One Thing Leads to a Lover (Love and Let Spy #2) - Susanna Craig Page 0,14
as a sort of alarm. In any case, he sucked in a sharp breath through his nostrils as its rusty shriek split the night, and was rewarded with the sweet, rich perfume of roses just before a thump on the back of his head sent him to his knees.
Langley Stanhope was far too hard-headed to lose consciousness. But his spectacles flew off and landed somewhere farther off, along the stone path, based on the clatter. When he tried to shake off the blow, he only succeeded in hurrying the onset of a headache. Dazed, but not so impaired that he could not move quickly, he hoisted himself into a crouch and spun, raising one arm to ward off any successive strikes as he turned to face his attacker.
The first thing he saw was the raveled end of a silk tie, the sort generally used to close a gentleman’s dressing gown. As his gaze rose, he discovered that the gentleman’s dressing gown in question had presumably once belonged to the Earl of Kingston. At present, it was wrapped around the tall, willowy form of that late gentleman’s wife.
She too had one arm raised, clutching the remaining fragment of the clay flowerpot with which she’d clubbed him. And on her face, an expression that somehow mingled both shock and horror, along with more than a dash of pride.
He wasn’t entirely sure which emotion had won out when she dropped the shard of pottery and began to babble as he got fully to his feet. “Oh. Oh, my. I am sorry! I couldn’t sleep, so I came out here. The weather was so fine today, wasn’t it?…though I suppose that wasn’t wise, so late at night. Still, I should never have done such a thing if I’d realized who…but in the shadows, it’s quite impossible to tell—”
He raised his hand again, partly to stop the flow of words, and partly to try to ease the pain shooting through the back of his skull. “Don’t apologize, Lady Kingston. It’s your garden, and I was trespassing. You have every right to protect yourself.”
Obligingly, she stopped speaking for a moment. But her nervous energy next found its outlet in reaching forward to brush the dirt and pottery fragments from his shoulders and even his hair. Her fingertips moved over him lightly, gently, the sort of touch a man could come to crave.
“And no idea who I really am,” he rasped, pushing her away with words when he could not seem to command his body. He knew better than to make himself vulnerable.
Her hand fell away and something like fear fluttered into her eyes. She was studying him as she had earlier that day—or yesterday—when they had stood facing one another in the entry hall.
Langley was unaccustomed to being the object of scrutiny.
And having lost his spectacles in the fracas, he could not return the favor as fully as he would’ve liked. Though they stood closer together now than they had then, she was still a bit blurry around the edges. The combination of lamplight and moonlight was insufficient to put a firm name to the color of her eyes or her hair—brown wouldn’t do, in either case—and the dressing gown hid everything else of interest from view. Still, he knew beyond a doubt that she was pretty.
“But of course I do. You’re—” she began and broke off again, backing a step away in her uncertainty. “Are you hurt, sir?” she asked abruptly. It could not have been clearer to him that the question she really wished to ask was, Do you mean to hurt me?
To both questions, spoken and unspoken, he swiftly answered, “No.”
Nevertheless, she withdrew another step, and another, out of the reach of his vision, out of his reach, until—
Crunch.
“Oh dear. What have I—?”
“I believe, Lady Kingston,” he said calmly, “you’ll find those are my spectacles under your foot.”
“Your spectacles? But you don’t—that is to say, earlier you weren’t wearing—” As she spoke, she crouched, her eyes never leaving his face as her fingers brushed across the flagstone path near her feet until she found what he’d known she would. Her voice dropped as she finished her sentence: “—spectacles.”
When she rose, their twisted remains lay on her palm, but she did not stretch out her hand to given them to him. Neither did he step forward to take them from her, having no desire to find out what might happen if he took her by surprise her a second time.