Page 30 of Once More, My Darling Rogue
Her eyes fluttered open, and her lips lifted up into the smallest of smiles. “You chased away the monster. You and your dragon.”
He felt as though he’d taken a hard punch to the gut. Her words, her smile. She never smiled at him like that, nor could he recall seeing that smile bestowed upon others. Yet there was an honesty in it. No artifice. No pretense. No role playing.
“What monster?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t see him clearly. Perhaps I should have a dragon inked on my back.”
He imagined a dragon in flight over her slender back, what she would endure to possess it. “It’s a very painful process. Once you begin, you can’t stop. What good is only a piece of the dragon?”
“I suppose you’re right.” She pressed her lips together before gnawing on the lower one. The action went straight to his groin. It was the shadows, his shirt draped over her skin, her in his bed.
“I have so many questions,” she said, distracting him from dangerous musings.
“We’ll get to them in the morning. You need to sleepnow.”
“I don’t understand my clothes.”
“Have they been talking to you then?”
Her smile grew slightly. “No, but they’re wrong. I don’t have a nightdress.”
“We’ll discuss it all later, after you’ve rested.” He was delaying the inevitable, but he didn’t want to lose the way she was looking at him, as though she accepted him, as though she didn’t distrust him.
She shook her head. “I don’t like to sleep.”
“You were having a nightmare. No one, nothing here will harm you. I’ll keep watch.”
“None of this, my being here, makes sense to me.”
“It will, very soon, I’m sure.”
She studied him as though striving to ferret out the truth, but he wasn’t lying. He would tell her everything tomorrow evening, after Gregory returned. Meanwhile, he would have another day of her scrubbing his back.
“I’m so cold,” she said quietly. “It’s as though I’m frozen throughout.”
He couldn’t make the fire any larger, and he had no more blankets, blast it all. He supposed he could heap his clothes on top of her. Or he could give her warmth in another way. “Don’t be alarmed but I’m going to lie on top of the covers and hold you. All right? I can warm you that way.”
She nodded. Removing his jacket, he spread it over her hips. He tugged off his boots. So the buttons wouldn’t scrape her, he draped his waistcoat over the chair. For his comfort, he unfolded his neck cloth and set it aside. Then he climbed on the bed, stretched out beside her. She came into the curve of his shoulder as though she belonged there, her hand curling against his chest. Placing his arm around her, he drew her nearer. With his free hand, he rubbed her back down to her waist, down to where the covers had gathered. He didn’t want to consider how close his hand might be to the bared flesh of her thighs.
“I can’t decide if you like me,” she said so softly he almost didn’t hear her. “You seem to care for me, like now, and other times you have no patience with me.”
“We just don’t know each other very well I suppose.”
“Then tell me a story.”
A story. Yes, he supposed he could do that. He’d told a good many to Grace when she was a child. “Once upon a time there was a cobbler and his wife—”
Laughing with that sweet sound that he had only discovered she possessed, she lifted her head and met his gaze. “You are not on the verge of telling me the story of the cobbler and the elves.”
“You know it?”
She gave him a pointed look. She’d given him many in the past, but none like this. It was teasing, amused. It made him want to plow his hands into her hair, bring her down for a kiss that would warm her, scorch her soul. It made him want to keep her here. It made him want to know her. It unsettled him to think she could be very different from what he had always known.
“Of course I know the story. I don’t want you to tell me a fairy tale, silly. I want you to share something about you. Tell me a story about you.”
Silly? He was far from silly. He considered castigating her, employer to employee, yet he didn’t want to lose this moment. For the life of him he didn’t know why he wanted to hold on to it. Share something with her. He had spent his life erecting a wall that only a select few could peer over, but none could see through completely. He even held things back from the Mabrys. He didn’t believe anyone could accept him completely as he truly was. He could give her something to use against him, so he had to be very careful in what he shared.
She settled back down, nudging her head in the hollow of his shoulder until it fit perfectly.
