Page 36 of Lessons for Marquesses
He glanced at her breasts and looked away.
“However, Aunt Charlotte is convinced I am and I’m afraid if the maids relay to her what they’ve seen…”
He was a sage even when drunk. Withdrawing a pouch, he shook a few coins to his left hand. His fingers struggled to form about them, the coins dropping to the carpet. He swiped them up with his right hand. “Wait here.”
“Meet me in the morning room at the back of the house,” she said.
“Right.”
Georgiana hurried to their meeting place and stood anxiously inside the morning room listening to Mr. Wolf’s deep murmurs and the maids’ effusive thanks.
He appeared with his brandy. “You’ve been saved from the altar.”
Georgiana collapsed to a sofa in sprawled relief.
“You don’t have to look so relieved,” he murmured over his glass.
With a jolt, Georgiana realized his eyes were a tawny brown, and when he was amused, they glowed. “Was that a jest?”
The glow shuttered to an opaque brown. “Definitely, yes.”
She ripped a strip from the bottom of her shirt and, after rooting out another piece of glass from her heel, wrapped her foot and stuck it to the tea table.
Mr. Wolf started to speak and then his gaze fixed on her foot. He sat across from her, overwhelming a chintz chair. One arm crooked across his thigh, his wide shoulders tensed. “George, I admire your pluck.”
“Do you? I mean, thank you.”
“I hope you learned not to approach suspected thieves, even bumbling ones, in the future. I could have broken your neck with the fall alone.”
“Oh, please, don’t trouble yourself, I’ve fallen many times.”
“I could have killed you,” he said quietly.
“Well.”
His head canted. “Well what?”
“Justwell. My aunt taught me to use the word along with others, and bite my cheek when discomfited.”
“How long have you been at these lessons?” he asked her bare foot and spread legs.
“She arrived after my father died.”
A muscle flexed under his scar. He leaned back in his chair as if making distance between them and studied the cap on her head. “What color is your hair?”
Georgiana’s cheeks heated at the question. It was too intimate. And dangerous. “Well.”
He formed a fist with his left hand upon his thigh, reminding her how fast he had turned in the garden and flung her to theground. Carefully, he set his glass to the table. “George, I’ve come to speak to you about an opportunity.”
Georgiana was a fast learner at hiding her enthusiasm and a dunce at learning to be a female. Nicholas amended his judgment to dunce atactinglike a female. This creature lounging upon the sofa was female, with a bare calf kicked to the table, the other leg lolled sideways. Aggravatinglythere, her pert breasts were barely shielded by her man’s shirt.
She folded her arms over them, which he surmised was to conceal, but the pose merely pressed the taut mounds farther up and out.
Distaste stirred on his tongue, while his loins stirred without prejudice for the enemy sitting before him. An enemy who just happened to have been bestowed with breasts identical to the thrusting, sweet shape of a Titian dream.
Venus of Urbinoin breeches and a grass-stained shirt.
Her cap, doing a fine job at hiding her hair, was embroidered with arabesques and peacocks in reds and varying shades of blue. Every blue matched her impossible eyes. The cut on her brow had ceased to bleed. In their world, where a female’s countenance was valued just below their ability to conceive a child, she had completely disregarded the wound.
