Page 66 of A Scot Is Not Enough
Her skin tingled.
“A shame,” he said. “Since I worked so hard to free them and didn’t get to explore them.”
“You are incorrigible.” She hiked up her stays, mildly drunk on his touch.
He cupped her face and kissed her soundly.
“I am anything you want me to be.”
She struggled with her slumping stomacher. “Can you save my wretched reputation?”
“There is nothing wretched about you.”
“I’m afraid my gown says otherwise. Just look at me.” Her voice was a tiny bit frantic.
Surprise lit his features a split second as if her dismay was unexpected. They were on his floor, their voices hushed to hide the obvious—an assignation interrupted. He tipped back, assessing her rumpled sacque gown. A sleeve was torn, embroidery frayed at the bodice, and her lightly boned stomacher bent.
Slivers of metal glinted from unreachable places. “Most of the pins for my gown have fallen between the planks. I have nothing to put myself back together.”
The door latch rattled. “Alexander!”
“A moment, brother.”
“My wrap. Please fetch it.” She plumped her panniers, skittish as a cat. “I’ll tuck myself away in your bedchamber and try to right myself.”
Mr. Sloane grabbed the red shawl from the middle of the floor. He walked briskly back to her and gently wrapped ruined red silk around her shoulders. Kind, burning eyes looked into hers. Her future was in them, a frightening feeling as vast as the ocean. Tenderness soaked her when he joined their hands together, closing the shawl’s end over her fast-beating heart.
The door thudded on its hinges. “Alexander! What is happening? Why aren’t you letting me in?”
“Now we’re just being rude.” She pushed up on her toes and kissed him. He tarried, but she patted his chest and tipped her head at the bedchamber door. “Go on. I’ll be right in there.”
“You and your pretty crumpets-for-breasts.”
Her breasts were more biscuits than crumpets, but if he wanted to think they were more sizable, who was she to correct him?
She slipped away and closed the door to reconsider the folly of seducing a morally upright government man.
Or had the government man almost seduced her?
Chapter Eighteen
Alexander opened the door with the smile of a kiss-sotted man, which his brother was too busy glaring to notice.
“What the devil is wrong with you?” Square-jawed Gideon pushed through the door and stopped in his tracks. “What happened to your head?”
He touched his head, the minor wound all but forgotten. Such was the goddess of Swan Lane’s effect.
“A cricket ball gone awry.”
“You? Serious Sloane missing a cricket ball? That hasn’t happened since you were thirteen.”
“I remember. The ball you lobbed at my head because I had vexed you.”
Gideon’s mouth curled in a victor’s grin. “As younger brothers do.”
The grin stayed until Gideon’s gaze shot like an arrow true to the bedchamber door and the sound of muffled footsteps behind it.
“Welcome to my humble abode.” Alexander couldn’t help the triumphant note in his voice.
