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If he untucked his shirt from his trousers at this moment, she’d have a direct line of sight down his...
Lady Beatrice Bentley!exclaimed her mother’s scandalized tones in her head.Stop gawking this instant. He’s not an eligible gentleman. He’s not a gentleman at all and therefore far beneath your notice.
True. But he was also beneath her window and she couldn’t look away.
Not now. Not when he was cradling the cidermug in one of his huge hands, stroking a finger around the rim.
Watching him gave her the most unsettling tingling sensation in her belly. Must have been something she ate for luncheon. There’d been a rather questionable leek and cod pie.
Jenny took the empty glass from him. “Will you be wanting more refreshment?”
There was no mistaking the suggestive inflection in her words. She wasn’t offering cider; she was offering kisses.
Beatrice peered over the ledge. Wright had moved closer to Jenny and away from Beatrice’s line of vision. All she could see was the taut curve of his backside and his long legs.
Whispers and... smacking noises? Were they kissing? And, incidentally, what would a kiss from him be like?
She stuck her head farther out the window.
Too far.
Her spectacles slipped off her nose and plummeted straight for his head.
She dropped into a crouch beneath the window, cheeks flaming and heart thudding. She could only hope that he was too occupied to notice a pair of spectacles falling from the sky.
Silence from below. She risked a quick glance out the window.
Egad.
She dropped back to a crouch.
Wright had found her spectacles, and apparently he meant to return them to her.
He was climbing straight up the rose trellis likea pirate scaling the rigging of a ship, making a beeline for the library window.
He couldn’t climb the stairs like other people. Oh no, he must display his brute strength by climbing hand over hand.
Mortification. Noun. Late fourteenth century. From Late Latinmortificationem, “putting to death.”
Could she make a dash for the library door? Not without her spectacles.
Nothing for it but to face him.
She’d faced humiliation before. Stared it down. Dared it to break her.
This would be a very brief interaction. He would hand over the spectacles; she would thank him, and then send him on his merry way back down the trellis.
“Greetings, princess.” His voice was velvet-wrapped gravel.
Beatrice rose on wobbly knees. He was fuzzy without her spectacles, a huge shape blocking out the sunlight, a hulking blur with azure eyes.
A blue to drown in, she’d heard one of the upstairs maids say swoonily. Beatrice’s brain sank beneath water. Her thoughts wentblub, blub, blub. Which wasn’t like her at all. Words were her stock-in-trade, were they not?
Apparently, when confronted by the sudden appearance of a far-too-handsome rogue at her window, she lost the ability to form words into sentences... or even to speak at all.
Pull yourself together. Not an ounce of ninny, remember?
He balanced easily on the trellis, gripping thewood with one enormous hand and dangling the wire loop of her spectacles from the fingers of his other hand.
