Page 33 of The Devil in Her Bed

No wonder he’d been able to vault. The intruder weighed a bit of nothing.

“Do you have a weapon?” Chandler demanded.

“If. I did. Do. You think. I’d tell you?” The reply was rasped out between pained breaths, in a distinctlyfemalevoice.

Holy God.Chandler reared back, pulling the knife away. A woman had vaulted into the safe house, drugged both the Lord Chancellor and the housekeeper, and nearly disarmed him.

No one would believe this.

And if he was honest, he wasn’t readily keen to have the story told.

While he kept her hands in his grasp, he palmed his knife and lifted up on his haunches to yank the cord from the bed curtains to tie around her wrists.

She had some explaining to—

Her leg whipped around at an impossibly acrobatic angle and kicked him off balance from where he’d crouched.

Chandler could have maintained his hold on her wrists and the rope, but only if he sacrificed his footing.

He chose his footing, as she was a woman, and would be easy enough to grapple again.

No one else alive had ever made him pay so dearly for a mistake in the moment. She swept his feet from beneath him before he’d even regained his balance. He landed on his arse in an indecorous heap. She was with him the entire way, controlling his fall, leaping atop him so her weight, insignificant as it might be, was concentrated on his chest, her legs trapping his arms and her knees threatening to squeeze the life from his throat.

The throat to which she now held his own knife.

“I don’t want to hurt you, not for doing your job.” Though still out of breath, her words were measured and even. “No one need know I was here. No one need know I got one over on you.”

The smug triumph in her voice wasn’t required to identify her. Nor was his body’s sudden and thorough reaction to her.

Francesca Cavendish.

Or, rather, the woman who masqueraded as same.

Christ, he could have killed her in the dark. His breath trapped for another reason, one for which he wanted her to kill him. He’d done her violence. Punched her in the stomach… hard.

She was still regaining her breath.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” he said, reflexively.

She snorted and ground down with her knees, her slim frame a darker shade of black than the night shadows. Her hair was hidden beneath a sailor’s cap, knitted to pull down over her ears.

“Youhurtme?” She huffed out a laugh. “Please, I’m not the one trapped.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m trapped beneath your thighs, my lady, I’m merely enjoying my current situation.” His own English accent protected him from recognition as Lord Drake. At least while the lights remained doused.

In reply, the muscles in her legs tightened, forcing a gasp of air out of him in a cough. Instinctively, his hands lifted to the tops of her thighs, fingers digging in, but it would have taken a crowbar to pry them apart, and he didn’t want to hurt her.

Lord, she was strong.

“Are you going to be a good boy, and let me go?” she asked huskily, unfazed by his wickedness. “Or will I have to spill blood on your floorboards?”

His blood sped away from every one of his limbs, racing to his cock with dazzling and infuriating speed. Surely that’s why he was light-headed.

Not because her knee dug into his carotid.

He took too long to answer, apparently, while contemplating just why her threat of murder gave him such a painful hard-on.

“Did you hear me?” The knife nicked the tender flesh of his throat, and he sobered instantly. “Because it’s been a while since I’ve buried a body, but I’m certain I’ve not forgotten how.”