Page 68 of And Then There Was the One
He was silent for long enough that she began to wonder if he was going to reply at all. His hand continued its steady, rhythmic movement through her hair. At last, he said, “I think you know me better than you believe. Better than my family knows me, even after a lifetime.”
Georgie felt somehow both pleased and saddened by this notion. Shewantedto know him, and to be known by him, she realized. It was not simply that he was handsome—that he was flirtatious—that she’d wanted to go to bed with him because when he kissed her, she forgot her own name. Itwasall of that, but it, too, was the fact that each time she spoke to him, she felt that the Sebastian she thought she knew was shifting before her very eyes—his mask being slowly cast aside, the man behind it being gradually revealed.
A man that she found herself, almost against her will, liking a frightening amount.
She shifted more fully onto her side, raising her head slightly so that she could peer down into his face, illuminated by moonlight.
“Thank you,” she said, and he raised a flirtatious eyebrow at her, his eyes tracking down the bare skin of her throat and shoulders. “Not for that,” she amended sternly, and his mouth quirked. “I mean… it’s been rather nice. Getting the chance to know you.”
His eyes met hers, softening, and he reached a hand up to cup her cheek. “Don’t say that.”
Her brow furrowed. “Why not?”
“It sounds like you’re saying goodbye,” he said, tucking her hair behind her ear. “And I’ve no intention of allowing you to do any such thing.”
She opened her mouth to protest—to remind him of his looming departure, of his life in London, of all the reasons that this could only ever be fleeting—but he raised his head and silenced her with a kiss. It was tender at first—the sort of kiss that felt like a conversation without words. After a few moments, however, his arm came around her waist, urging her on top of him, and all thoughts of practical concerns, of logical objections, of anything other than his mouth and his hands and his naked body against hers, were pushed to the back of her mind.
And for a blissfully long while, she didn’t think about anything at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Tuesday dawned damp, dreary, and very, very busy.
The day commenced in less-than-relaxing fashion, with Georgie awakening warm and sleepy in her comfortable bed. Warmer than usual.Verywarm.
Because there was a bare-chested man pressed against her back.
“Sebastian!” she hissed, scrambling to a sitting position before she was even fully conscious, belatedly grasping for a sheet to pull to her chest. “You have to leave.”
“Hmmm,” he mumbled, and she looked down at him, his golden hair tousled, his face oddly young in slumber. She’d been alarmed to learn the night before that the only thing more attractive than the sight of him in his expensive jumpers was the sight of him in nothing at all. She allowed herself one gratuitous look at the lean muscles of his arms and chest, then reached over, seized a pillow, and bashed him across the face with it.
That, at least, had set proceedings in motion.
He’d stumbled into his clothing—discarded in exceptionally haphazard fashion the night before—and then she’d frantically ushered him out the door so that he might return to his bedroom. With a quick glance down the hall to ensure that neither Papa nor Abigail had decided to choose that precise moment to wander around, she’d more or less shoved him out the door, and had nearly closed it behind him, giddy with the sense of having got away with something, when it was pushed open once again—
So that he could take three rapid steps toward her, seize her face in his hands, and give her a kiss so deep, so lingering, that she thought it should probably be illegal this early in the morning.
“We are going to solve a murder today,” he informed her in a low voice when he drew back. “And then, once we’ve done that, you and I are going to talk.”
He dropped his hands, swept her an absurdly courtly bow, and then was gone, leaving Georgie to slump back against the doorframe and wonder, dimly, if all her limbs were still attached.
“Ahem,” came a voice from the hallway, and Georgie whirled around to find her father emerging from the kitchen stairs in his house slippers.
“Papa,” she said, acutely conscious of the dressing gown she’d hastily flung herself into and of the love bite on her throat she’d caught a glimpse of in the mirror. “Good… morning.” She feigned a coughing fit to buy herself a bit more time.
Papa looked unfazed. “Glad to see Fletcher-Ford is awake,”he said mildly, walking past her down the corridor. “I’d like to ask him about last year’s Oxford-Cambridge rugby union match at breakfast.”
And with that, he was gone. It was only several long moments later that Georgie managed to wrench her jaw shut.
“It is too early for scheming,” Arthur said darkly, a couple of hours later. Georgie had waited as long as she could before phoning him that morning—and had shown up at the door to his tiny flat at the not-entirely-respectable hour of half eight, Sebastian in tow.
Upon first arrival, Arthur appeared to be alone, but not five minutes after she arrived, there was a knock on the door, and Constable Lexington was revealed to be on the other side of it. “Hello,” she said upon opening the door. “I brought you a scone.”
“I happened to be passing,” he began a bit stiffly, “and I thought—”
“Constable Lexington,” Georgie interrupted, “why don’t you refrain from insulting my intelligence and just… not bother?”
A brief, startled silence; Georgie glanced over to see Arthur suppressing a grin, and he raised an eyebrow at Lexington, who was carefully avoiding Georgie’s eyes.
