Taming of the Beast (Scandalous Affairs #2) - Christi Caldwell Page 0,17
expression darkened, and then he started toward her.
Faye stiffened, her entire body tensing as she lifted her arms protectively, but he continued moving past her.
“Do you mind?” he asked.
He reached for the waistband of his trousers.
Faye gasped. Surely he wasn’t going to—“Stop!”
And shockingly, he did. He stared expectantly at her.
“Wh-what do you think you’re doing?” she croaked.
He paused. “Oh, forgive me.” Some of the tension went out of her.
That relief proved short-lived. Rejoining Faye on the other side of the bath, Tynan reached for the laces at the back of her gown.
“W-what are you doing?” she said a second time, her voice climbing. Slap at his fingers. Plant him a facer. Do… something, other than breathe heavily.
Tynan placed his lips close to her nape, and she trembled as he brushed a kiss over that overly sensitive skin. “You mean you are not looking to join me?”
Unbidden, an image slipped in of his large frame in that bath with her draped over him, both naked, his mouth on hers just as it had been a short while ago.
“No!” she squeaked. Refusing to cower, Faye angled a glance over her shoulder to meet his piercing stare. “I was decidedly—” She caught that teasing glimmer in his eyes and yanked her skirts back. “You are making light.”
“Aye.” His expression hardened. “If it’s all the same to you I intend to bathe. I’ve no intention of letting water I’ve just heated go cold, all to entertain you,” he said coolly, and unapologetically, and so damned arrogantly, she almost wanted to shed her own garments and climb in those blasted steaming waters herself.
Instead, she did the next best thing. Faye availed herself to one of the two kitchen chairs and nodded in his direction. “Well, then, as you were, Tynan.”
Surprise brought the bold slashes of his black brows up a fraction, either from her bold use of his name or the challenge she’d met. Perhaps a shade of both. She’d unnerved him for a change, and that victory sent a little thrill coursing through her.
Her triumph once again proved all too fleeting.
Mr. Wylie shoved his trousers down, and her breath caught. She should look away. She really should.
He smirked. She felt it, and she couldn’t even bring herself to care as she took in the sight of him, a perfectly carved slab of muscle with oak-hard thighs, and his shaft, fully erect and arching up toward his flat belly, straining.
Heat pooled low in her belly and between her legs, her body’s reaction not different from when she’d scoured the pages of that forbidden book and, under the covers, touched herself in that place that now ached.
That arrogant quirk of Tynan’s lips slipped. That jeering mockery gave way to an intensity of emotion she couldn’t quite name, but one that unnerved her even more.
Faye swiftly trained her focus skyward, upon that shockingly well-painted ceiling of a pretty eggshell-blue paint, not the cracked and aged and dull color that would fit with the sorry furnishings. She focused on those minute, irrelevant details to keep herself from thinking about the fact that she now stood in the kitchen with a stranger who’d stripped himself bare before her. A virile man, at that. “Let us get to it, Tynan. The details of our…”
The splash of his leg striking the water’s surface brought her words trailing off, and she was forced to battle new imagery of Tynan Wylie in her mind—his long, naked frame covered by the surface of that steaming water.
Swallowing wildly, she forced out the remainder of her unfinished thought. “Our arrangement.”
“Hand me that rag, sweet.”
Sweet. Yet another endearment that rolled all too easily from his tongue. “Uh… yes, right.” Coming to her feet, Faye swept her gaze about. She snagged the scrap of white linen and walked over to join him, but then stopped. Keeping a pace apart, she stretched her arm out and looked at the point beyond the top of his dark curls. “You know your manners really are quite lacking,” she felt inclined to point out. “A ‘please’ will get you far, Tynan.”
“A ‘please’ will get me far?” He snorted. “If only I’d had this sage advice during my times living in the streets and tending Newgate, sweet kitten.”
Cutting through her annoyance with him, came just one phrase from all the words he’d spoken…
During my times living in the streets.
It was a detail that painted a harsh life, and he spoke about it with a casualness that suggested suffering was natural and hardship common.