Page 34 of Teach a Rogue New Tricks
He knelt until he could look straight into her green eyes so like her sister’s. “I would venture to guess your father is worried about you. You should return to him.”
She pulled a sweet from her pocket and smacked it into her mouth. “Nuh-uh. He’s kissing Mama in the corner.” She jutted her thumb over her right shoulder.
He followed the trajectory. There stood the baron. Or rather, there leaned the baron, his massive forearms braced against a wall, bracketing a small, dark-haired woman whom he’d caught up in a kiss.
Cass snapped away from the sight and studied the sky, his hands pushing through his hair. “We-ell. Very good. Yes. Quite good, that.” He’d slept with many women and even tupped them in public places, but he’d never been a voyeur. And though the couple remained fully clothed and their kiss a mostly chaste one, intimacy crackled around them like gathering lightning. It seemed entirely wrong to look.
“Want one?”
Thankful for something to look at other than the kissing or the gray sky, Cass returned his attention to the child. She held a sweet from her pocket up to him.
“Ah. No.”
Her eyes narrowed as she popped the treat into her mouth.
Had he done something wrong? The sweat returned.
“Nowhat?” she insisted.
Truly, he’d sweated more since meeting the youngest Miss Cavendish than he had since his last bout at Jackson’s. “No…”—she smiled encouragingly—“thank you?”
She nodded.
“No thank you?” Another adage to add to his notes. Decline sweets politely.
She smiled, nodded, as if she were anything other than a cute demon child. She studied him from boots to hat and back down. Stripped him bare, she did, right to his very soul. “You should practice being polite. My sister says it gets easier with practice.” Then she shrugged, turned, and skipped away.
Cass collapsed against the statue, closing his eyes. He breathed in and out, in and out, slowly, shaking a bit with laughter. “What form of torture wasthat?” he inquired of the bronze man.
“Pansy can be intense. But I’m glad to see she’s taken so many of my lessons to heart.”
Cass jumped, clutching his heart with one hand and his hat to head with the other. “Ada,goddamn, don’t scare me like that. Where’d you come from?”
She grinned. “I found you. I was searching for Pansy. She likes to disappear, and it worries the lot of us. Then I saw her skipping away from a man. I confess I panicked a bit, but, then I recognized you. Were you trying to hide behind the statue when Pansy discovered you?” She looked both ways around it. “It’s not entirely substantial. You could do better.”
“I found it to be a perfectly good hiding spot until your sprite of a sister discovered me. I must say, you’ve trained her well. I should secure her to be my governess. Terrifying, she is.”
“I’ve heard all rogues are scared of children.”
“You’re sister’s less child and more force of nature. Everyone should be scared.”
She laughed, throwing her head back and revealing a slender column of throat. His mouth went dry, and he slid around the statue, farther away from her, closer to the wall where the shadows protected him, protected her from him. And she needed protection because he’d never desired to touch a woman’s neck as much as the need to touch hers had shot through him, still thrummed through him. Her laughter sang around him, penetrating the darkness. And then her scent hung in the shadows, too, and she stood so close to him, he felt her heat.
“What next?” she asked, her voice a whisper. “Do I hide now?”
“If I had known we were to play sardines, I would have chosen a more confined and less public hiding spot.”
Red rushed into her cheeks faster than onto a lit match.
Damn. Absolute wrong words, those.
“You’re suggesting you would have chosen a spot that required me to join you in seclusion, our… our bodies pressed closely together.” Her gaze skittered away from his, touching every surface surrounding them but him. “Did you say that to shock? To warn me away again?”
Panic rushed through him, urging him to escape their hiding spot. “I do not know why I said it. Habit. I apologize. I… I must depart.”
She took a step back, so she stood partly in the shadows, partly in the sun. “If you wish. Though I will not run from you this time. I think I understand your trick now, for pushing people away.”
Now he felt fire light his cheeks, his neck, glowing embers dropping into his chest to turn his lungs to ash.
