Page 21 of Pride: The Rogue
Mr. Latimer eased himself off her frame.
The moment she found herself freed, she scooted backward on her buttocks and heaved in deep gasping breaths of air.
He stuck a hand out.
Up close, she eyed that hand that’d so effortlessly restrained her. His fingers were the bronzed sort, callused, and raw from real work. They were the hands belonging to the man she’d secretly imagined herself marrying one day. Someone who was like her. Someone who knew what it was to toil and didn’t look down on her for having lived that existence, but understood, on every level, her and the life she’d known for nearly all her life.
Mr. Latimer the Conqueror spoke, interrupting her distracted musings.
“Afraid to sully your hands,” he remarked with more of that perverse humor.
She blinked slowly, realizing she still stared intently at that purely masculine hand.
“Or,” he said, bringing her gaze flying up to his, “are you still worrying I’m going to lay you down and ravish y—?”
Unthinking, just not wanting him to complete that horrifying possibility, Livian grabbed his palm and used it to tug herself up.
The moment she was on her feet, however, she remained frozen.
An improbable and explosive electric current rushed between the place her flesh touched his. A tingling charge like the ones she’d used to get as a girl, running for the first time across the earl’s plush Aubusson.
Gasping, Livian ripped her hand back.
“Yea, better not touch a baseborn bastard like myself,” Mr. Latimer the Conqueror mocked. “Though, I suspect your reasons for not touching me had a little to do with both.”
Not wishing to offend him and earn his wrath, Livian cleared her throat.
“Yes, well, now that we’ve sorted all that out, if you’d be so gracious as to leave my rooms.” She attempted to appeal to whatever decency might exist in this savage creature. “I had the most arduous evening and had to walk some distance in the rain.”
“Some distance; you don’t say?”
She couldn’t decipher whether he toyed with her or truly sought clarification, but either way, she gave a vigorous nod. “It was quite bad weath…”
At once, she noted details she’d previously failed to establish.
His close-cut, brown hair, so dark as to almost be black, slick with water. His—surprisingly fine—black wool garments, equally wet.
“You were saying?” he drawled, folding his arms across his broad chest. “I believe…something about the weather.”
“Yes…” Nervously, she traced her tongue along the seam of her lips.
With searing intensity, his sharp gaze zeroed in on Livian’s mouth.
The glitter in his eyes transformed into some—unfamiliar to her—emotion. A heat, not like his previous annoyance and anger of before, and somehow more unnerving.
“The weather!” she blurted.
He stared at her in confusion.
He couldn’t very well kill her if they were of a shared experience and opinion.
“That is, I was going to mention the dreadful conditions. Given you also experienced first-hand the state of the weather, you know first-hand,”I said that twice, “how miserable it is and how very much a warm b—”do not say bed,“accommodations andpeace are on such a night.”
When she’d finished her ramblings, Mr. Latimer the Conquer still stared this time in an opaque way.
“Warm accommodations,” he repeated “And peace?”
Livian gave a frantic nod; her plait bounced wildly and flopped over her shoulder. “And food,” she quickly added. “Unless you haven’t eaten, and you really should…”
