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Cornwall was the perfect place for him. There he could be numb and frozen with no one to judge him. There he was useful. “I prefer my own company.”
“I saw that.” Her gaze dropped below his belt and a saucy spark flared in her eyes. She was referring to what she’d seen in the window, and nimbly changing the subject.
MissPenny didn’t want to be interrogated and neither did he.
“I didn’t know I had an audience,” he said.
“You didn’t seem overly concerned about passersby.”
“The window looks out over private gardens which you were trespassing upon.”
“I wanted to explore. My guardian and great-aunt haven’t allowed me to do much of anything since I arrived in London several months ago. The ball tonight was my first social event of the Season.”
“So you thought you’d venture forth on a solo midnight perambulation. In my rosebushes.”
“If you had spent two months receiving deathly tedious lessons in deportment and decorum, you’d want to roam as well. And sample some brandy. And maybe even kiss a duke.”
“I doubt I’d want to kiss a duke. Infuriating creatures. They should all be damned to a specially created duke hell.”
She grinned at his repetition of her words from the shed. “Ha,” she said. “Precisely.”
His lips threatened to turn up at the edges. He sent them back down with a stern admonition. Thinking about kissing MissPenny—however sweet her lips, however disarming her conversation—was absolutely off-limits.
She wasn’t a girl, she was a powder keg waiting to explode and take him down with her. He wanted to regain his control and equilibrium, not slip further into chaos. None of what had happened tonight was supposed to happen in his carefully regulated life.
When he was with her he felt the ground begin to shift beneath his feet—she threw him off-balance with her unpredictability and her passionate kisses.
She wasn’t part of his plans.
He wasn’t to kiss her, think about kissing her, dream about her, pleasure himself after dreaming about her or...damn it to Hell.
As soon as his head cleared, he’d escort her home. “I gather the decorum lessons didn’t take.”
“Not when she kept me imprisoned with only her grim self and a host of stuffed hedgehogs dressed as nobility for company.”
“Er... hedgehogs?” It could be the throbbing ache in his head, but he was having a difficult time following the conversational path.
“Stuffed hedgehogs. She says they expired of natural causes, but it’s still gruesome. Their little faces look almost alive, except that she’s replaced their eyes with gleaming bits of glass that are so very lifeless.”
“An interesting hobby.”
“She calls it taxidermy. You’d have to see them to believe it. If they were alive it would at least be more diverting. We could frolic about and knock things off shelves. As it is, I’m kept as immobile and trapped as they are, posed this way and that, garbed to her tastes. The only places in London I’ve seen have been her town house, one ballroom, one garden shed, a study, and a... bedchamber.”
“Some might consider a bedchamber with me inside it to be the most exciting sight in town.”
“Ha.” She chuckled softly. “The funny thing is that my uncle might agree.”
“He would approve of you being in my bedchamber?” he asked skeptically.
“Maybe not the bedchamber part. But he would be happy I was with you. He’s practically besotted with you.”
“With me.” Now she was making even less sense.
“He thinks you’re the, let’s see, what were his words? ‘The pinnacle of British manhood—dignified, statesmanlike, admirable, and, above all else, honorable.’ ”
The scornful curl of her lush lips gave him a burning desire to disabuse her of the notion that he was anything so boring and staid as statesmanlike. “I used to be wicked, you know.”
“So Crankshaw informed me.”
