Page 38 of Pride: The Rogue
“For if he had, Livian?” he asked. “If he’d been there, Mr. Dryver would have found me waiting, stopped me from entering.” His harsh gaze locked with hers. “He’d have included the very important detail Mr. Felchlin omitted: that the rooms occupant was in fact a young lady. And then all ofthis,”he slashed a hand back and forth between them, “could have been avoided.”
This…as in them.
To keep from smiling, she pressed her lips together.
“Did something I say amuse you, darlin’?” he asked, like a perturbed child.
“Yes.”
Her directness appeared to knock him off-balance.
Livian pulled her chair close to the table. “It’s just, you’re like an entirely different person than you were when you came down. It’s as though you believe men and women are incapable of being alone in one another’s company,” she charged. “That we are nothing more than animals who require handlers.”
“Aye.”
She snorted. “Next, you’ll say you don’t think men and women can be friends.”
He stared at her weirdly.
Livian widened her eyes. “You don’t!”
“I don’t think that, sweetheart,” he drawled.
“Oh, that is reassuring, Lachlan. As I was starting to take you for one of those stuffy—”
“Iknowmen and women can’t be friends.”
Livian burst out laughing. When had she enjoyed herself this immensely? It felt good, so good, to just freely laugh…that it took a moment for her to register his graveness.
Her amusement died. “That is ridiculous. They most certainly—”
“Can’t,” he finished for her. “Ultimately, sweetheart, men are primitive animals who can’t stop themselves from going to the carnal—and I managed to build a fortune based off that very accurate assumption.”
He’d built a fortune off…?
“Women?” he interrupted her puzzling. “They’re no different. They just fight their urges.”
She should be more scandalized at the bold, wicked, words he spoke than at his grim assumption that men and women were incapable of being friends.
“Yes, well, if you go through life putting women into the two categories of ladies too lofty to speak to, or women to bed, Lachlan, you certainly aren’t going to go about makinganyfriends.” Livian gently patted the top of his hand.
A warm current flowed from where her palm touched his naked flesh. Even as the power of this seemingly casual touch kept her paralyzed, a riot of sensations shot off like Vauxhall fireworks, within her.
Her heart beat as it’d never beat before.
All because I’m touching this beautiful stranger.
She went all the more still.
I’m… touching this beautiful stranger?
With a gasp, Livian snatched her fingers back and scrambled back in her chair.
Lachlan curled his lips up in a slow, crooked, all-knowing, half-grin; a grin that said he knew very well, the reason for her jerking away from him.
Oh, the smug lout. She’d sooner lie to the Lord’s face than give Lachlan Latimer the satisfaction of thinking he was somehow right.
Whichhe most certainly wasn’t.
