“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “It’s you.”
That took the wind from his sails.
“It’s exceedingly late, Miss Penrose, what are–”
“I study moths.”
Jack tipped his head back, stared to the heavens, to the stars, to the fates and Saint Ninnidh, as the Duchess of Rakecombe would say, and wondered why the hell they all enjoyed making sport of him so much.
Was he purely on earth for their ridicule?
“I realise,” she began, goggling at a grey insect, “that some people think they are dull but in fact, they’re–”
“Wonderful inhabitants of the night,” he continued with a sigh, quoting Rainham’s explanation for his choice of codename for Jack. “Light on the wing, silent in flight, quick and inventive. Masters of disguise. They hide their true self behind a façade of imitation…”
Absurd.
However, his words caused Miss Penrose to lower her magnifying glass. “Why yes,” she said, gawking at him as thoughhewas the one with antennae sticking from his head.
It would seem she was no longer unsettled by his attentions as her voice was husky but strong with none of that rasp he had noticed when they’d first met.
He kneeled on the grass by her side and peered at the sheet. “Why do they seek the light? It only hurts them,” he asked, always having wondered.
“No one knows for sure. I think it has something to do with navigation, like sailors and the stars. After all, it is I who is making them confused with my false light. Otherwise, they would spend the night feeding and m-mating…but maybe ’tis silly.”
One should never mention mating to a rogue. It conjured images of scorched nights and a mesh of bodies. Miss Penrose’s legs wrapped around his waist, hands knotting her hair to a messy tangle as he–
“Show me some moths,” he pleaded. Surely lepidopterous insects would quash any improper thoughts. “Do you pin them into one of those little cases.”
“Eugh, no!” She glared at him. “I don’t know why gentlemen feel the need to do that, the need to subdue nature.” She scrunched her nose. “Actually, I do, it’s to feel superior. Anyhow, I find they stay still long enough on the sheet to be studied, and then I write my observations. I may attempt a watercolour tomorrow. They are created for flying, Lord Winterbourne, and I could not pin one down, even in death.”
She peeped oddly at him and he wondered if they were still talking of moths.
“Call me Jack,” he murmured. “Please.” In this moon-tipped dark, her whole body was cast in grey light – such a beautiful and beguiling colour. Had he once considered it dull?
“Why?”
“Because…” He reached for some practised line of seduction, some droll retort, but… “I always envisage my father when I hear that title, and he was an utter blackguard. I dislike it.”
She smiled. “It would be my pleasure, Jack. And you must call me Tamsyn.”
Why did he feel as if he’d just won fifty pounds at Ascot?
“Now, Jack,” she said, pointing at a puny grey fellow, “this is a Marbled Green orCryphia muralis.”
On closer inspection, he saw it wasn’t grey at all, but a subtle moss green with black jagged lines. “Curious markings.” It stalked the sheet as though a duke.
“Moths camouflage themselves to blend in and some, like the Marbled Green, have patterns to break up their outline. You’d never see him against a lichen-covered rock. Hidden in plain sight.”
She continued talking, pointing out the various names and body parts, but Jack’s brainbox had wandered on. He stared at her lips as she talked, her hands as she pointed, her hair as it lapped her shoulders.
Everything about Tamsyn was…enticing. He could stay out here all night watching her natter on about moths.
“And this one, as Linnaeus catalogued in hisSystema Naturae, is theFoppiso magnificofromSmellium Londinium,” she whispered, pointing at a huge fellow with furry bits.
“A what?”
He’d not been listening, Tamsyn had gathered some time ago. He’d been…gawping.
