Page 32 of Pride: The Rogue
He should’ve known she’d not falter so easily.
“Mr. Latimer,” she said on a huff. “As one who’d beensodetermined to reclaim his rooms, I’d trust you’d far rather be there in the accommodations you fought me over than sitting here, drinking my milk, and keeping me from my reading.”
Actually, she’d be dead wrong, ten times to Sunday on that supposition.
Latimer found himself enjoying their repartee more than he’d enjoyed anything in, hell, longer than he could recall.
He looked with new interest upon that coveted item she held so close to her breast. What kind of tales did Mrs. Lovelace find herself reading? Given the attributes she designed a clearly fictitious husband, loving, caring, devoted, respectable gentlemen, Latimer ventured she was a romantic and favored works romantic in nature.
“What an interesting volume,” he remarked. Nor did his words emerge not as any part of banter between them, but rather born of an actual curiosity. “One that doesn’t even have a title or the name of an author etched upon the cover or spine.”
Latimer found himself reaching for the object in question.
Flushing, Mrs. Lovelace quickly drew the book in, protectively close.
She glared.
“Ah, I see. You, the lovely Mrs. Lovelace, unlike your esteemed husband,dohave a problem sharing.”
“Only with bothersome, mettlesome, grating fellows too arrogant to know when their company is unwanted.” She spoke between tightly gritted teeth.
“Me?” he asked, this time with the most false stunned surprise meant to shine through.
“Yes, Mr. Latimer!You!”
“Speaking of unwanted company,” he needled. “May I venture a guess?”
She sighed. “I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Upon discovering his delectable wife landed herself alone with a real man, Mr. Lovelace, cast you out?”
If the lady’s cheeks grew any redder and hotter, she was going to catch fire and swallow Latimer up in that conflagration.
He suppressed a grin. It wouldn’t be a bad way to go.
“That is it, isn’t it?” he continued when she didn’t take the bait. “The stodgy fellow would have been able to tell from the flush on your body, when you came to him in your night shift, that it wasn’t any fire responsible for that becoming color you wore.”
With every imagined vision he painted with his own words in his own mind, his voice grew harsher. His cock grew harder and harder.
And the golden-haired beauty before him, her breath, too, grew increasingly shallow.
God, he wanted her.
“Aye, darlin’,” he said huskily, “he would have known with just a single glance you enjoyed that one short moment spent in my arms more than you’d ever spent in his—”
In the end, it was those outrageous words that got the rise he sought out of her.
His mystery woman soared to her feet with a speed that sent her chair flying backward and just missed tumbling into the still roaring fires. “Would you stop!”
Her cry echoed throughout the silent inn. As soon as it did, her panic-stricken eyes, darted frantically throughout the room.
But no one appeared. She and Latimer remained alone, while the whole world slept.
The lady stared at him through worried eyes. For there could be no doubting this regal, composed-until-this-moment, proud young woman was, in fact, a lady.
As she dampened her plump lips in that telltale way he’d learned fast denoted her unease, he went absolutely motionless.
Latimer studied the beguiling chit not with a gaze clouded by desire, but in a new light.
