Page 59 of How the Earl Entices

“Something tells me that you want to do far more than watch,” she grumbled warily.

He feigned wounding. “Am I so easy to read?”

“Like a library.” When he began to protest, she continued, “With every book spread open wide.” She cut him off before he could interrupt, “Beneath magnifying glasses.”

He threw back his head and laughed. Sweet Lucifer, how much he enjoyed sparring with her! More than with any other woman he’d ever known. Spirited, sassy, so very quick—a man could cut himself on that sharp mind of hers. A beautiful body to arouse the senses, a wit to challenge the intellect, and all of it wrapped in a woman whose mystery only served to draw him more strongly.

With a grimace of irritation, she shooed him away. “Go on! Go!” She took his shoulders, turned him around, and pushed him away. “Out from behind the screen!”

Calling out as he walked away, he repeated her words from Sea Haven, “You don’t have anything I haven’t seen before.”

A high-pitched growl of frustration broke across the room. Seconds later, a wet flannel smacked him in the middle of his back.

“Unlike all those other women you’ve known,” she called out, safely hidden from view behind the screen as she undressed—and for the moment safe from his retaliation—“Iprefer to bathe in peace.”

“Allthose other women?” He bent over to snatch up the wet facecloth and set it aside on the dresser. He enjoyed raising her ire more than he should, but he couldn’t help himself. She was beautiful simply passing from moment to moment, possessing more presence than most of the women in Mayfair. But when she was angry, she was downright glorious.

A part of him wanted nothing more than to enrage her, just to see how magnificently she’d glow.

“I cannot even begin to imagine how many there must have been in your life,” she taunted.

The sound of softly splashing water arrested him in mid-step. His gut tightened reflexively at the image that played through his mind of Grace slipping seductively into the warm bath. Naked.

“Thousands and thousands,” he quipped.Not a single one of them like you.The raw honesty of that thought startled him.

When she laughed, he smiled wickedly to himself and turned around to look at the screen. The temptation to walk back to her was nearly irresistible.

“More like half the women in England,” she corrected amid more soft splashes and the exotic scent of jasmine wafting its way across the room to him, “if rumors are to be believed.”

“Rumors can’t be trusted,” he threw back wryly. “It was far more than that.”

“Well, youarea rake, after all.”

And who areyou?Besides the woman who was driving him to distraction?

He rubbed at the tension knotting at his nape and trailed his gaze around the room, hunting for any clues to her identity that she might have accidentally left in view…Nothing. After all this time with her, he was still no closer to learning her identity, and the more time they spent together, the more she drove him mad. The most alluring yet mysterious woman he’d ever met,and the most damnably frustrating.

Tonight, they would walk into the lion’s den. He needed to be able to trust her, to place his life in her hands. How did he do that, when he didn’t even know who the hell she was?

His gaze fell onto the bed. He shook his head at the juxtaposition of the threadbare travel bag she’d carried with her halfway across England sitting next to a satin gown that cost more than Alice Walters would make in ten years at her apothecary shop. She was a daughter to one gentleman, a wife to another…yet also a mother who willingly became a fisherman’s widow to protect her child. How did he reconcile the two very different parts of her life?

Who the blazeswasshe?

Throwing a glance over his shoulder at the screen, he crossed to the bed. “If you need any help washing your back, just ask,” he called out, continuing with their taunting flirtation because she expected it. “I’m very good at washing women’s backs.” Only a fleeting guilt pricked at him as he searched her clothes. “And other places.”

“With your reputation, I would have thought you’d prefer your women dirty.”

He smiled at that barb—and at the frumpy night rail as he set it aside. He paused to consider her belongings, all spread out before him. There was nothing there to give any clues to who she was. Not even a monogrammed hairbrush or hand mirror. “Is that how you prefer your men? Disheveled, sweaty…” He grimaced painfully at his own uncontrolled behavior around her. “Shamelessly eager and panting for you.”

From behind the screen, there was a silent pause. His arrow had stuck home.

What he wouldn’t have given for a glimpse of her at that moment, sitting there naked and stunned that he dared say something so blatantly sexual to her, her sensuous lips parted and her eyes glazed with arousal. Would her nipples be puckered into hard, little points, ready and aching to be suckled? Would her bare thighs be warm and slick with soap? Would he taste the jasmine clinging to her skin, the tangy taste of it on his tongue when he licked down her body, until he had to duck his head into the water to reach—

“I prefer them to be gentlemen,” she countered, once she’d found her voice.

Defying the softly splashing water’s siren song, he took a moment to gather himself. “Then that leaves me out.”

She gave a loud, haughty sniff and sarcastically drawled, “Pity.”