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As if donning an invisible coat of platonic interest, he said with easy affability, “Much better.”
“Your turn,” she instructed. When he was silent for a moment, she added, “Now you’ve grown demure. What a shame that all the books you’ve read have left no impression on your vocabulary.”
“Trying not to shock you, dearest.” He started. Damn—had he actually called her dearest? Out loud?
Praise God, she didn’t seem to notice. She put her hands on her hips. “Try me.”
He debated before raising his hands to his mouth. “Shag.” It was a fairly tame word, but he wasn’t about to give her a full lexicon of all the filthy words he knew. And he knew quite a lot.
Her cheeks reddened, which also ranked highly in his enchanting moments of the day. But, heavens help him, this little game he’d orchestrated had not gone as planned. It had started as an amusing whim between two friends and shifted into his uncomfortable awareness of her as woman.
“Think we’ve proved the acoustics work.” Thankfully, he sounded properly sardonic and didn’t growl with arousal. “Shall we get down to business?”
“Follow me.” Grace ascended the stairs, and he followed.
Do not look at her arse. Don’t look—
He looked at her arse.
To his dismay, it was perfectly delicious, round, and full, and his palms itched to stroke along her ripe curves. He could have been happy living out the rest of his life without knowing that Lady Grace Wyatt possessed a spectacular behind, but, thanks to his roving gaze, he’d been expelled from that innocent Eden.
Stop it, churl.
Feeling like a randy buffoon, he forced himself to look down at his feet, concentrating on the steps beneath him. It didn’t quite assuage his guilt, but better that than leer at a woman he considered a friend.
On the next floor, she walked down a corridor before opening a set of double doors, revealing an exceptionally large, handsome room with parquet floors and not one but two unlit chandeliers. A few elegant chairs and small tables ringed the chamber. At one end stood a lacquered pianoforte, awaiting a pair of hands to bring it to life.
Seb slowly moved into the ballroom, his gaze drifting upward to the coved ceiling adorned with ornate but elegant plasterwork. He measured the length of the room by pacing from one end to the other. With his rather long stride of thirty-six inches, he calculated that the ballroom was nearly eighty feet long.
“We could hold an archery contest in here,” he murmured.
Grace grinned. “Charlie and I used to play cricket in this room when the day was too rainy to venture outside.” She pointed to an impression the size of a cricket ball that marked one of the walls. “That was him throwing too wide.”
“You must have left your own souvenirs.”
She grimaced as she nodded toward one of the tall windows lining one side of the chamber. “They had to replace that glass.” She shook her head. “As punishment, I didn’t get pudding for a week.”
“A couple of wild creatures, you and Charlie,” Seb noted.
“Perfect beasts, it’s true. We were torments to our parents.”
“And now . . . ?”
“Charlie’s got his own family to torment him. And my mother and father are surprisingly tolerant of a daughter who likes to muck about with amphibians and lizards.”
He shoved aside the sudden press of envy. His own parents wanted a different son, and Seb wanted a different family. No one had what they wanted, and, in a way, he’d come to peace with it. He couldn’t change himself into a future giant of industry.
“They’re also worried,” she grumbled, “that such a daughter needs a husband.”
“And you?” he asked.
“What of me?”
“Do you think you need a husband?” The question slipped out, yet once he’d spoken it, he craved the answer—to know what she wanted. In their four years of friendship, though they had shared details of their lives, they’d never fully explored their deeper desires, or shared their most secret hopes.
As if raising an unseen shield, her expression turned cynical. “I don’t keep specimens. It’s too cruel to confine a wild creature.”
