“Well, Miss Knight? Are you picking my pockets or trying to grope me?” His brogue had deepened, lending a seductive tone to his voice.
“Of course I’m not trying to grope you.” She tried to sound and look appropriately indignant, but she had a bad feeling her cheeks were glowing as red as the embers in the hearth. And her voice came out disappointingly weak.
When she tried to pull away, he held her wrist in a gentle but inexorable grip. “Ah, I was so hoping you were about to have your way with me.”
“My lord, really,” she huffed.
“And you didn’t deny you were picking my pocket.”
“No.”
Victoria shifted, all too aware that she was still leaning over him, almost chest to chest. She was so close she could see the tiny lines around his eyes and the fine grain of his beard scruff where it darkened his jaw.
She was also starting to get a sore back from bending over.
“May I ask why?” he purred in that husky brogue.
“I was trying to find the key to the door. Sir, this is a rather awkward and painful posture,” she said, giving another tug against his hold.
Humor gleamed in his eyes. Blast him, he was finding this entire humiliating situation amusing.
“Of course,” he said. “Especially for a woman as starched-up and proper as you are.”
“I am not—”
Suddenly he pulled her toward him, and in the blink of an eye she was sprawled inelegantly across his lap. While her brain scrambled to catch up, he arranged her neatly across his thighs.
He hadverymuscular thighs, ones that she felt quite easily through his tight-fitting breeches and the too-thin fabric of her gown and shift.
“My lord, what are you doing?” she finally managed to gasp.
“Correcting your awkward posture. Surely this position is much easier on your back.”
She stared at him, taking in the wicked curve of his sensual mouth. She should be shrieking the house down around their ears, and yet all she wanted to do was snuggle closer.
Clearly, she had lost her mind.
Victoria tried once more to gather her wits as well as her morals, which had gone missing the moment he touched her. “My lord, I only came in here to check on you, not engage in . . .”
Well, she really didn’t know quite how to classify the moment. The earl was not a man to dally with any woman, nor did this feel remotely like that frightening experience with Thomas Fletcher. She felt instinctively that if she tried to scramble off his lap, he would make no effort to prevent her.
Arnprior leaned forward and kissed the tip of her nose. “Engage in what, Miss Knight?” he murmured before brushing his warm lips across her cheek.
When she recovered from that shock, she tried to summon a stern look. “Sir, I believe you are not at all yourself tonight.”
His eyebrows arched up in an offended lift. “If you think I’m trying to seduce you because I’m drunk, Miss Knight, you are very wrong. I may be a bit jug-bitten, but I have not clipped the King’s English.”
She frowned. “I have no idea what that means.”
He leaned in, nose to nose. Her heart galloped around her chest.
“It means I am in perfect command of my faculties,” he whispered.
“I cannot agree with you.” She began to wriggle, trying to communicate her desire to get off his lap. It seemed to produce the opposite effect, though, since he let out a strangled groan and held on even tighter.
A moment later, she knew why. A quite formidable erection was now pressing into her backside. “Sir! I think you’d best let me go before something untoward occurs.”
God, she sounded like a complete ninny.
