A Very Highland Holiday - Kathryn Le Veque Page 0,46
Physically?”
His lips actually stirred her hair as he growled against her ear. “I’ve been hard as a diamond since the moment I watched you undo your buttons.”
Chapter Five
John leaned back and let his admission crash into the space between them, overflowing it with heady, carnal, unspoken reveries. His. Hers. All amalgamating into one frustrated frequency of need.
All the chaos of the common room had gone quiet, no doubt Bess had kicked everyone to their beds. In this abandoned corner of the structure, he and the comely Miss Latimer might have believed they were the only two people in the whole of the Highlands.
John watched her intently as she stared—or rather—glared at him. Unblinking. Her chest rose and fell beneath the high-necked blouse as she very distinctly did not allow herself to look down.
She’d have found the answer to her question if she had, straining against the placket of his trousers.
However, after what he’d just discovered about her, he realized he might have been too forward. Might have overwhelmed a woman who’d only just been harangued by undesirables.
He closed his eyes and stepped back, allowing her space. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
Squirming with shame and regret, she instantly buried her face in her hands. “No. That is—the fault is mine. I asked you the vulgar question. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
“I order you to stop feeling shame,” he said with a stern frown.
She looked up at him askance. “You can’t command emotions, that’s not how they work.”
“I can and I will,” he shot back, looking to goad her past her mortification. “I insist the blame for our—indelicate interaction be placed on my shoulders. I’ve forever been a man too plain of speech. Too blunt and coarse and forbidding. It made for a successful Lieutenant Colonel, a mediocre nobleman, and well… ripe shit at relationships.”
The tremulous tilt at the corner of her mouth told him his candor was working. “Which relationships?” she queried, her relentless curiosity returning. “With women, you mean?”
“’Twas doubtless why I remained a bachelor at five and thirty. I assumed one took a wife like one took a hill in combat. It was all strategy and espionage, if not an all-out battle. I was built to win, not woo, and I frightened many a maidenly noble lady into the arms of some gentler, more civilized man.”
She wrinkled her nose at that rather adorably. He wasn’t certain how to interpret the expression, but that didn’t stop him from continuing, if only to put conversational space between their previous fraught interaction.
He marched around her, exploring the space of his chamber with his hands clasped behind him. He did his best not to prowl like the predator he was. To draw his tense shoulders away from his ears. “My social ineptitude reached past the fairer sex to anyone, really. My parents. My brother, James. Even after everything, he came to claim my remains all those years ago. Or perhaps he only returned for the ring, and taking my benighted bones back to the de Lohr crypts was an afterthought, though I couldn’t say I’d blame him.”
“The ring?” She grasped onto the one subject he’d only mentioned as an afterthought.
“A de Lohr signet. Given to my templar ancestor—the Lion Claw, they’d called him—by his ladylove so many generations ago.”
John summoned a picture of the piece into his mind. The head of a lion had been etched into the precisely crafted purest gold; rubies set into the ocular cavities as if the blood spilled by the apex predator reflected in his eyes.
“Surely your brother came to collect you, and the ring was the afterthought.”
“You underestimate the significance my family put on that ring,” he said gruffly. “And you didn’t know my brother. We did not part on the best of terms. I regretted that. I was a hard man to know, and I did not understand his impulsive passions. His depth of emotion. And, if I’m honest, I envied him his freedom as the second son, his shoulders unencumbered by the weight of the de Lohr name.” Unbidden, John looked into the past, seeing the familiar face of his brother, the disappointment in his eyes the last time they spoke. “I am confident James made a better Earl than I might have. At least, I hope he did.”
“The Earldom of Hereford is still one of the most wealthy and respected titles in the Empire,” she explained gently. “If that is any condolence to you.”