Lady Derring Takes a Lover - Julie Anne Long Page 0,55

yet interesting cigar. You wouldn’t happen to know where I might find such a thing?”

She sighed. “Did it smell like . . . something that had perhaps died inside the walls of a house, then was buried in a variety of herbs and spices in a kitchen garden watered by the contents of a slops jar?”

He struggled not to smile. “It wasn’t quite how Delacorte put it. But your description is equally apt.”

“Derring used to be fond of cigars that were precisely . . . that unusual. I don’t know where he purchased them, however. I never did see a bill or receipt for them.”

“Did you often see his bills and receipts?” He said it lightly, and with some surprise, as though receipts were a comical thing to inflict upon a countess.

She hesitated. “For the running of the household, of course. Not for Derring’s purchases.” She searched his face curiously, as something was clearly troubling her about the question. “If you’re wondering how it is I came to acquire the expertise to run a grand boarding establishment, Captain, I tracked those expenses very carefully, and I am very good at budgeting and managing a staff,” she said proudly. “Derring wasn’t, of course,” she added shortly, dryly.

He believed her. Surely someone who was intelligent, and blushed so very easily, wouldn’t lie as smoothly as that, or volunteer that sort of information.

Then again: one never knew anything about anyone, as he’d told the drunk man lying in front of The Grand Palace on the Thames.

“Your spotless facilities and my comfortable room are a testament to your household management skills, Lady Derring.”

Her crooked smile once again indicated she was skeptical of flattery, particularly from him, but nevertheless, he could see she was leaning into it the way a flower leans into a cool spring rain.

Which was precisely how he was leaning into that smile.

The realization made him frown again. “I expect you should want to get on with your duties. Am I keeping you from them?”

“I was just about to trim the candles in the sconces.”

She looked up at them somewhat ruefully.

He recalled her body stretched to reach the top of the window. The compulsion to help her with something was like an itch needing scratching.

“Why don’t I do . . .” He gestured to the sconces. “It’s easier for me to reach.”

She looked up at him, dark eyes thoughtful, a little reluctant.

“That’s very kind of you.” She said it somewhat stiffly, a little shyly. As if it were a sort of surrender.

She handed him a candle.

He effortlessly reached up.

First one sconce.

And then the next.

Conversation had been safer than this silence, or as safe as anything could feel in Captain Hardy’s presence; he was, she realized, precisely as Dot had described him: part Lucifer, part Atlas. Trouble. And, quite frankly, Desire on Legs.

The silence made her both acutely aware that they were alone, and that as she handed up the candles, she was so close that her next breath took in a tantalizing hint of smoke and soap and musk, clean but heady. Immediately she understood how Derring had felt about those cigars. She wished for a blanket that smelled just like this. She would wrap herself in it every night. She would never sleep again.

She handed him another candle.

And when he reached up, she leaned forward a little more and inhaled, quite sneakily, near his elbow.

Her head went light. Her eyes closed.

When she opened them, he was staring down at her. His face was absolutely motionless. His face a study in amazement.

“Did you just . . . sniff . . . me, Lady Derring?”

His voice was amused. And very, very soft. Like a voice from the pillow next to hers.

After a long and shameful delay, during which he did not blink once, and during which her face rose several degrees in temperature, she finally whispered, “Perhaps inadvertently?”

The trouble was, he was still very close, and she could still smell him. The impulse to rest her head against his arm was a terrible, frightening urge.

And all at once something he saw in her face made his go closed and unreadable.

He silently turned, leaving her simmering in mortification.

He moved on to the next sconce.

She handed him the candle, and he reached up. “Lavender,” he said. His voice was gruff.

“I beg your pardon?”

He turned and met her eyes and said, very clearly, very steadily, his voice confiding and quiet, “Last night, when you leaned forward to tell me I was gauche, you smelled of lavender