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He should’ve known that to dip a toe into the sea of the past would be to lose himself. And yet here he was, staring at the woman he’d once thought would be his bride, her wavy sable hair spilling over the creamy, exposed skin of one of her shoulders.

“Inevitable?” he repeated, rolling the word around in his mouth as though it were foreign to him.

She shrugged that unclad shoulder, her hair slipping over her breast to hide her nipple. Thank God, he thought at the same time that his brain roared in protest.

He’d loved her for this boldness once. She used to lie stripped and bare before him, allowing him to trace the lines of her body while he whispered his love. The contrast of his calloused, sea-weathered hands against her soft, pristine skin had fascinated him nearly as much as the little, indecipherable noises she made when he pushed into her. He’d relished her lack of shame then, enjoying that only he had access to this secret saucy side to her.

That sauciness had matured, more powerful for the fact that they were no longer young. She was the queen of this little world of hers, and he could sense the power pulsing off her as she pinned him with her gaze as though challenging him to rise to this strange game of dares he didn’t know the rules to.

“It was only a matter of time before we would act upon our mutual attraction to one another,” she said with a shrug, as though her orgasm had hardly affected her.

His knuckles popped as he clenched his fists to his sides. It shouldn’t anger him to see this casualness, but he couldn’t help it. She’d been everything to him, pulling him back from the brink in a thrashing sea when he thought he couldn’t hold on any longer. It was the memory of her that had kept him going when he’d been picked up in a remote village in Suriname, stopping in Curaçao, Port-au-Prince, and Kingston, before finally landing on British soil once again and making the bumpy, uncomfortable ride back to Eyemouth by mail coach. And when he’d arrived in their hometown and knocked on her father’s door only to learn from her cold, self-satisfied mother that Lavinia Malcolm was now Lavinia Parkem, he hadn’t believed it. It was only when he saw Alistair Parkem loop his arm around her waist that his world shattered. She’d been his beacon in the dark sea, until he’d learned she’d turned her back on him, just like everyone else in his life.

When Sir Newton had told him that she’d been reduced to owning a shop and working for her living, he’d felt a flutter of unmanly satisfaction he knew he should be ashamed of, yet the sight of the proud, determined woman who’d faced off first with Wark and then taken him to task had bowled him over. Ever since that first meeting, he’d been unable to shake the feeling that she had once again knocked him off his balance until, gripped by an impulse he could neither name nor control, he found himself in this situation.

Strangely, he found he didn’t regret it one bit.

That was the stunning, disturbing truth he wrestled with as she slowly put her dress to rights and began to collect the hairpins he’d scattered across the floor.

“I’ll remind you that you kissed me first,” she said, as she used her short nail to catch up one of the hairpins that had fallen into a crack between the floorboards. “And I suspect you liked it more than you wish to let on.”

Of course he had. He could try to deny his attraction to her, but there was no way he could’ve hidden his body’s reaction. Not when he’d been pressed up against her legs, his tongue laving at her breast while he’d breathed her in. He’d wanted her something powerful, and now that he’d had his first taste in over a decade, he was afraid he couldn’t stop.

“I should go,” he said.

She nodded. “You should.”

He shifted, unsettled as she watched him. He didn’t want her to think that he was the sort of man who counted down the minutes until he could slink out of a woman’s home after an encounter. Not that he cared what she thought.

Eventually good sense won out, and Andrew hauled himself to his feet and then reached down to help her up. “Here.”

Her hand—no longer soft but strong from work—set his skin sparking as she placed it in his. He jerked against the strange sensation, pulling her just a little too hard and sending her careening into his chest. His arms instinctively went around her, trapping her with her hands flat on his chest.

They stayed there for a stunned moment of pure torture. That damned gardenia-scented soap she used to wash her hair wrapped around him, and he could see the subtle thrum of her pulse at the side of her neck. The fingers of her hands curled slightly into the cloth of his jacket, holding her in place, and when she looked up at him he knew with frightening certainty that if she lifted up just a couple inches and kissed him there would be no sanity left in him to keep him from lifting her skirts and taking her up against the wall.

“So we find ourselves again in a familiar situation,” she said. But the amusement in her voice wasn’t enough to cover the vein of desire pulsing underneath. She was not so very unaffected after all.

Turning over this new information, he stepped back, holding her at arm’s length. Her fingers brushed down his chest but she didn’t grasp at him any longer.

“You’re determined to attend Wark’s dinner Tuesday?” he asked. “You won’t stay away even if I tell you to, will you?”

Her smile faltered for a half second, but she shook her head.

He should shut the whole operation down. No matter how hard he fought it, he was emotionally compromised. Still, without her, he and Gillie would be blindly throwing darts, hoping one would stick. It had to be Lavinia. It had to be now.

“I’ll ask Gillie to put together a list of Wark’s known associates so you can prepare, and she’s already investigating Douglas,” he said. “If you’re going to go into this, I want you as ready as possible. The more you know, the less likely you’ll be to say the wrong thing and stir their suspicions.”

“Then you’ll support me?” she asked.

“I don’t see how I can do anything else.”

She nodded. “Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. I trust you.”

They were the words he’d never thought he’d hear from her again, and they felt strangely like succor to his soul.

Lavinia followed him down the stairs to let him out. He lingered only long enough to hear the bolt on her door slide into place, and then donned his hat and began the short walk home to his lodgings through the cold Edinburgh night.

Nothing about this operation sat well with him, but he knew two things for certain: the years had done nothing to diminish his longing for Lavinia, and he knew as surely as he knew the sun set in the west that this evening was not the end of whatever had sparked again between the two of them.