Page 12 of Her Beast

“Fuck me,” he muttered, gorging on the exquisite face beneath the foolish twist of straw and net that counted for a woman’s hat.

He could see her bloody eyelashes even from this distance!

The angel also possessed creamy, flawless skin; plush, pouty pink lips; a perfect retroussé nose; enormous blue pools for eyes; a determined chin; and a rounded jaw that Malcolm’s palm itched to cup.

The young woman nodded at something Miss Clemmons said and then turned, her smile shifting into a scowl as she glared at an old crone who was hurrying across the store toward her.

Miss Clemmons wisely melted away as the two women commenced to bicker.

The older woman made a chopping motion with one hand and the angel turned away and flounced toward the east exit.

Not for the first time Malcolm cursed the fashion for bustles and cages and every other manner of frippery that hid a woman’s body from a man’s view.

But although her lower half was concealed from him, her flaring skirts led to a waist that could not be far off the current ideal of nineteen inches, making Malcolm’s fingers—both real and phantom—twitch to span her slender body.

He loved the feel of a warm female body snugly encased in tight stays. If there was one garment he adored, it would be a corset. There was something unspeakably erotic about binding a woman’s body into the masculine ideal of femininity, sculpting her for no reason other than male pleasure.

Just looking at the angel’s snugly corseted body made him harden.

Still, as shapely as she undoubtedly was, she was also a very tiny woman. Malcolm estimated that she was roughly the same height as the current Queen of England, who had—at barely five feet tall—always looked bloody ludicrous whenever she’d stood next to her dearly departed Albert, a foot difference between them.

Malcolm was a huge man—even bigger than the Royal Consort—and he had a penchant for rough sex, so he’d never gravitated to small or fragile-looking women. Indeed, he had always believed that Sukey—who stood five feet and eleven inches in her stocking feet—had possessed the perfect female figure.

But, as much as he’d loved her, even Malcolm had to acknowledge that Sukey had not been a beauty like the woman four floors below. That hadn’t mattered a whit to Malcolm, who’d valued and adored his wife’s fire, brains, and liveliness far more than classically perfect features.

And yet here he was entranced by the perfect face of a stranger after merely gazing at her for ten seconds!

What was wrong with him? Why did he find this woman so bloody riveting?

Was it because he was a nightmare in human form who could never attract a woman like her, so now he suddenly yearned for the unattainable?

Or was it just her sheer physical perfection that drew him? After all, what manwouldn’tfind her desirable?

Just as his angel reached the door to the outside world a towering ginger-headed bloke approached her.

Malcolm lifted his glass again.

Christ! The man was massive—easily a foot taller than the girl and her chaperone—with a prodigious belly to go with his large build.

Running to fat was one thing Malcolm could not be accused of.

As hideous and scarred as he was, he’d never been more physically fit in his entire life. Not that any woman would notice his body after one look at his face.

The ginger-headed giant shook his head at the angel and whatever he said made her fling up her hands.

The man’s posture stiffened and then he grabbed her upper arm and propelled her out of the store and into the hazy, polluted afternoon.

And that was the end ofthat.

Malcolm slowly lowered the opera glass as he pondered the strange trio, his mind lingering not on his angel but on the oversized man with her.

At six feet four inches Malcolm didn’t see many men as tall as he was. And that red hair was more than a little distinctive. Why did Malcolm feel like he’d seen the man before?

He closed his eye, as if that might help him remember.

A faded image flitted through his mind, but when he tried to pin it down, the memory flickered and was gone, like a flash of light on water.

He opened his eye and stared at the huge glass doors far below.

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