Page 39 of The Groom Wore Plaid
“Your mention of frogs reminded me that I had thought to continue your lessons this night with a prism. But the experiment won’t work here, since the setting sun is in the wrong window.”
And then he took her hand and led her toward the door. She couldn’t pull from his strong grip, and damn him, she was intrigued by what kind of experiment could be done with a strangely shaped piece of glass.
But she made certain to grab the shirts on her way out.
At the end of the hall, when he pushed open a set of double doors, she saw a massive, curtained four-poster bed, with a satin burgundy counterpane.
“This is your bedroom,” she said warily, and let go of his hand to remain near the door.
“So it is.” He arched a devilish brow.
He began to open the chests that lined one wall and searched through. Curious in spite of herself, she studied the paneled walls with their intricate carved decoration, the bare wig stand that had probably been his father’s, for Owen showed no inclination to wear a wig as so many men did. The furniture was heavy and masculine, finely made for an earl.
“I can’t find any sheets,” he muttered.
“Sheets?” She glanced wide-eyed at the bed.
As if he read her mind, he began to toss bed pillows to the floor and pulled down the counterpane.
“Owen, I absolutely will not—”
He yanked a white sheet right off the bed, thengrinned at her aghast expression, as her insides quaked.
He draped the sheet over a chair and placed it across from the window. As he pulled shut the curtains on the setting sun, moving from one window to the next, he said, “The light is almost gone. We must hurry.”
The room was suddenly full of shadows, his body almost a blur of movement, as lacking in shape as a ghost. She had a pang of foreboding about her dream, but let it go.
He gathered a section of the curtain up, then glanced around with a frown. “Need something to—ah.”
To her surprise, he unpinned the brooch from his shoulder, and the loose ends of his plaid fell to dangle along the outside of his belt. Next he flung off his coat and waistcoat until he was only wearing his shirt and plaid, tucking the excess plaid into the belt at his waist. In his shirtsleeves, the width of his shoulders made her catch her breath. Oh, she shouldn’t be here.
Using his brooch, Owen pinned up a section of the curtain until it let in a narrow beam of light, then lined up the sheet-covered chair across the room.
He motioned Maggie forward. “Come closer and watch. This is how Newton proved that white light is a mix of colors.”
She hesitantly approached, not wanting to be too near the bed. It wasn’t just that she didn’t trust him—she didn’t trust herself around him.
Owen put the triangular piece of glass into thelight—and she gasped as the light appeared a rainbow of colors on the white sheet.
“You’ve seen something like this before, with rainbows or puddles of water,” he said. “Scientists used to think that a prism or other things somehow dyed the sunbeam into different colors. But Newton took another prism and held it into the multicolored light, and it reformed back into a white light, proving that white light contains all the colors mixed together. Fascinating how it all works, isn’t it?”
She stared at him. His enthusiasm and wonder matched her own, and she felt rather overwhelmed. The world was a strange and miraculous place, and knowing men in some far-off city had explained parts of it didn’t make it any less magical. But men hadn’t explained dreams, didn’t deem them worthy to be studied, to be believed.
He lowered the prism, and the rainbow disappeared. His smile faded, his brown eyes became almost black as he regarded her with that awareness to which she was so susceptible. They were alone, the setting sun almost gone. The air fairly shimmered with the tension between them, almost as much as the white of his shirt against his dark, sun-touched skin. She was closer to the bed than she’d meant to stand, and suddenly, it loomed like something alluring and exotic and foreign, no longer a simple bed for rest.
“Maggie.”
He said her name in a deep, rough voice that sether to trembling. She should leave. But he crossed the fading beam of light and took her into his arms. His kiss was as deep and rough as his voice, taking from her, drinking from her, making her think of the darkness of passion as an ocean current at night, sweeping her away. She forgot all about resisting him or playing ignorant about how to kiss.
His big hands on her back slid lower, cupping her backside and pulling her against him. Through her skirts she could feel the hard length of him. Knowing he wanted her was thrilling and intoxicating, making her forget the danger of desire between them. The future was suddenly something she couldn’t control, shouldn’t know.
And then he was kissing her brow and her cheek, and down her neck. He slid his hand up her body and cupped her breast above the stays. She moaned. She felt trapped within her garments, wanting to shed them and any resistance she thought she could sustain against him.
She suddenly realized that the padding she’d donned at her waist interfered with his touch, and snapped her back to the reality of her plight.
She couldn’t lose herself. She’d been granted a gift she couldn’t ignore.
She turned her head aside, and he straightened.
