too sweet. Perfect. How did he remember how she took her tea? She took a few more sips and waited until the set of his shoulders looked less like boulders ready to crack. He wasn’t just an avalanche—he was an earthquake waiting to happen.

For her.

For any woman in her situation, no doubt, but at least a little bit for her.

She remembered this feeling.

If she grinned at him now, there was no telling what he would do.

Oh, it was tempting.

She set the cup down and wriggled free of the blankets. He scowled at her. “I’m sweltering,” she protested.

“You’re seeing the doctor when he gets here.”

“I’m hot because you wrapped me up like a Christmas pudding on the boil, not because I am ill with a fever,” she pointed out. “I went for an unexpected carriage ride, a couple of men blustered and brayed like donkeys, which is an insult to donkeys now that I think about it, because donkeys are charming. And now I’m fine. I only came here to clean up a bit so my parents would not worry. And because people were starting to stare.” She froze. “Oh dear.”

“What now? You were taken to Newgate Prison? Bedlam hospital? You saw a fairy king in Berkeley Square?”

She waved that away. “Of course not. It’s only that if anyone saw me come here, it might make things awkward with Lady Violetta. Again. I didn’t think. Again.”

“I don’t care about that.”

He would, when he had a moment to think about it. “I’m so sorry. I promise I am not doing it on purpose.”

He shook his head. “That gets more of a reaction from you than a kidnapping?” She shrugged. He scrubbed a hand down his face. “Sybil, you can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Whatever it is that gets you abducted.”

She shrugged again, even though it made the vein in his temple throb. “London is London.”

“Most ladies live their entire lives in London without so much as a head cold. Never mind stealing horses and being abducted.”

“Barely abducted.”