“‘Betting pool’?” he repeated, scandalized.
She nodded, chortling. “Malcolm started it.”
“So, Malcolm stays in the family bucket,” Jasper said, turning around her reasoning in his head, “but now I’ve moved. What about the others?”
“What about them?” She blinked, wrinkling her brow. “You think after sampling you, I want to go have a scoop of Rhys to test some yet-unawakened curiosity?”
He winced at the concept. “No. That doesn’t seem likely. But that Lem fellow. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he also has an arse on him.”
She gave a short, sharp laugh. “Ihavenoticed. It interests me not a whit. And keep your eyes off other arses, Townsend. At least for a while.”
He was still frowning. “But why not consider Lem that way? He’s very good-looking. You understand one another. He clearly is loyal to you.”
“No,” she said again, shaking her head and giving a little shudder. “Not ever. He is too much like family.Actualfamily. If you think Rhys is unlikely, then by necessity, Lem is too.”
“And I’m not?” he asked, raising his brows.
“You are…” She trailed off, tilting her head to the side like she was considering it. “You always were Malcolm’s, above anyone else’s. You have been a constant in my life, but there wasalways a stair between us because of that, and because you are older.”
He wanted to argue about Lem a little more, but he couldn’t think of anything he could say that wouldn’t just sound petulant, so he resisted.
“Why do you always stay in the parlor?” Libba asked, puncturing his glower. “Mal and I were debating that recently. Why did you never take a guest room?”
“Because I was half convinced that if I let Lady Selwyn turn a bed down for me, I’d end up a ward too,” he said without thinking. “I like my parents. I didn’t want them to think I’d do that.”
“They don’t know whether you’re sleeping on a feather mattress or the floor when you stay at the Rest, though,” she pointed out, looking amused. “Did Willa offer that to you?”
He hesitated. “Not specifically, no. That baroness always scared the soul out of me, but she was good to me too.”
“She had a formidable presence,” Libba agreed wistfully. “All right, talk of my dead foster mother has sufficiently worsened my parch. If you would?”
“But you cannot move,” he said, checking with her, in both of her glittering, brown eyes. “There is more to… to say.”
“Jasper,” she said fondly, giving him a caress and then a little smack on the cheek. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
They fell intopassion twice more.
Once in the night, groggy and giggling as they explored with hands and mouths and different positioning. She climbed atop him. She touched him. She kissed him. And they shared laughter and teasing until those things were lost to the power of something stronger.
Then again in the early light of dawn, half-dreaming and boneless and languid, drawn together like inseparable forces, unrushed and still, somehow unquenched.
It seemed that they had talked for hours in the darkened room, but Libba, upon fully waking, could not remember what had been so important that they had avoided the bigger things, the necessary things, that they ought to have been discussing.
At least here in the end, she could see him fully, dusted with the soft glow of dawn. She could run her eyes along him without concern or excuse and memorize every dip and freckle of his form.
He lay there. And he let her do it, a soft smile hovering over his mouth that looked more fond than smug.
In reverse, Libba thought to herself, she would have been smug.
“I might stay in today,” he said, arching and stretching his arms out, every tendon beneath them straining against his skin.“I can’t imagine focusing on consignments. I’d say you could stay with me, but…”
“‘But’?” she prompted, sharply, her eyes narrowing a hair.
He grinned at her then, flashing his teeth. “But you threatened your troupe with a full, five-act gauntlet of understudy swapping today.”
“Oh, blast,” she said, blinking and frowning. “You’re right. I did.”
