Page 20 of The Viscount in her Bedroom
“Is the candle out?” he asked.
“Yes.” She whispered, as if things were too intimate in the dark with him.
In the tense silence, she remained still, knowing he was before her—or was he?
When he spoke, he was behind her, and she jumped.
“Thisis my world, Miss Shelby,” he murmured.
It was her turn to feel his breath, and it bathed her neck with a heat so very foreign. She didn’t know what he meant to do; he might as well have been a stranger—or one of the relatives of her last employer, who had always kept trying to come upon her alone.
But it was strangely thrilling to be sharing the darkness with Lord Wade.
“Right now you don’t know where I am,” he continued.
This time he was on her right side, a solid presence.
“Or what I’ll do. This is what I live with every day. You’ll have to pardon me if my behavior doesn’t suit your expectations.”
She lifted her chin. “Why aren’t you telling this to your family? They want to share your feelings. Instead you pretend that things haven’t changed, all in an attempt to keep them from being hurt. But it’s all right to make a stranger uncomfortable?”
“You’re not a stranger.”
He was in front of her again, closer this time. Though she wore but a nightdress and dressing gown, her skin buzzed with awareness, and surely the folds of the gown seemed to move, as if something brushed against it near her feet. Her breath was coming far too fast, but it wasn’t in fear.
She licked her lips. “I’m almost a stranger. We had only conversed a few times.”
“I still remember what you look like.”
She was startled, intrigued, flattered. “Of all the women who gathered around you everywhere you went, how could you remember me?”
“You have red hair, blue eyes, and the whitest skin that shows every blush.”
She was blushing now—she was hot with it. She kept expecting him to touch her; she admitted to herself that she wanted him to. The expectation was maddening, confusing.
He made a sound she could not place. “And there were always admirers gathered around you, too,” he said.
Her eyes were adjusting; faint moonlight shone through the tall windows, and she could see the outline of him dark before her, too close, as she’d known he was. A shadow man. She closed her eyes to be one with him in the darkness again.
ChapterFive
Simon knew she had not moved since he’d begun to tease her. He thought he could hear her heart pounding; he could definitely hear the sound of her breath, moving rapidly in and out of her lungs. He imagined her breasts rising and falling with it.
She couldn’t be wearing much. If he could see, he might be able to tell if her nipples were erect, if her lips were parted. Surely she was experiencing desire; she wasn’t afraid of him.
Or was she? Was he misunderstanding this whole confrontation? He knew he should be angry with her, with her assumptions that she understood him. Instead he was powerfully aroused. Did she not feel the same? It was agonizing not to be able to tell, not to read her expressions. He had never known until he was blind how much his sight really told him about a person’s thoughts.
“If you knew I had gentlemen around me,” she said, “then you were aware of me—as if you were an admirer, too.”
He knew she was trying to be bold, but her voice trembled. For a moment, she didn’t sound like a woman who knew how to lead on a man.
He told himself she was not new to this flirtation. He could kiss her, and he would not be the first.
But something held him back, and it wasn’t fear of rejection, or fear of looking foolish. Not with this woman who so bravely stood alone in the night with him.
Why did she allow this to happen? What did she hope to gain with a blind man?
But he played along with it, knowing it was dangerous, but just not to which one of them. “Every man was your admirer,” he said. “Wasn’t that what you wanted?”
