intent on hers. Suddenly she was acutely aware of his size. Her mind neatly supplied her with an image of the sharply defined muscles on his chest.
If she pushed him again, she might feel those muscles under her fingertips.
Slowly she raised her eyes from his powerful neck that a half-open neck cloth did nothing to conceal. To his square chin and blunt cheekbones.
Jeremy looked like a warrior. He could have been in the legions of angels commanded to guard heaven’s door. Until he fell.
A dark angel, then.
She lifted her eyes all the way to his, because the room had gone peculiarly silent. She could hear his breathing, and her own.
For most of the evening, he’d sat in the shadows. But now they both stood within the pool of light thrown by the lamp hanging over the billiard table. The light was bold and bright, since a shadow might throw off a player’s calculations.
Jeremy’s eyes were not black, as she’d always thought, but flecked with gray. Dark gray with a lighter ring around the outside.
She stilled when she saw the expression in them.
In the last two months since he had arrived at the castle, she had seen him scornful, bitter, grieving, desolate. Buried in guilt. Pained as if he’d been stabbed in the chest. Issuing withering sarcasm, mostly directed at her but occasionally flaring in all directions, even at Aunt Knowe.
Outrageously arrogant.
But this she had never seen.
Need.
What was in his eyes was pure physical need. For her?
Her lips parted, surprised, and her hand began to rise to his chest before she snatched it back.
“That’s right, Bess,” he said, his voice cordial but still low, a growl hidden in its depths. “I am not a safe companion. Especially not if you put on breeches and I could see every outline of your luscious bottom.”
“Jeremy!” she breathed. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Don’t lust after you? They all lust after you, princess, don’t you understand? All those men who proposed to you.”
“No, they don’t!” she said stoutly.
“Surely you don’t believe they’ve fallen in love with you, poetry or no poetry.”
“Love doesn’t enter into the calculation. I’ve presented a lady whom they want to marry: obedient, demure, quiet.” Her voice had an edge. “Well-bred on one side, if not the other.”
He made a noise, somewhere between a laugh and a snort. “You’re wrong, Bess. They aren’t in love with you, but damn, they are in lust. You walk across the ballroom, looking like the perfect embodiment of a future duchess—and at the same time, the most sensual woman in England.”
Betsy gasped, and ice went down her spine. She lost all inclination to pat his chest and glared at him, stepping back until she bumped the table. “No, I do not! You are absolutely incorrect.”
He frowned. “It was a compliment of a sort, Bess. I can assure you that gentlemen watch you with your duchess airs, your touch-me-not innocence, and the main thing that comes to mind is a violent wish to have you. To be the one to break that ice and set free the fire inside you.”
Betsy gasped, horror welling up in her chest. If he was right, all those proposals she’d received were because of her mother, rather than despite her.
What if those men thought they saw the shadow of her mother’s debauched behavior? The kind of lust that drove a woman to throw away the best match in the land? To leave her children?
Acid burned up her throat from her stomach, and for a moment she thought she’d vomit.
Jeremy’s eyes sharpened with puzzlement, and he wrapped his large hands around her upper arms. “I meant it as a compliment.”
He had no idea that he was making her heart burn with disgust, and she certainly wasn’t going to explain.
Her mother, Yvette, was her burden, and the last thing she’d do was reveal that weakness to one of the few men in the world who had always told her the truth. A shudder ran through her body, and Jeremy’s hands tightened on her arms.
“What’s the matter, Bess? It doesn’t make sense that you’d fall for the idea that men view ladies like delicate angels. You don’t turn up your nose at a bawdy joke. Hell, you were the one who called me ‘flaccid’!”
“Excuse me,” Betsy said, marshaling all her strength to remain calm. “But any man who thinks about me that way is quite mistaken. I am not a loose woman, puns or no, and there is nothing about me that might suggest I would readily