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“I should think it would work out very nicely foryou,” she grumbled.

“No woman is going to want to put up with me running off into the wilderness for the better part of the year,” Adam protested. “She might say she doesn’t mind, but that wouldn’t last. Couple kids come along, it’d change.”

“Children,” Ellie echoed darkly. The word sounded like a curse.

“You, ah… not fond of kids?” Adam offered carefully.

“Children,” she asserted as she warmed to the topic, “are another weight added to the chains of marriage. They trap a woman in the most intolerable of circumstances, depriving her of any slim hope she might have had of intellectual freedom or achievement. Do you know that as soon as a woman even becomes engaged to be married, she is dismissed from the civil service? It’s one thing to be removed because you were arrested—”

“Arrested?” Adam cut in as his eyes sharpened with interest.

Ellie clamped her mouth shut.

“Oh, no. No, you don’t,” he pressed, leaning forward. “You don’t drop a juicy tidbit like that and get away without elaborating. Did you get yourself arrested for something, Princess?”

“I… may have… chained-myself-to-the-gates-of-Parliament,” Ellie finished quickly and snatched the rum from his hand.

A low, rumbling chuckle rolled out of him.

“Do you have any idea,” he offered darkly, “how much I would’ve paid to see that?”

Ellie shot him a glare.

“It was hardly the most edifying spectacle,” she pointed out crossly.

“You telling me you regret it?” he prompted.

“Absolutely not!”

His grin widened devilishly.

“The police only held me for a few hours,” Ellie finished thinly. “And they agreed not to press charges if I signed a statement promising good behavior in the future.”

Adam cocked up an eyebrow.

“And you signed it?” he asked with obvious disbelief.

Ellie raised her chin defiantly.

“It is possible that I wrote down the name of the Right Honorable William Gladstone instead of my own,” she admitted stoutly.

Adam burst out laughing.

“It’s their own fault if they didn’t bother to read it,” she cut in scathingly over his hysterics. “Surely, the prime minister of a nation which continues to systematically oppress the rights of half its population is more in need of ‘good behavior’ than I am.”

Adam shook his head. His eyes were watering with mirth as he looked up at her again.

“They really broke the mold with you, didn’t they?” he said wonderingly.

At the affectionate humor in his words, Ellie’s skin began to warm.

The sensation slipped along her limbs, tingling into her fingers and toes—then shifted, turning wilder and more electric. It buzzed through her as her attention sharpened on the details of the man before her.

The fine, joyful creases at the corners of his eyes. The lazy, powerful line of his shoulders.

Rum heated her veins. Her tongue still tasted of sweet vanilla fire. The firelight caressed his skin, dancing along the elegant angle of his stubble-roughened jaw.

Ellie’s gaze locked onto the place where the curve of his well-muscled forearm was revealed by the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt. There was something deeply, wildly appealing about that forearm.