Page 72 of Seduced By a Scoundrel

He fell in love all over again.

He would have said so, plans and strategies be damned, but her stomach growled. She pressed a hand above her belly button. He frowned. “You’re hungry.”

“A bit.”

He was already off the bed, pulling on his breeches. He tossed over her dressing gown, which was draped on a chair. She was appallingly messy. It should have annoyed him to no end. Instead, he found it endearing.

He pulled her to her feet when she was not moving as quickly as he liked.

“Keir, I’m hungry, I’m not in danger of expiring.”

“Not while I’m around,” he agreed. “Are you getting up or am I carrying you to the kitchens?”

She huffed out a startled laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m hardly a waif to be plucked up off the ground.”

“Carried it is.”

It was one thing to carry her a few paces outside of a gentlemen’s club and another to carry her throughout the house and down two flights of stairs.

“You can’t be serious,” she said, even though she was thoroughly enjoying it. “Put me down.”

“Certainly not.”

“You’ll hurt yourself.”

He only raised his eyebrow in that imperious way of his. She shook her head, before resting it on his sturdy shoulder. His arms flexed around her. She dragged her fingernails through the soft pelt of hair on his bare chest just because she wanted to. Because she could. She nearly purred.

“Keep that up and I’ll stop right here and take you in this hall. We’ll utterly scandalize that portrait of Joan of Arc.”

“Believe me, she’s already scandalized.” Sybil nuzzled his throat, then bit his earlobe. His breath went harsh. “I dare you.”

“You are incorrigible.”

“Utterly.” And this was the easy part of what lay between them. The attraction, the need. The fire. That, she understood.

Keir turned his head and kissed her, hard, quick. Possessive. “But you’re still hungry, so you’ll be fed first.”

He ducked under the doorjamb into the kitchen, as if he did this sort of thing all of the time. Maybe he did. Perhaps he had spent all the years they were not on speaking terms carrying women around his house in his giant arms as though they were goose down.

But she didn’t think so.

Something had happened in that complicated brain of his when she told him she would not marry him. Some puzzle had been solved.

Marriage was not the answer, of course. He would realize that in the cold light of the morning. She was still a foundling. A spinster. Still referred to as That Girl, with a shake of the head, even though she was not a girl and had not been one for some time. Some of that was the persona of her own making. Some of it was not.

But for now, she was the woman who knew that he growled deep in his chest and shuddered when she took him in her mouth.

Again, it was enough.

She did not know whom she was arguing with, because the insufferable mountain of a man was not discussing any of it. He was clearly on a mission. He set her down on the long table near the grate, where the fire had fallen to coals, and urged them back to flames. She memorized the way he crouched, the play of muscles under his skin. The material of his breeches tight over his thighs. The light gilding his strong jaw. She wanted to live in this perfect, quiet moment.

The kitchen was not fussy or large, but it was clean and comfortable. There was a rocking chair by the grate, shelves of jars containing staples like flour and salt and boxes of spices, jelly molds, butter stamps, and copper pans hanging on the walls. There was a cat, Parsnip, who eyed them disdainfully for interrupting her rest and stalked away down the hall to the housekeeper’s private parlor. It was chilly, but not unbearable. It smelled of smoke and sugar.

“There’s cake in the blue tin just there,” Sybil pointed out, since she had tried to reach it herself but Keir had immediately turned his head to growl at her.

She still hopped down from the table to fetch the wheel of cheese and the last of the previous day’s bread, wrapped in a cloth. Mostly because the stern, disapproving look he sent her never failed to make her tingle.

When the water in the kettle boiled, he wrapped the handle and carried it to the teapot, pouring it over the leaves Sybil had already put inside. She brought out the honey and two clay mugs, not at all the fancy bone china the Marquess Blackburn was used to drinking from. “Finally,” he approved. “Something I won’t be terrified of snapping in two.”