loathed and the man she loved to die on the same night, does it not?”
“Not impossible if it happened,” he corrected calmly. “I am sorry for the loss of your brother, my lady, but I am not responsible for it.”
His sympathy took her by surprise, but she refused to trust him or his words. “Of course you would deny it. I hardly expect you to admit to having committed murder.”
“And so you thought to falsify my confession through your vicious little book?” he guessed.
Correctly.
Blast him.
“I was attempting to right a wrong,” she defended herself. “If I cannot have justice for Alfred’s death, then destroying the remnants of your reputation will have to suffice.”
There. Some raw honesty for him.
His countenance was unreadable, but his jaw was rigid. “What a vivid imagination you have for a gently reared lady.”
She lifted her chin, eying him with all the defiance teeming inside her. “Pray do not act as if I shocked you. I am certain my work pales in comparison to the sins you have committed.”
He gave an indolent shrug, his stare hard upon her. “Perhaps. Or perhaps I am not as evil as you imagine me.”
Ha! She most certainly did not believe that. There was a reason he was known as Sin, after all. She was sure the rumors she had heard about him were true. All of them.
“Only an evil scoundrel would abduct an innocent woman from London and take her prisoner,” she countered.
“Ah, but I hardly think you are an innocent, Lady Calliope.” He stroked his thumb over the sharp edge of his blade as he watched her.
“You will cut yourself again,” she warned him before thinking better of the words.
He raised a dark brow. “Concern for me, princess? Take care, or else I shall think you have taken a fancy to me. Then again, I did take note of the manner in which you have been admiring my physique.”
Her cheeks went hot anew. Of course he had noticed her silly ogling of him.
“I was not admiring you,” she denied crisply. “You repulse me.”
His gaze dipped to her mouth. “Your nipple said otherwise earlier, darling.”
He had been awake. The utter knave!
Even her ears went hot. “How dare you?”
He had the audacity to flash her an unrepentant grin. “A man may as well grow familiar with the woman who will be his wife. I had to be certain you are not frigid. I will require an heir, after all.”
With that, he sauntered back to the other side of the bed, still holding his blade as if he were a common footpad wielding a weapon rather than a peer of the realm. Gritting her teeth, she rose from the bed, clutching the counterpane to her breast for modesty’s sake.
“I have already told you, I have no intention of marrying you,” she told him. “You cannot force me.”
“Force will not be necessary, princess.” He was still grinning, the fiend. “Your protestation grows tiresome.”
“As does being your prisoner,” she returned, her voice sharp.
“Need I remind you that you brought this on yourself?” he inquired mildly as he donned his trousers.
She pinned him with a glare. “I did nothing to deserve being abducted by a depraved villain.”
His smile faded. He shrugged on his shirt. “You fired the first volley in this war of ours, my dear. If you had not done your damnedest to make certain you ground my reputation into the mud, I never would have even noticed you. Right now, I would be happily between Miss Mary Vandenberg’s thighs.”
He was such a boorish devil.
“You are coarse and horrid.” And she was burning, her cheeks aflame at his wickedness.
“They call me Sin for a reason, princess.” He gave her a grim smile, working on the buttons of his shirt and hiding his chest from her view.
The moment was strangely intimate. Wildly inappropriate. It was, she imagined, what husbands and wives did, rising together, dressing in each other’s presences. Only, in her mind, a husband and wife ought to love each other, the way she and Simon had.
She forced herself to look away from the Earl of Sinclair, to search instead for her own garments. And that was when she recalled that her gown had been savaged by his blade.
How could he expect her to go about wearing yesterday’s gown, with a sawed-off sleeve?
“Do you need my assistance in helping you to dress?” he queried, disrupting the tense silence that had fallen between them.
His abrupt change of subject took her by surprise, as did his offer.