Page 137 of Faceless

“Such as?” He scoffed lightly. “What could be more pressing than this?”

“Such as arranging the rest of our day. You may speak for the afternoon, if you wish, but I have decided what I am going to do to you tonight.”

He went still beside her. He could not help it. He felt the smile begin somewhere he had given up trying to govern and arrive, despite his best efforts, at the corner of his mouth.

“Have you, now?”

“I have given it considerable thought.”

“This is what I admire most in a woman. Her devotion to thought and research.”

The corner of her mouth lifted. He had been watching for it; he saw the lift and knew himself to be in trouble before she had said another word.

“You are going to find it very difficult to object.”

“I generally do.”

“This time I have a strategy.” She reached for a book on the table beside her and turned a few pages without reading them. “I am going to begin with that thing you have been pretending not to like.”

“I am not pretending —”

“You are.” Still not looking at him. “It is one of the least convincing performances I have ever witnessed, and I was acquainted with my mother for twenty years.”

The laugh got out of him before he could stop it — a brief, helpless huff against the top of her head. He could not have said why this exact register of her wit, used on this exact subject, undid him so reliably; he only knew that it did. She set the book down at last and turned to look at him fully, and he made the mistake of meeting her eyes.

“I have been married to you for five months,” she said, and her face had taken on the look that had been dismantling him since Hertfordshire and had only improved with practice. “I know precisely what happens to your breath when you like something and do not intend me to know it. I know what happens to your voice. I know what happens when you are trying very hard to be honourable while wanting the opposite.” Her gaze dropped, not far, and came back. “You have become remarkably easy to read for a man who built an entire marriage on concealment.”

“Elizabeth.”

He meant it as a warning. It did not arrive as one; he heard the want in his own voice as plainly as she did. Her hand moved to his knee and rested there, and the answering response went through him at once, and he had to take a breath he had not previously been intending to take.

“Would you prefer the remainder of the strategy?” she asked softly. “Or would you like to discover it piece by piece when I have you upstairs and at my mercy?”

The fire snapped. Falstaff sighed in his sleep. He looked down at her hand on his leg as if it had become the central fact of the room — which, for the present, it had.

“You are under the mistaken impression,” he said, and heard the growl come into his own voice, “that I object to being at your mercy.”

She smiled — slowly, with the pure satisfaction of having known all along she would draw it out of him.

“No. I am under no such impression at all.”

He was leaning towards her before he had decided to. One hand went to the back of the sofa behind her, the other to her waist, and he found himself entirely past the point at which retreat had been a useful concept.

“Then perhaps,” he said, very low, “you had better tell me this strategy quickly, because I find my patience for delay has materially declined.” The book slid from her lap and got caught in a fold of her skirt. He did not catch it.

She opened her mouth to answer, already smiling, when the knock came at the door.

Her face fell. “Oh, bother that factor. He is forever calling at the most inconvenient times! I imagine he wants me to pledge support for the new roof on the kirk, which I had hoped would wait until at least Thursday.”

She moved to stand. He caught her wrist before she had committed to it and drew her back.

“He will go away.”

“Fitzwilliam.” She was laughing at him already. “He will not go away. He will know I am at home, plant himself in the sitting room, and contrive to send Mrs MacLeod upstairs after me at the exact moment we have just got ourselves into a state of dishabille. I know that man. I have been receiving his Tuesday calls for six months.”

“He can have Thursday. I do not require the kirk’s building repairs discussed today.”

“You do not, perhaps. But the roof does, and I should rather speak with him for ten minutes now than have him interrupt us later. Besides —” she leaned down close to his ear, “— you could do with learning a little patience. You have so very little of it where I am concerned.”