Page 33 of Burning Secrets of a Lady's Pen
Corin nodded.
“Until the flashbacks, yes. He seemed cold and removed. Almost a villain, the way he haunted Lady Evelina. I could almost swear that he hated her until we saw the beginning of their romance. Where did you get inspiration for such a ghoulish love?”
Imelda felt her chest tighten, her eyes jerking away from Corin’s as she shrugged awkwardly.
“Where does one ever get inspiration?” she murmured, trying to evade the truth that danced in her chest like too hot a burning flame.
“I thought maybe you might have…” Corin trailed off, looking out over the expanse of the water to one side with a shrug. “There were scenes that seemed vaguely Florentine, you know—but then with Reginald…I worried that maybe there was a failed romance for you. After your time in Florence where you might have come across a Reginald of your own.”
For a long moment, all Imelda could do was stare at him. Was he…was he really asking her if she had met someone else to inspire Reginald? She could feel her face heat in a way that had nothing to do with the warmth of the sun, her words stuck in her throat as he turned worriedly back to her.
And she could see the exact moment that realization dawned.
“You drew inspiration for Reginald from me?” His voice was toneless, his dark eyes glittering as he paused in his rowing to stare at her, and Imelda still couldn’t answer him.
How was she supposed to tell him that she had?
She could hardly deny it. Not without creating some fictitious love after Florence like he’d been asking her about, and her brain was far too full of fluff to even think of coming up with such a story.
“You made me the villain in your story,” Corin repeated more forcefully, throwing the paddles down into the boat and sitting back with an angry stare.
“Not a villain, necessarily,” Imelda hedged. “And I never said that you were the inspiration for Reginald either.”
“You never said I wasn’t,” he returned flatly.
“Reginald is a complicated character—”
“Who is trying to kill the heroine of your story!” Corin snapped, his nostrils flaring. “He quite literally—” He flung his arm back to gesture, though as he did so, the boat pitched, and just as quickly as he had started arguing with her, he was forced to stop.
The disturbed water beat against the side of the boat as Corin tried to right it, the boat rocking to and fro, and Corin went right out of it over the side, his words lost in a gurgle of water and splashing.
“Corin!”
It took everything in Imelda not to stand and make matters worse, her hands shooting out to either side of the boat to try and steady both it and herself as she heard Corin come back up for air.
“Christ!”
“Corin, are you all right?” Imelda didn’t dare lean any further than she was already, her knuckles bleaching white from how tightly she held the boat as she looked over the side at a drenched, irritated Corin.
“I’m wet!” Corin snapped.
“Let me give you a hand.” Imelda fussed, holding tightly to one side of the boat as she extended her other arm to reach out to him.
Corin said nothing as he gripped her hand with one of his own and used the other to leverage his body up and over the side in order to get back in the boat.
He was seething. That much was clear, his nostrils wide and his eyebrows furrowed as he whisked water off of his forehead and pushed his drenched curls back off of his face.
Imelda forgot the English language. How to speak it, how even to think it.
His clothing clung to him in a way that would be deemed indecent no matter the circles that one ran in, every taut muscle on display under the now sheer, tight fabric. She could see every line of his chest and the faint smattering of hair that ran down the line of it.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she thought she could actually imagine the feel of that hair under the skin of her fingertips as she ran them slowly down it, tracing it until it reached that raised line of his pants and—
“Not a word,” Corin muttered, clearly mistaking her silence and stare for something else entirely.
Imelda felt as if molten lava had overtaken her veins, her breath trapped in her chest as she tried to regain her mental footing.
She was ogling him, she knew. She was no better than a man. The basest of men, even. The way she was picturing the skin that lurked under his clothing, the way her brain kept returning to that trail of hair all the way down…
