Page 32 of A Touch Wicked
James rose from the chair. Emma was surprised when he sat beside her and gently lifted her chin. Oh, how blue his eyes were. How tender his gaze. She wanted him to stare at her like that all the time, to strip her bare and make love to her again and again and again. It was so easy to forget, the moment her skin touched his.
“Not nothing,” he said, brushing his thumb across her cheek. “If you ever wish to speak about it, I’ll be here.”
“You will judge me harshly.”
For everything. I’m not a good woman.
She was selfish, to hold so many of his secrets in her heart and share nothing of her own.
“Then I hope I surprise you.” His voice was so low now. “I hope you’re wrong.”
Emma sighed and leaned into his hand; she couldn’t help herself. “Why can’t you sleep?”
James’s hand stilled for a moment. “Bad dreams, Miss Dumont. Why were you restless?”
“Good dreams,” Emma said. “Ones I don’t deserve.”
That seemed to surprise him. “You think I will judge you harshly,” he said, stroking a thumb across her lower lip now. “and that you don’t deserve your good dreams. What makes you so unworthy of happiness?”
Emma grasped James’s hand and pressed a kiss to his palm, drawing from him a soft inhale. “One day, I’ll tell you. And you’ll understand why I don’t sleep.”
Chapter 18
“Good god, he’s done it again!” Alexandra flicked the newspaper and groaned. “I hate men. I hate them.”
Emma and Alexandra were having tea in the garden, on what was a beautiful, sunny day. Emma tried her best to take part in discussion, but for the last half hour had lapsed into the kind of silence that meant she was only half-listening.
It had been three days since she had last seen James in the library. He came and went from society events, and did not return home until late. If the lack of nighttime pacing was any indication, he was finally sleeping again.
Emma envied him that. It meant he was moving on from the mysterious masked woman.
Alexandra waved a hand in front of Emma’s face. “You’re not listening. You’ve been elsewhere for days.”
Emma sighed. “Forgive me. I’m out of sorts at the moment. What were you speaking of?”
“Mr. Nicholas Spencer,” Alexandra spat, as if the name were a curse. “The Devil.”
“Oh, dear. What did he write this time?”
Nicholas Spencer used any opportunity to eviscerate Alexandra's work in the papers. Emma found his criticisms had merit, but Alexandra harbored an irrational hatred for the man. Whenever she’d asked about it, her friend went silent and refused to speak of it. She merely referred to him by the moniker she had given him: the Devil.
Alexandra snapped up the newspaper. “The author is a noblewoman who seeks to understand the plight of the common people. Yet she writes about this from the comfort of St. James's, in a house that spends more on food than those in Whitechapel make in a lifetime. Surely that accounts for the limited range in her work: the ability to seek solace in her fortune after visiting the poverty in the Nichol. Some do not have such luxury of experiencing poverty as if it were a new gown, to be used and then discarded at will.” She crumpled the newspaper in her hands.
Emma winced. “He has a point, dear. Even I have not lived in such conditions as to write about them with the same passion he does.”
“I don’t care if he has a point!” Alexandra seethed. “He always has a point. It’s never enough. He’s a bloody—”
“Alexandra,” a voice interrupted. “Not very ladylike language, is that?”
Emma turned to see James coming through the path between the rose bushes. She eased out a breath. Did he have to look so handsome?
When his eyes touched on hers, she flushed, recalling that she had kissed his hand that night in the library. She should not have done such a thing. It revealed too much.
James’s lips curved into a smile, as if he could read her mind. God, how she’d missed that smile. It was a smile that belonged in a bedchamber, shared between them as lovers. It was intimate, and he bloody well knew it.
Mercifully, Alexandra diverted his attention by flinging the newspaper at him. “I’ll use whatever language I see fit. Did you see? Did you see what he wrote?”
James caught the flying pages against his chest. “Yes, I saw, and I’m not certain what you expect me to do about it. Challenge him to a duel?”
