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“Then he wants to. I can tell by the way he looks at you.”
Claire had to ask. “What makes you think that?”
“He gets this hungry look on his face when he looks at you. Like he’s imagining what you taste like and smell like. What you’d feel like wrapped around him.”
Heat crept up Claire’s cheeks.
“Pardon me,” Katherine said. “I keep forgetting you’re not like me. Real ladies would faint to hear such things. They do it with the lights off and their nightrails shoved up to their waists, grinding their teeth the whole while.” She laughed lightly.
That wasn’t what it had been like for Claire with Finn. She had questions for Katherine. But she’d seem like the worst sort of whore if she asked them, so she kept them to herself. Then curiosity got the better of her. “You don’t do it with the lights off?”
Devilish delight twinkled in Katherine’s eyes. “I do whatever he wants.” She kicked off her shoes and lifted her feet to the footstool. “There’s no shame in taking pleasure in the bedchamber.” She narrowed her eyes at Claire. “What were you doing with Finn up on the landing tonight?”
“Watching the show,” Claire admitted.
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“That’s why Finn looked like he wanted to drag you straight to his bedchamber and keep you busy the rest of the night. He’s probably irked to no end that I’m blocking the path between the two of you.”
“Blocking what path?”
“You’re here with me, instead of with him.”
Claire wasn’t going to be with him, no matter what.
A knock sounded on the door. “Enter,” Claire called.
Wilkins stepped into the room and bowed. “Mrs. Crawfield’s chambers have been prepared. And his lordship would like to see you in the study, miss.”
“Would you show Mrs. Crawfield to her chambers?” Claire asked over her shoulder as she went to see what Finn wanted.
“He has found a way around my block, apparently,” Katherine murmured to Claire as she walked by her to follow Wilkins to her chambers. Claire’s heart lurched.
Fifteen
Claire found Finn in the study, sprawled in a chair before the fire with a tumbler of some kind of drink in his hand. “Don’t even think of it,” he said as she looked at his glass. “The last time you took my drink, you know what happened.” He was getting hard at the mere thought of it. He hooked a chair with his foot and drew it closer to him so that they both faced the fire, but the corners of their chairs nearly touched.
“Certainly, it’s not proper to sit that close together.” She said it so primly that it amused him.
A grin tugged at the corners of his lips. “Surely that doesn’t apply with a man who has been inside you.”
Claire gingerly perched her bottom on the edge of the chair. “You shouldn’t talk of such things.” Her cheeks flushed a rosy shade of pink.
“How can I not? It’s all I think about.” He drank the last swallow of his drink and set the cup to the side. “Would you like something?” he asked.
“You just informed me that I couldn’t have anything. Did you need to tell me something? Or did you just want me to watch you drink?”
Oh, he needed something. And she was it. “I just wanted to talk to you. To find out if Katherine was settling in all right.”
“She’s fine. She has the room next to mine.”
“A genius bit of maneuvering there.” With Katherine close by, he would not go within one hundred feet of Claire’s chambers.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Of course, you don’t.”
