Page 15 of The Mad Baron's Bride
She’d never been around a man who made her soaware, as if her nerves had been tapped alive.
A scent of sulfur wafted from her candle, promising her that moving forward was a step toward temptation, one step toward hell.
“Come in,” he said, and she did, temptation be damned.
“Your aunt has persuaded you to trade your poky lodgings for one of her soft beds?” She drifted along the bookcases, pretending to look at titles. She already knew what was here.
“I hadn’t wished to impose on her, but she offers several amenities that the rooms I found did not.” He rested his gaze on Leda as if she figured among these amenities. Heat rippled across her collarbone.
“At the price of your bachelor’s independence. She will mark all your comings and goings, you know.”
“I have found that the pleasures of the bachelor life, whatever they may be, have lost their appeal.”
“Thus the wish to marry again. Did neither of the Misses Warren show promise? It cannot be there is not a single lady you met today who has piqued your interest.”
He closed his book but put a finger in it to mark his place. “I’ve met one.”
She studied a row of leather-bound titles, conscious of how she held her candle, how her body moved in this space. She was accustomed to being looked at, but the weight of his regard was different. It lay on her skin like a touch.
“Do you mean to make an offer?”
“I am not certain she would encourage my suit. She has not spoken highly of marriage.”
He stood, his body unfolding from the chair, and she was treated to a full view of the powerful swell of his shoulders, the strong square of his chest. The waistcoat hugged a flat stomach, and she suspected he did not rely on stays. The stretch of the fabric suggested that what lay beneath was pure muscle and virile blood.
Now why was she having notions that he wasvirile.
She turned to glance at him over one shoulder, arching a brow. “Is she the type to consider an association outside of marriage?”
That was very daring of her. Leda hadn’t once contemplated having an affair, though she knew widows like herself could take such liberties, if they stayed discreet. Leda herself looked the other way, and occupied herself in her room, when Lady Plume now and again entertained a male caller late into the night.
“I do not know if she could encourage those attentions, either. And at any rate, I ought to occupy my time with finding a companion for my daughter. Not for myself.”
“Yet the right wife would fulfill both of those functions, and so admirably,” Leda murmured.
Heat teased her senses first, sending a tingle down her spine. Then the scent of tobacco and warm male curled beneath her nose as he drew close. A spicy undertone came with it, a scent unfamiliar but which conjured images of the dark undergrowthof forests, wild animals, hunter and prey. She shivered as he spoke, and his breath wafted over the part of her shoulder left open by the loose neckline of her gown.
“What are you searching for?”
Safety. Like all cornered creatures, she wanted safety: a burrow in which to hide. A companion to protect her.
She turned her head away, scanning the titles without reading them. “Something to lull me to sleep. My imagination is overactive tonight.”
He held out the volume in his hands, gilt tooled on the green leather. “My aunt had a copy of theLyrical Ballads. I was curious about it.”
“Appropriately soporific?”
“Not so. The first poem is about an ancient mariner going barking mad. Lack of water, I gather, and something about having to wear a dead bird about his neck.”
Leda scrunched up her face. “Then by comparison, you must feel quite mundane. The utterly normal, average baron. Nothing like what they say.”
“The accusation is not that I am mad, so much as I drove my wife to madness.”
“I am sure that is not true.”
He lifted a brow. The hairs were dark, like his lashes, startling against the pale color of his eyes, which caught the shadows in the room. “No? Yet you said almost as much over breakfast.”
“That you drove your wife mad? Did you?”
