chance to answer, clearly already having one. “And here I’d been so certain those swims had been deliberate, to raise their ire, and yet if they had been, surely you’d have recalled them.”
Actually, she had been correct.
“Alas, it was not a habit you quit, though, did you, Lord Scarsdale?” she murmured in contemplative tones. “There was the time two years ago . . . I came upon you . . .”
She left that to dangle in the air, a memory she had that included Charles, but one which he had no memory or knowledge of.
And . . . he wanted it. He wanted so very desperately to reverse time and find himself in that moment with her . . . creating a future recollection that they two shared. What would it have been? What could it have been?
There was, however, no going back. Hell, at this point, Charles wasn’t entirely certain there was any going forward with Emma, and that acknowledgment he made for the first time to himself struck in his chest. But he’d also be damned if he didn’t try, still.
“Did you?” he asked, adding a layer of huskiness to his response.
“Oh, yes,” she said, with a little lift of her shoulders in a bored shrug.
Charles narrowed his eyes on the saucy woman he’d almost wed.
Emma pushed herself away from the poster and took a step closer. “I had quite a view of . . .” She dropped her gaze to the blankets—nay, more specifically, square between his legs.
Heat crept up his neck, and he squirmed, his bare ass cold on the hardwood floor. Surely she was not looking at—
“Your bits and pieces.”
Charles choked. There was something utterly horrifying in hearing the woman he desperately wished to wed use that same term his own mother had in these rooms about his . . . about his . . . bits and pieces.
Emma flicked a bored stare over his person, and with a yawn, she resumed walking.
By God, she had . . . yawned at him. Because of him? And about his, as she’d called them . . . bits and pieces? It was really all the same. And it also happened to be the first time in the whole of his life that a woman had done so.
That heat continued its climb all the way to his cheeks.
Emma flared her eyes. “My goodness, are you blushing?”
Nearly pitch black as the room was, the minx missed absolutely nothing.
“Hardly.” Charles clenched his jaw. “I am . . . merely hot.” He wasn’t given to lying, but he also wasn’t one who was readily going to own a blush.
The young lady cast a glance over her shoulder, giving him a cursory up-and-down look before resuming her turn about his room. “Given you aren’t wearing a stitch of clothing, I’d say that is rather hard to believe.” She moved with ginger steps. Careful ones. All the while she did, she passed her gaze over the items assembled upon his desk, and the furniture situated around the room, as if all of it were infinitely more interesting than Charles himself. Which, given how she’d initiated their breakup and received his pursuit following it, wasn’t that hard to believe. Still, her indifference chafed. Emma’s ankle turned ever so slightly, and she immediately righted herself, so quick with that correction that had he not been studying her as closely as he was, he would have missed it.
She cleared her throat and, carefully lowering herself to a knee, grabbed his trousers. Straightening, Emma tossed them down at Charles.
Refusing to give up the death grip he had on his sheet, Charles made no effort to catch the garment. Instead he let it hit him in the chest.
Wordlessly, she presented him with her back and made her way over to his desk.
As he stood, he kept his gaze upon Emma. Emma, running her fingers over his book. His inkwell set. There was an intimacy to her exploring those particular items, even deeper than her being in his rooms. “It does occur to me, since you stormed my household, you’ve not provided the reason for your . . . late-night appearance,” he called over, clutching the sheet carefully about him.
“No.” Emma released the corner of his notebook and faced him; there wasn’t the blush he’d worn moments ago, which he would have expected any young lady to be in possession of, given his state of undress. Rather, standing with the hearth at her back, the fire casting a glow