One Thing Leads to a Lover (Love and Let Spy #2) - Susanna Craig Page 0,79

memories of a place were too painful to bear, until one was forced to confront them and discovered those memories were themselves a sort of balm. The way the hustle and bustle of town got into his blood, made it race, until he was convinced that dull country life would be the death of him, only to get there and discover…peace.

The way the heady danger he craved had begun to look far less like rushing down a dark alleyway in pursuit of a fellow spy, and more and more like standing in a half-lit room bearing his soul, his very self, to this woman.

“Come.” He turned back toward the entry hall. “Let me give you a little tour of the place.”

Every room was its own chapter of the story of his youth here. The dining room, where Sophia Stanhope had once picked up a bowl of soup and drunk from its brim, when she’d seen him struggling with his spoon. The library, where Benjamin had been wise enough simply to sit and read to himself, until Langley had demanded to know the secrets of those marks on paper, how they could produce laughter or tears. The drawing room where the pair of them had taught him to walk and sit and bow and even dance like a gentleman—all the knowledge he’d hoarded, like the magpie he was, until he was no longer sure what was truly his and what he’d managed to steal from right beneath their noses.

Amanda laid her slender fingers on yet another door. “And this?”

“My bedchamber.”

The words lit a blush across her cheekbones. He expected her hand to fall away, for them to continue down the corridor.

Instead, she made a little noise of interest in her throat and reached for the doorknob. “I should like to see where you slept,” she said, opening the door. “Or did you lie awake nights, even then?”

“Sometimes,” he confessed.

Sometimes he had laid on his back and tears had leaked from the corners of his eyes until his pillow was damp. Had that bewildered boy been weeping for what he’d lost, or what he’d found?

That was a question for which he still had no answer.

Once inside, he walked to the window and sent yet another pair of dusty draperies scooting merrily along their rod, driving out the darkness. If he ever came back to this house to live, he supposed he would be expected to occupy the master’s chamber. It was what Benjamin and Sophia had intended. What they would have wanted. Doubtless Amanda would find that room more to her taste, with its elegant furnishings and larger windows overlooking the river.

But when he turned away from the window, she was standing beside his bed, one hand resting on a sturdy, carved bedpost, watching him. Dust motes danced in the beam of sunshine he’d let in, a path of light leading, improbably, from him to her.

He forgot to think about the past. Or the future.

He simply followed that path.

The sunlight picked out the threads of gold in her brown hair, along with a scattering of most unladylike freckles across the bridge of her pert nose. Her dark eyes glittered. She was so perfectly, breathtakingly lovely to him, so bright and shining. No wonder his greedy soul had been drawn to her from the first.

With the unhurried smoothness of a practiced thief, he raised his hand to cup her cheek, brushing his thumb over her velvety skin. She nestled easily into his palm.

“Amanda.” Would her ear catch that breathless note, incredulity at his own good fortune? “I swear when I brought you here, I had no intentions—well, no real expectation of…” He let his gaze wander to the bed behind her.

“Oh?” Her brows rose, then settled again, giving her warm regard a seductive cast. “I did.”

She released the bedpost and laid her palm on his chest, slipping between his coat and waistcoat, sliding upward to his shoulder, curling her fingers around his neck. Then she lifted herself onto her toes and brought her mouth to his, the touch impossibly soft, more the suggestion of a kiss than a kiss itself.

He held himself still, savoring those little brushes of strawberry sweetness as she traced his lips with hers. Just this once, he would not waste the present moment in looking ahead to future dangers. No longer a starving, scrounging boy, but a wealthy man settling in to a feast, secure in the knowledge that the banquet would not be swept away before he’d had