Page 23 of A Baron's Scandalous Quill

“William.”

“Mylord,”she stressed once again.

“If I told you that I prefer watching you to looking at this room, would you mind?”

“No.” Her smile seemed to grow impossibly wider.

Oh…

It gave him hope. A small kernel bloomed in his stomach, and he sat down in the nearest chair, not in the place his father would have occupied, but a chair nearer to the fireplace, so he was as far from the memory of George as he could possibly get.

“I wouldn’t blame you for running from me, to know that I stare at you so much,” he whispered.

“Well, if you like to stare, then I’m hoping you’ll forgive my staring, too,” she said softly, shifting through the papers. “Goodness, this is a dark room, is it not?”

“Horribly dark. Every time I came in here, I detested it. I used to wonder if my father was a man made of shadows himself, to feel so at home in a place like this.”

“Perhaps he was,” she jested.

“Perhaps so.”

“What happened in this room?” She circled the desk, reaching for more papers that were resting on a shelf nearby. Rather than taking them back to the desk with the others, she moved toward him and sat down on a footstool by the cold fire. He jumped in his seat, startled that she had come so close.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what makes you hate it so much? Other than the darkness.”

“I…” He looked at the cold and empty fireplace. Feeling a sudden hatred for it, he lurched forward, grabbing the old coal scuttle from the hearth and setting the fire.

“My lord? What are you doing? Don’t you have staff for that?”

“Some lords may be so incapable they can’t start their own fire. I am not one of them, Miss Thornton.”

“Becca.”

“What?” He halted on his knees on the hearth rug, turning back to face her. She was smiling at him from where she flicked through the papers on the stool just behind him.

“It is my name, my lord. You can call me Becca.”

He had no objection to the idea. He preferred it to ‘Miss Thornton.’ It suggested there was indeed an intimacy between them, a feeling so strong that he turned completely on his knees to face her, feeling supplicant at her feet.

“Becca,” his voice deepened as he said it, and she released a shuddery breath.

“On second thought, maybe you shouldn’t say my name like that.” She looked down at the papers in her grasp.

“Why not?” He frowned.

“Because it does things to me it should not do when you say it like that.”

He chuckled heartily.

There was a wall coming down between the pair of them now. They were returning to the flirtation that had been there between them on the night of the assembly.

Perhaps all we needed was for Henry to leave the room.

He turned back to face the fire and set it going, the quiet filling the air until the fire began to crackle. He sat back on his haunches, looking at the flames for a moment, feeling the light and heat begin to spread around the room.

“It was always dark and cold,” he whispered suddenly. “Having you in this room, it feels altogether different.”