Page 42 of A Sight to Behold
“You are?” Alarm pierced her voice.
He gave her a lazy smile, stretched his legs, and crossed his feet from the opposite bench, where he was seated. “Do I look worried to you?”
She inclined her head and surveyed him from across the little cabin. His feet nearly touched her thighs, but he was careful not to make contact lest it be unwelcome.
On second thought, she was ogling him quite intensely from the three-feet distance between them. “You look very nice like this.”
He was so happy to be alone with her.
“What do you mean?” Nick tried to respond with nonchalance, but his heart made a flip. He wasn’t in his usual attire since he’d expected to find an emergency patient in his office. He’d only pulled his woolen coat over the plain white shirt and wore simple beige breeches and brown boots.
“You don’t look like a doctor today.”
“I’m always a doctor.”
“Yes, I know. But you look like a boy.” It would have been an insult from anyone else, but not how Pippa said it. Admiration and something else that Nick didn’t dare consider desire colored her voice. Not yet.
“I’m a boy. A man, actually. And you are a lady.”
“I’m a woman,” she corrected him.
He straightened and sat up and squinted at her. “I don’t think you are yet.”
Alarm made her eyes grow wide.
An uncomfortable pause followed.
“You are a man, though, so you have been with other women before?” Pippa asked shyly, wringing her hands.
“I am. I have.”
“I thought so.” She turned to look out the window. They’d left London behind and were on a cobblestone road heading past some fields. But Nick didn’t care for the green hills outside, northe air that cleared of London’s soot. He hoped for a different kind of clarity.
“Is there something you wish to ask me, Pippa?”
She swallowed. “Yes, indeed.”
Chapter Twenty
The carriage clatteredalong the country road and Pippa knew they’d make good time on the way to her country house. Looking at the specimen of manhood stretched out in all his long and lean glory, with his muscular arms crossed behind his head and his hair mussed from what must have been a night without much rest, had Pippa all heated. She rather enjoyed the view from the bench across from his.
Still, Pippa couldn’t stop thinking about Violet’s account. Most of it was scandalous, even if what she had described occurred with her husband. And yet, Violet had said he was experienced and teaching her to grow up. In Pippa’s case, engaging in anything remotely as wicked as what Violet did would ruin her. But she was doing that herself right now, wasn’t she? Taking a day’s excursion out of Town with a bachelor unchaperoned wasn’t being done in consideration of her reputation.
And then again, what mattered to her more?
After years of being laughed at, ridiculed, and shunned at social gatherings, was the alleged fragility of her reputation worth considering? Wasn’t it merely an abstract idea implemented to keep girls like her on the shelf and away from romance?
What Violet had spoken about was a passion that Pippa had only ever read about in romance novels. And yet, it was real. She could see it in Violet’s change, the flush of her face, the wildsparkle in her eyes. Love and passion must be too wonderful to forego. Pippa wasn’t going to squander the chance.
And it was too late now; she had him in the carriage and was on the way to Silvercroft Manor.
“Pippa, if you’d like to ask me something, do so,” Nick said.
“Have I disrupted your Saturday plans?”
“That’s not what you were going to ask me, was it?” He leaned back, crossed his arms over his chest, and eyed her curiously.
“No.” Pippa swallowed. How was it possible that the way he sat and looked at her made her belly twitch and her heart skip a few beats? “What were you going to do today had I not interrupted?”
