Page 20

“‘But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?’” he called up.

Ellie’s eyes dropped to where he stood and widened with warm recognition, even as her mouth twisted skeptically. “Shakespeare? Really?”

Adam flashed her a grin. The next lines were ready on his lips—and he knew exactly how they would be received. “‘Wert thou as far as that vast shore washed with the farthest sea, I would adventure for such merchandise.’”

“Merchandise?” Ellie echoed indignantly.

He pressed a hand to his chest. “‘O speak again, bright angel.’”

“Perhaps I shall speak on the insidious impact of referring to women poetically as pieces of physical property,” Ellie offered. “How have you the entire balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet memorized? I didn’t take you for a thespian.”

Adam shrugged. “It’s the iambic. Sticks in your brain.”

A taut silence fell, accented by the soft rush of the fountain and the distant sound of someone laughing.

Ellie’s gaze dropped, tracing the line of water he could feel trickling from his hair down his neck. It slipped to the open buttons at the top of his shirt, where his skin was still damp from the sauna.

Her gaze locked there with a look that set Adam’s nerves tingling.

She swallowed tightly. “Why are you wet?”

Adam’s own attention was a little less focused than it ought to be. He kept studying the tendrils of hair that had come loose from her practical bun, thinking how much nicer they’d look if he just pulled all those pins out and then ran his hands through the thick chestnut waves of it.

“Sauna,” Adam replied a little densely.

Ellie was still staring at him like he was a tall glass of lemonade on a hot day. “There’s a sauna?” she pressed a little numbly.

“Had to try it after dealing with The Mustache,” Adam replied with somewhat less than his own usual eloquence. He was thinking of how after he’d taken her hair down, it’d be awful nice to give it a gentle pull to guide her head back and then kiss his way down her throat to her—

“The Mustache?” Ellie echoed with a confused frown.

“Frosty-Mothballs,” Adam rambled back, trying to push the image of tugging aside the open collar of her blouse from his brain. “Fusty-Mouseberry. Whatever the hell his name was. He thought I had designs on your friend. Wanted me to know his grandad’s a duke.”

Ellie stiffened with indignation. “As though that gives him the right to lay claim to a woman like a horse at an auctioneer?”

The sight of her righteous anger made Adam feel pleasantly warm. He liked it when Ellie got righteously angry. “I was close to tossing him into a fountain over it, only I didn’t want to get us kicked out of the house.”

Ellie’s look heated with quiet approval. “Pity,” she noted as she gazed down at him through the soft gold of the lamplight.

The silence returned, and their eyes locked. The night air gained a subtle electricity that danced across Adam’s skin as he looked up at her, his mind racing with everything they might get up to in the twilight intimacy of the silent courtyard.

No, he told himself firmly as he fought for control. He couldn’t kiss Ellie senseless on Constance’s family’s balcony. He needed to stop acting like an impulsive idiot and take control.

“Could I come up there for a second? Just to talk,” he added quickly.

Ellie’s eyes flashed with surprise and confusion, but she nodded.

Adam crossed over to the entryway beneath her perch and mounted the cool, dark stairs. He stepped out onto the balcony—and there she was, waiting for him. Still looking a little travel-rumpled with those tendrils of hair curling over her shoulders, lips practically begging for just the right kind of bite.

Talk, he told his brain firmly.

“I owe you an apology,” he said.

Ellie frowned, clearly taken off guard. “For what?”

“For the…libertiesI’ve taken with your…” Adam waved an awkward hand over Ellie’s softly curved form. “…Person. Since we started traveling together.”

“Liberties?” Ellie stared at him as though struggling to keep up with the turn in the conversation.