Page 72 of The Lady is Trouble

Ask him how many ways of making love he planned to show her. Or if this was the end of them. The end ofus.

He glanced over his shoulder, and she got the first look at his eyes she’d had since he entered the closet. Pale, the hue of fog sliding over cobblestones. He raised a brow in question.

“Sometimes, I can feel auras, faintly.” Lifting their links hands, she sketched a trivializing circle. “There’s no one in the hallway.”

Exiting the room, he pressed a swift kiss to her wrist and dropped her hand. He directed her to the front of the house while he started toward the back.

She only made it two steps before she turned to find he had halted before the bay window, sunlight a glorious waterfall over him. A flash of indecision crossed his face, so swift an alteration she almost missed it. He brought his hand to his temple, rubbing at either wanton thought or headache. Then he shook his head, hair falling in his face, a smile she felt sure he didn’t want her to see tilting his lips. In four long strides, he made it back to her.

The kiss was impulsive and impassioned, right there in the open, so unlike Julian, her heart missed a beat. “Back door. Midnight,” he whispered, then he was gone.

She climbed the stairs to her bedchamber with half a mind on the steps she took. She stumbled on a wrinkle in the hallway runner she had meant to smooth out this morning.

Julian’s aura had made the decision to deceive him much easier.

She was good for him. Shewas. His aura and the changes held within it when he was with her were proof.

He needed her, even if he didn’t know it. Piper wondered if he even loved her, not the familial love he’d always carried, but passionate love a man felt for a woman. Love that made one forget idiotic promises made long ago, forget fear, forgetlogic. His accountability for her had twisted him up inside until he wasn’t sure where he belonged in her life.

Lover, friend, protector.

While she had always known.

If he did love her, it was going to take another of their raging battles to expose it. Unless she made love to him so often and so well, he gave up.

She flopped to her bed, her arms falling wide. She was not as honorable as Julian.No onewas as honorable as Julian.

As he’d told her on more than one occasion, she would make an excellent thief.

So, she’d steal his heart if he would not readily give it to her.

They touched at every opportunity in the days that followed.

Even as Julian gave himself to her, strategically managing many of the encounters, she, serenely and unexpectedly,seduced. Whispered suggestions at the most inopportune times—I think this might be fun to try—when his hands were otherwise occupied but his mind all hers. At dinner, while passing in the village, across a lawn strewn with people, he had no time to fortify himself against her impassioned assault. From the simple brush of her hand when he reached for a breakfast scone to leading him into a shadowed nook for a heated kiss that stripped away thought, she kept him maddeningly off-balance as no woman ever had.

When she got that naughty, amused look on her face, he was lost.

The taste of her lived on his tongue, the feel of her on his fingertips. She laughed so easily, with a wicked wit he found not only utterly charming but bloody dangerous. He didn’t understand her luminosity, considering the burden she carried. He couldn’t create a painting with a hundredth of the intensity of her smile, let alone herbeingwhen the weight on his shoulders came out in dark slashes.

Julian had found a partner who matched him in agility, enthusiasm, and pluck. No location was off-limits for their trysts. The conservatory, which allowed for a beautiful view of the stars beneath the glass rooftop. The potter’s shed, which had garnered Julian a splinter in a rather delicate location, one Piper had—with tears of hilarity streaming from her eyes—removed. They’d walked the estate before sunrise and made love on the dewy grass of the back lawn. Swam in the lake with moonlight shimmering across the surface of the water and their skin.

Darkness was their champion and their cloak.

Piper was pushing every other experience from his mind until she alone was his world. All he wanted or needed. But his trepidation remained. How could he trust his instincts when a blistering rush of desire took him down like a punch every time he saw the girl?

They had begun working on mastering control of his visions, although the images contained within continued to carve him up like daggers. Brought low, she stepped in and led him home.

Indeed, he feared their connection as he’d feared nothing in his life.

He was sharing parts of himself that had nothing to do with her luscious mouth and tantalizing body. He had even asked her opinion about a painting being shown at the next Royal Exhibition, something no one, not even Humphrey, knew about.

Cataloging her place in his life—healer, lover, friend—was a challenge with his promise to her grandfather held over his head like an ax set to swing. Marriage was not an option if he stuck to that promise; however, concern over her reputation, already dreadfully damaged due to her past escapades, was a thorn beneath his skin. He had never dishonored anyone in his life, and he didn’t want to start with Piper.

Making things worse, like a lovesick fool, he’d outfitted the lodge with all the personal items she needed to stay there. Clothing, hairbrush, toothbrush. He was clearly intoxicated. Besotted. How to make rational choices when his heart was engaged, when she had become such an integral part of his life?

How could he protect her when the notion of not seeing her, touching her, made his heart stutter?

The answer to what he felt was clear if one spent but a moment considering the evidence. He let this morose certainty circle his mind for a full heartbeat before sending it away.