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If she’d been the kind of woman who blushed, her face would have turned beet red.
“Seems to me that you might try to ravish me after a few more glasses of whisky,” he said. “Women don’t hold their spirits in the same way as men. Wait, wait—” he interrupted her indignant protests. “Before you accuse me of being an arrogant jackass, my observation is based strictly on scientific facts. My body mass is larger than yours. I’ve more surface area to absorb the spirits.”
He certainly had a large surface area.
His hands were simply massive, his fingers long enough to wrap around the entire silver cup. She tested the girth of the cup she held. Her thumb and forefinger only stretched halfway around.
She caught him staring at her fingers with a strained expression. Perhaps he was imagining depraved things as well.
One wouldn’t think a gentleman’s hand would be such an object for erotic fixation, but in her dreams his hands did so many delicious things. They fondled her breasts. Stroked her between the legs. Lifted her by the waist and settled her down over his...
Bollocks!Maybe whisky hadn’t been such a brilliant plan.
It was time for the unsavory jokes. They couldn’t talk about their conflict, their past, or anything else that would be detrimental to her heart.
She poured another glass of whisky for him and a much smaller one for herself. “Have you heard the one about the sign on the bawdy-house door?”
“Come again?”
“While that would be a good sign,” she admitted, “but this one said, ‘We’re not home. Take the well-beaten path.’”
He snorted. “Do you even know what that means?”
“Certainly I do. And there’s more where that jest came from. I’ve a whole arsenal of bawdy jokes at the ready.”
“Indy.” He set his empty cup on the seat beside him. “This really isn’t a competition, you know. You don’t have to best me at everything. You can drop the bravura act.”
“I’m merely being a congenial traveling companion. And maybe it’s not an act. You don’t know me anymore. This could be what I’m like with my intimates.”
“What intimates? As far as I know your only friends are your brother and his wife. You’re married to your archaeological work. Your idea of excitement is a fourteen-hour excavation in a dusty old burial site. You spend more time with skeletons than living society.”
Don’t lose your temper. You’re made of ice, remember?
“At least my passion is for the betterment of womankind, not simply my own immediate gratification. And I’ve sacrificed much for my work—my reputation, for one thing. Mamas shield their daughters from me as if my independent spirit might rub off on their precious offspring like polish from a boot.”
“I’m certain mothers shield their daughters more stringently from me than from you.”
“But that’s because you’re fulfilling everyone’s expectations, not flouting them. You’re supposed to be an arrogant rogue whose collection of lovers is only eclipsed by his private collection of antiquities.” Her shoulder bumped against the window. She was as far away from him as possible now. “It’s so very unoriginal, Ravenwood.”
And it still made her so furious.
Despite all her resolutions to remain emotionless, the all-too-familiar anger swelled up as if she’d hit her mind with a hammer by accident. He’d chosen such a useless life over the one they’d planned together.
She’d carried this pit of anger in her belly for so long, like she’d swallowed the pit of a peach. It felt like it could choke her. But she would never ever ask him why he’d changed. Why he’d stopped answering her letters.
You can’t walk backward into the future. What’s done is done.
She opened her novel, even though it was too dark now to see more than shadows outside the windows.
The words on the page were too blurry to read.
It was always like this when she was with him. One moment she wanted to jump into his lap, and the next she wanted to lash out and find a way to hurt him, as he’d hurt her.
The whisky seemed to make it worse, if anything.
Those feelings should be dead and buried. They shouldn’t be haunting her still.
Indy’s straight-slashing dark eyebrows drew closer. He’d angered her, as he always did. She was tucked into one side of the commodious coach, no longer playing the out-rogue-the-rogue game. The severely cut blue wool coat she wore had epaulets, like a military captain.
