Page 23 of The Copper Heir (The Gilded West #1)
To keep herself calm, she turned away from him and took her first good look at the bedroom.
Decorated in shades of cream and muted blue, it was tasteful if a little on the dramatic side with its heavy, dark wood furniture.
It held a writing table with an overstuffed chair upholstered in rich blue fabric pin-striped with gold, a bureau, an armoire and the oversized four-poster bed with spindly-legged bedside tables each holding a crystal lantern.
There were windows on either side of the bed hung with heavy dark blue drapes that were pulled shut.
It was a perfectly civilized room. He was the only uncivilized thing in it.
There was such an air of wildness about him that she shivered and debated the merits of talking to him at all.
The contrast of his clean-shaven jaw paired with his still damp hair, hastily towel dried and pushed back with his fingers, and the fury blazing in his eyes, made him appear as dangerous as she knew him to be.
Somehow the effect only made her heart flutter.
He was even more handsome than he had been at the cavern, as the shave had emphasized his strong jaw and the barely there indention at the bottom of his chin.
He looked restrained, just waiting for the moment she might step too close.
“I’m not ‘yours’, Jameson,” she finally said once she’d gotten a handle on her temper, emphasizing his name because it was one less layer between them. “The contract I signed gave me the choice to accept the bid or not.”
“You forget, Emmaline...it’s not the contract that makes you mine.” His green-gold eyes darkened and captured hers in that way he had that made her belly flutter.
She blinked to escape his spell and shook her head. “I escaped you.”
“You did, until I found you.”
“We’re not in the middle of the wilderness anymore. You can’t take me back, not here, not with all of these people.”
One corner of his mouth tipped upward, but he didn’t challenge her.
He was so damned confident he didn’t have to.
Panic flared within her for one brief moment before she managed to get a hold of it and remind herself of all the reasons he wouldn’t get away with her.
Deciding not to give rise to her anger and tempt an already unstable situation, she changed tactics.
“I came to see you because I wanted to tell you I’m sorry that I had to put sleeping powders in your flask.
I didn’t want things to go that way between us, but I had to get away.
I’m sure you understand my desperation.” She waited what she thought was an appropriate amount of time, but he said nothing.
She hadn’t exactly expected a noble acceptance of her apology, but when a flicker of acknowledgment didn’t so much as cross his face, her anger boiled over. “Well...” she prompted.
He raised his eyebrows in question.
“This is the point in the conversation where you accept my apology and—”
“Accept your apology?” he scoffed. “For drugging me and leaving me in the wilderness at the mercy of any animal or criminal who wanted to pick me off? No, I do not accept.” He pushed off the footboard and took a threatening step toward her.
“How can you not accept?” Tightening her hands into fists at her sides, she attempted to keep the reins on her fury. “You were perfectly safe. You said yourself that your brothers were returning that night and it appears that they found you.”
“A man had just tried to kill us. For all you knew he was going to come back with his friends before nightfall to finish the task.”
“Oh, that’s ridiculous! I shot him for you.”
He laughed and it made her so angry she wanted to strangle him. “You don’t know there weren’t others close by.”
“One: If he had come back to finish the task he would have found your horse gone and followed the tracks to look for you, which put me in greater danger than you. He wouldn’t have known you were on the mountain to climb up there and look for you.
Two: You kidnapped me! Is there some etiquette I’m unaware of that says I’m supposed to get permission from my kidnapper before escaping? ”
“Before trying to escape, you mean?” He grinned, making her suspect that he wasn’t taking this seriously at all.
“I did escape. You had no idea where I was, until... How did you know I was here?”
He just kept stalking closer. “You can’t get away from me.”
She wasn’t sure if he meant escape in general or in this room right now. Either way, she took a step back and stifled the panic threatening to claw its way up her throat and escape in a scream. “But I did get away from you.”
“Briefly. I admit you got the best of me. I wasn’t expecting to be drugged, especially not after you sat astride my lap and kissed me so sweetly, but it won’t happen again now that I know what you’re capable of doing.
” His gaze flicked down to her chest and he nodded toward the place where her locket used to be. “Looks as if you’ve lost your locket.”
“You left me no choice. I won’t be a pawn in whatever game you and Ship are playing. I’m sorry he took someone from you, but I won’t be a part of this.”
“You already are. The message has been sent and he thinks that we have you.” He came closer as he talked, slowly as if drawing it out.
Her heart pounded faster with each step because she had no idea what he planned to do once he reached her.
It wasn’t fear that made it pound. It was excitement.
With every step it strummed through her veins, settling low in her belly, especially as she had become more aware of the bulge beneath his towel and the heady way his eyes pulled her in.
Her resistance was hanging by a thread and he hadn’t even alluded to anything physical happening between them.
Bumping up against the low back of the chair that sat at the writing table, she held her hand out to ward him off. “Stop, you don’t have to come any closer for us to talk.”
He did stop, but not until he’d walked right up so that his warm skin pressed against her palm.
Her fingers settled into the indentation chiseled between the twin muscles defining his chest. Immediately her throat dried and her breathing increased.
The contact sent a blaze of seductive warmth from her fingertips all the way through her body to where it settled in her core, pulsing as it waited for his touch.
This was bad. This was very, very bad.
“We’re finished talking, Emmy.”