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He broke away and put her at arm’s length. “Now you can go upstairs.”
“Oh. Er.” She dropped her gaze to his boots. “Yes, quite. Upstairs.” Where she had crates to open and new words and worlds to discover.
“Now that you’ve been properly kissed, you’ll be forced to concede that kisses are far more scintillating than archaic words.”
Was that all this had been? A rogue proving a point, nothing more. “Ha!” She knew her smile was wobbly, but she couldn’t let him see how shaken she was by the kiss. “I’ll concede nothing of the sort.”
He gave her a smoldering look. “Then you want more kissing? I thought I’d been hired to make renovations, but if it’s kissing you want...”
“No, no, it’s renovations, nothing more. Carry on, Wright.” She waved her hand at the wall and backed away swiftly. Too swiftly. She stumbled against a chair and nearly toppled to the floor.
He was at her side in seconds, spectacles in hand. “You might need these.”
“Thank you,” she said briskly, donning her spectacles and clinging to the shreds of her dignity. “About what just happened...”
“Nothing happened. I was proving a point.”
“Precisely.” She laughed, but it sounded hollow and forced. “It didn’t mean anything. It was merely a question mark and there’s nothing left to discover. Full stop. Carry on with the renovations. You’re doing God’s work. Helping bookish ladies and bluestockings for decades to come.”
She made an awkward exit and hurried upstairs.
Inside the reading room she inhaled deeply of the scent of scholarly tomes and unfinished dictionaries.
What in heaven’s name was the matter with her?Here she was surrounded by a carefully curated selection of ancient manuscripts and books, and all she could think about was kissing Ford, when she should be reveling in the freedom to be as scholarly as she pleased.
She also meant to reexamine her aunt’s letter. She felt certain that there was a hidden meaning she hadn’t uncovered yet. Her aunt had been trying to tell her something about her inheritance.
Ford.She tasted his name on her tongue. The Old English noun meant a shallow place where water could be crossed. Used as a verb, if one forded a river, one crossed a body of water by walking along the bottom.
Either way, the diminutive of his name denoted a passage, a crossing from one shore to another.
A transition.
She knew what his name meant, but what had the kiss meant? When presented with an unfamiliar word, Beatrice always broke it down into small increments, searching for the Latin, French, Greek, Old English, or Germanic roots in order to piece together an educated guess as to the meaning.
She had no educated guess about what the kiss had meant. It hadn’t been a frivolous or meaningless moment for her.
It had been a whole new vocabulary. A new language.
And it meant nothing to him. He kissed women all the time.
These alarming sparks of desire that he ignited in her were wholly uncharacteristic and should be dealt with immediately. She couldn’t ignore them,because they kept returning, growing stronger and more heated every time they met. She must deliberately stamp them out, douse them with cold water, until all that remained was a lingering scent of smoke.
There could never be a conflagration.
Ford felt like smashing something so it was a good thing he had a sledgehammer in his hands and a wall to bring down.
What the bloody hell had just happened?
He’d never meant to kiss her. Yes, he’d been thinking about kissing her, but he was always thinking about that when she was around. She was such an alluring combination of primness and passion.
Tension coiled in his body. Desire. The memory of her soft backside against his groin. The way she’d turned in his arms and tried to kiss him.
She was just so damned tempting. He kept catching these glimpses of the sensual woman beneath her proper facade. Today he’d caught more than a glimpse. He’d seen her hammering down walls like a warrior princess.
He’d liked that glimpse of her power.
He liked the lady far too much.
