Murder on Cold Street (Lady Sherlock #5) - Sherry Thomas Page 0,16
dipped his head and took her lips in his.
Four
The first time Charlotte Holmes had kissed Lord Ingram, she’d been thirteen and he fifteen—and she’d blackmailed him into it by threatening to lure a horde of unruly children to the ruins of a Roman villa that he had been in the middle of excavating.
She remembered very little of the kiss itself. For a girl who possessed near-perfect recall, that had been a grand anomaly, as if for the duration of the kiss, her brain had suffered some sort of catastrophic mechanical failure.
She did remember the faint whiff of Turkish tobacco that clung to him. She did remember the stare he gave her afterward, his expression opaque and unfriendly. And she did remember watching him march away, his strides long and swift, while her fingertips prickled with remnant heat and electricity.
A dozen years passed before they kissed for the second time this past summer. Their circumstances had changed greatly, as had they as people, yet exactly the same thing had happened. She had emerged from that kiss, too, as if from a daze, aware only that she was holding on to him, her cheek against the lapel of his coat, his heartbeat drumming in synchrony with her own.
Much again had happened in the months since, most notably that they had slept together. Not as an ignition of long-suppressed desires—though she suspected they’d had enough of those to set a dozen beds on fire—but as a measure calculated to create a certain impression, while dealing with a dangerous adversary.
Thankfully, as driven by ulterior motives as those two bouts of physical intimacy had been, she remembered them very well. The very correct, very straitlaced Lord Ingram had been as depraved in bed as she could have hoped for—and she had hoped for a great deal, having had long years to contemplate, in theory, all manner of debauchery and indecency.
Present-day Lord Ingram leaned down toward her.
The faint scar by his temple that he had acquired after a trip abroad two years ago. The gleam of the tiny antique coin that adorned his favorite stickpin. The beginning of stubble on a jaw that had been closely shaven that morning.
Heat.
Pressure.
Incitement.
He straightened.
She panted, as if she’d just finished a session of canne de combat training. Her face felt hot. The soles of her feet tingled. And still she could only recall bits and pieces of the kiss—the texture of his hair between her fingers, the slight roughness of wool under her other hand, the slide of the tip of his tongue across the inside of her upper lip—as if she’d dreamt of it and most of the dream had evaporated upon waking up.
Silence.
Not a fraught silence, full of undertow and that asphyxiated feeling in the chest. Nor an easy, relaxed silence. More as if . . . as if they were two travelers who found themselves in a place not marked on any map, and were looking about for their bearings.
“So this is what you came to see me for,” she murmured. “Does it have something to do with Mr. Stephen Marbleton’s involuntary return to Château Vaudrieu?”
“Yes.”
She gazed at him. “You gave in to an impulse. This is unlike you, Ash.”
He made no response.
She, for all that she was often thought of as cold-blooded and unemotional, was rather free with her impulses—as much as possible, she preferred to indulge herself. Lord Ingram, on the other hand, felt intensely, yet kept a stranglehold on his emotions and his desires.
“You taste good,” she said.
Another indulged impulse on her part, to give voice to this particular thought.
Was he carefully weighing his words, making sure that he did not answer rashly, impetuously?
He kissed her again.
The heat of his palm against her cheek.
The pressure on her chin, held firmly between his thumb and forefinger.
The incitement of being pulled up from her chair and set against the wall.
And then he was no longer kissing her, but gazing into her eyes. An entire minute passed before he said softly, “I didn’t give in to an impulse, Holmes. I made a choice.”
* * *
Her eyes were large and wide set, ringed with long dark lashes tipped with a hint of gold. Her irises were the vivid cool blue of northern skies in autumn—and sometimes they reminded Lord Ingram exactly of a transparent, impersonal sky, unclouded by emotions.
They were not quite as impersonal today. But they remained deceptively guileless, as if she had never experienced kisses—or even proximity to a man—before this moment.