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“Ford,” she breathed, her voice throaty.
He liked the way she said his name, from one side of her mouth, saying it in a way that was different from any other person who’d ever said it before.
“Ford... you’re... it’s...”
“I know. It’s so good, Beatrice.” He kissed her hungrily. “So good.”
“No. Ford.” She broke away. “You’re . . . pressing on me and I think . . . there may be a nail sticking up from the floor.”
He rolled off her immediately. “I’m so sorry. Are you hurt?”
She laughed ruefully as he helped her rise to a seated position. “Not hurt. It was only... slightly uncomfortable.”
“I shouldn’t have laid you on the floor like that. It was wrong of me.”
“Ford.” She touched his arm.
He tried not to feel the pleasure of her touch, not to react to it.
“I didn’t want you to stop kissing me. I just didn’t want to get a puncture wound and die a horrible death from blood poisoning.”
Of course he had to stop kissing her. He never should have kissed her in the first place.
The moment was lost. Gone forever. He was a fool.
There was a right and a wrong and this was wrong. Coggins could have walked in on them at any moment and received an eyeful.
“We can’t. Not here. We can’t. Ever.” His breathing jagged, his words not making sense.
“You’re not speaking in complete sentences, Ford.”
He stumbled to his feet and offered her his hand. “Beatrice, you deserve so much better than this. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You weren’t thinking and neither was I.”
“So much for keeping things businesslike.”
“I don’t think it’s possible for us to be strictly business associates. We always wind up doing the most wildly inappropriate things.”
“We have to make a pact. Absolutely no more kissing.”
She took a deep breath. “Where are my spectacles?”
He handed them to her and she hooked the wires over her ears. “I can maintain control of my lips if you can,” she said.
“It might be easier to maintain control if you remained upstairs in the reading room. Don’t you have crates to unpack?”
“I do. I only wanted to help with the renovations.”
“And you did. Thank you. But I’ll take it from here. You’ll have your clubhouse, at least the rudimentary configuration, before I depart. You may come for a final inspection with your friends in one week’s time. I’ll go up to the roof now and finish patching the shingles.”
He needed to clear his head.
She bound her hair back into a tight knot at the nape of her neck and jabbed it with the pins he handed her. “I’ll go upstairs, then.” She avoided his gaze, gathering her carpentry book and leaving the room.
The memory of her legs twined around his hips while he kissed her up against the bookshelves followed him up the ladder and out onto the roof.
He balanced atop the slate tiles, staring out over the rooftops of London and over the river that led to the docks, to where his ship would arrive soon, the path he’d chosen.
