Page 61 of Seduced By a Scoundrel

“We keep odd hours,” Sybil explained, untying the knot of her cape ribbons. “There’s no sense in keeping everyone up all night just to open a door for us. I’m perfectly capable of moving my arms. I’ve been doing so for nearly thirty years.” She was supposed to hide her age, to be demure about her spinsterhood.

Not in this house.

“There is sense in it when someone just tried to abduct you,” Keir grumbled.

“We have sturdy locks.” She took his hat and his gloves and tossed them carelessly onto a chair. “And footmen.”

“Footmen.”

“Aye,” one of the footmen said, appearing at the end of the hall. “All right, miss?”

“Yes, thank you, Peter.”

“Peter, is it?” Keir asked, peering down the hall. Sybil saw the exact moment he noticed the other man’s military bearing, the knife at his boot. He nodded. “Good man.”

Sybil took Keir to the parlor because it seemed a bit brave to drag him to her bedchamber and beg him to undress her. With his teeth. Or to let her undress him. With her teeth. Not that they had never done so, just not like this. Not without a clear escape route.

Keir followed her, no doubt perfectly aware of the fact that this was scandalous enough for a man like him. A deserted parlor with a fire burning low and snow at the window was precisely a place where a lady was seduced by a scoundrel. If she was lucky.

“And I’m not the scoundrel here,” he said. “That distinction belongs entirely to you.”

He was not precisely wrong, she supposed.

How delightful.

Sybil tried to get her wayward thoughts under control as she had not even realized she had spoken out loud “Just so you know, our cook is French.”

“I should have guessed.”

“And I shouldn’t like to bother her for tea at this hour.”

“Lured by the promise of tea and shortbread and left wanting.” He shook his head, as if disappointed. “Worse and worse.”

“I do have shortbread, though.” Sybil went to the side table, always well stocked with whisky and brandy and chocolate fondants. Also: knives, sharpened hatpins, bundles of herbs with various unsavory uses. Hopefully, Keir would not notice those. “And whisky.”

“Sybil?”

“Yes?”

“May I tell you a secret?”

She turned to stare at him. “You have secrets?”

That fond twitch of his mouth again. “Everyone has secrets, Sybil.”

As he was standing in a house filled to the rafters with secrets, she did not disagree. “And yours is?”

He bent his head closer, eyes shining, tone heavy with the gravity of what he was about to impart. She held her breath because he was so close and she liked it so much. And he never told her secrets anymore. “I do not care for whisky,” he said.

She gasped on a chuckle. “Blasphemy.”

He nodded gravely. “Don’t tell my Scottish granny. Now, she loved whisky.”

Sybil shook her head, clicking her tongue. “You’ve given me a dangerous power over you, Keir Montgomery. Was that wise, do you think?”

“You already have power over me,” he said, but he murmured it so softly that she was half convinced she had misheard him.

Pity.