create.”
Slowly, he turned to face her.
She was once again in her shift, with the blanket now secured around her like a toga. Yet she was still bare enough to stir his desire. Which wasn’t helped by the way she lifted her damp hair from her neck and shoulders, revealing the creamy smoothness of her skin as she twisted her tresses to put up her hair.
The sight of her mesmerized him. He’d watched countless women fuss with their hair. Some after they’d just left his bed, in fact. But never had the sight struck him with such visceral force as it did now, with such a fierce reminder that private, innocent moments like this still connected them. And always would.
Holding the hair pins between her lips, she twisted her damp hair into a chignon and attempted to pin it into place. She turned her lithe body this way and that, and he smiled at her antics, as if turning herself could magically make her hair do the same. But the uncooperative locks kept slipping free.
He took the pins from her, then gently turned her around. “Let me.”
Her lips parted in surprise, but she obliged and didn’t fight him when he carefully took her hair in his hands and loosely twisted it. Even though it was damp, her locks still slipped over his fingers like silk, and he resisted the urge to say to hell with the pins and shove his hands deep into its softness, to let the golden tresses fill his palms.
“You don’t have to do that.” A grudging acquiescence edged her voice that she needed his help. They’d broken down walls tonight, but they were still a long way from the trust they’d once shared. A trust he very much wanted back.
“I don’t mind.” No, he was grateful for any excuse to touch her, even this innocently. “Now that my stint in the army’s over, I’ve been considering a second career,” he admitted thoughtfully. “Something decidedly more dangerous.”
“Home office agent?”
“Lady’s maid,” he said deadpan.
A mischievous smile pulled at her lips. “Well, you are surprisingly good at pinning up a woman’s hair.”
He lowered his mouth to her ear and drawled rakishly, “I’m even better at taking it down.” Then he punctuated that exaggerated flirtation with a stolen kiss to her nape. Any excuse to touch her.
She laughed, killing whatever seduction he might have started. He would have considered that laugh as a prick to his male pride, if not for enjoying the lilting sound of it so much.
He secured the last pin, and she began to move away. “Thank you—”
He took her shoulders and stopped her. This time when he lowered his mouth to her ear, he was deadly serious. “Thank you for trusting me about your brother.”
She hesitated, then gave a jerky nod. Not at all the vote of confidence he’d wanted, but he would take it. And take hope in it.
Yet he couldn’t bring himself to step away from her and instead nuzzled his cheek against her exposed nape. She trembled.
“All those years, I never forgot about you,” he admitted. “But I’d moved on, accepting the new life I’d been given, just as I’d hoped you had.” He pulled in a deep breath. “I hated your father for what he did to us, but I also knew that he wasn’t wrong. You deserved a better man for a husband than me.”
“Don’t say that,” she scolded, but the chastisement was barely more than a breath. “It isn’t true.”
“It is—it was. The life I could have given you then would never have been enough.”
He slid his hand over her shoulder, to trace delicate patterns with his fingers against the side of her neck. This time it wasn’t just a tremble that he elicited from her but a quickening of her breath, a racing of her pulse beneath his fingertips. She was affected by him as much as he was by her. Her body couldn’t lie.
“You deserved riches, a grand house, jewels and furs, a fine carriage…the respect of society. I couldn’t have given you any of that.”
Not then.
The words lingered around them, as palpably as if he’d spoken them aloud. She stood frozen beneath his hands as he slowly began to caress them up and down her arms in slow, reassuring strokes.
“But your father can’t harm us any longer.” He dared to place a single kiss against her ear, in hopes of stirring the same longing inside her that now pulsed through him. “And I’m no longer a man you