Page 51 of Miss Delectable
“Youlistenedto me,” he said, bracing his hips against the windowsill. “Let me prattle on like a schoolboy retelling the Battle of Hastings. You ply me with soft cushions, a warm hearth, and a shameless cat. You kiss me as if…”
He rose and turned away—very rude, that—but Ann had the sense he needed the privacy to gather his thoughts.
“As if you are my favorite dessert,” Ann said, crossing the room and wrapping her arms around him from behind, “and somebody has finally perfected the recipe.” She pressed herself to the hard planes of his back, her embrace a little desperate. Holding Orion felt good and right, but did nothing to stem the tide of desire that threatened to engulf her.
Where had this passion come from, and what was she todoabout it?
He turned and looped his arms around her shoulders, resting his chin on her crown. “We ought not to be carrying on like this before the window, Annie.”
“This is not carrying on. Not nearly.”
He took her hand and pressed it to an impressive bulge behind his falls. “Verynearly. The sooner I subject myself to the bracing effect of the elements, the more likely I am to survive this ambush without… without behaving rashly.”
Ann itched to caress him intimately and learn just how rashly they could enjoy each other.
“I should be getting to the Coventry,” she said, giving him a single glancing pat. “Did you want me to listen for any particular sort of gossip?”
He twitched her shawl up around her shoulders. “A fellow named Philippe Deschamps has graced the Coventry’s tables a time or two. He might well be spreading talk about me, or his presence might be provoking others to talk. He was the French officer most likely to have met with any spy from my camp.”
“The waiters repeat nearly everything they hear at the tables. I’ll pay attention to them for a change. I don’t want to move.”
“Do Miss Julia and Miss Diana make a weekly venture of their library sortie?”
“Without fail.”
“Might I call again next week, Annie?”
Annie.She’d never had a nickname before. “If you don’t, I will have to call on you.”
“We keep the cellar stairs unlocked during daylight hours for the trades.” He murmured the words close to her ear, inspiring visions of daylight raids and wild interludes in his study. “I ought not to have said that, because it implies that all I seek from you is… Tell me to hush, Annie. Tell me not to be presumptuous and impulsive.”
Ann’s grip on him became fierce, because he was right: Physical arousal was a formidable distraction, but the feelings… oh, the feelings.
“We are lonely,” she said. “Tired of being lonely, tired of solitude and self-sufficiency, but what draws us together is more than that.”
He put a finger to her lips. “Not another word. You are due at the Coventry, and I must resolve once and for all the small matter of somebody trying to destroy my reputation and my business. I will call on you again next week, if you’ll allow it.”
“I will allow it.” Ann would be counting the hours, which bothered her. On the one hand, she never wanted to turn loose of Orion Goddard. On the other, she had toiled for years to achieve professional standing one step shy of the foremost honors to be had in a kitchen.
She desired Orion Goddard, respected him, liked him, and was even a little besotted with him, but he was right: Indulging her impulses with him could come at a price much higher than she was prepared to pay.
Ann pondered that lowering thought while Orion escorted her the short distance to the Coventry’s back gate and then right up to the back door.
“Until next week,” he said, bowing correctly over her hand. “I will see you in my sweetest dreams.”
She curtseyed. “Until next week.” She slipped through the door lest she make free with his person on the very doorstep, but hadn’t so much as unbuttoned her cloak before Jules, looking irascible and smelling strongly of overindulgence, blocked the hallway to the kitchen.
“Pearson, you are late, and that is no sort of example to set for your new apprentice.”
Ann looked him up and down, in no mood for his tantrums. “While you are for once on time. Would you also like to choose tonight’s menu for a change, or shall I just go ahead and do that, the same as I have for the past fortnight?”
She brushed past him, knowing she ought not to provoke him, but no longer willing to pretend he was the kitchen’s indispensable talent.
Because he wasn’t and never had been, and that he’d ruin her great good spirits with his petty tyranny vexed her exceedingly.
* * *
Agricola had not initially sharedRye’s enthusiasm for some exercise on a cold, still morning, but as they’d approached the park, the gelding had caught sight of open expanses of grass covered in sparkling hoar frost. He’d gone so far as to give a ponderous buck and shimmy and to whinny to his kin on the bridle paths.
