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“Fire and ice.”
“The North Pole and the South.”
“I hate you,” she said. “Quite thoroughly.”
“So you’ve told me.”
“‘If I be waspish, best beware my sting.’” Now she was quoting from a Shakespeare play. Dirty fellow, that Mr. Shakespeare.
“‘My remedy is then to pluck it out,’” he rejoined, surprising himself by recalling the next line.
“‘Ay, if the fool could find it where it lies.’”
“As I recall,” said Raven, “TheTaming of the Shrewbecomes rather bawdy at this point. Isn’t there talk of tongues in tails?”
“Yes, and men being three-legged stools to sit on,” she said, with the hint of a smile on her lips. “You know I’ll never be tamed, or ordered about, right?”
“I’m well aware. I don’t want to tame you. I want to protect you from being hurt,” he said, his voice jagged with emotion.
And he wasn’t only speaking of what could be, in Paris, but of what he’d done.
He’d wanted to make her hate him. And it had worked. Gods, how it had worked.
She inhaled, her full breasts brushing against his chest. Her softness made his body feel more solid. All of him solidifying... hardening like lava meeting the air, hardening to stone, but his heart kept glowing.
His Indy.
The fiercest person he knew... yet she was all extravagant curves, and they would fit together so beautifully. Two halves of a whole.
Forbidden thought.
She lifted her hand. The briefest touch along his jaw.
Forbidden touch.
“You haven’t shaved since last night.” The words spoken in a throaty whisper. Her finger tracing the line of his jaw.
“I haven’t slept since last night,” he said roughly.
“You honestly think this will be a perilous undertaking?”
“I know it will be.”
He stood perfectly still as her finger continued its exploration. Over his chin, down his throat to his Adam’s apple.
Touch me. Caress me. Slap me.
I’ll never respond.
Never pull her close and lose himself in her scent, her lips, her Indy-ness. If he did he’d never come back up for air. He’d drown.
His chosen path would disappear. The oaths he’d sworn.
King and Country.
To prevent and defeat treasonable or other dangerous conspiracies against the state... or die trying.
No vulnerabilities. No attachments. Nothing his enemies could use against him, as Sir Malcolm’s enemies had done. The spymaster’s wife and young daughter had been poisoned to death one year before Raven had come to live with him.
