Page 18

M illie did her best not to outwardly fret as he read. She didn’t pace or wring her hands or tap her fingernails on Dot’s desk, but goodness, she wanted to.

Any time he smiled or breathed differently, she wanted to spring across the couch, grip his shoulders, and demand to know which line or word had elicited such a reaction.

Instead, she sank into Dot’s chair again and gripped her hands in her lap, watching Abe Murphy’s handsome profile as his lovely hazel eyes scanned over her words.

She wished, in that moment, that she’d taken greater care with her penmanship. It looked very sloppy all of a sudden, from here.

On Dot’s desk were books on civil law and property precedence. Millie eyed the titles without much interest, but did find it heartening that she was continuing to do legal research for her husband, as she had been doing for her father for many years.

In another world, Dot would have been a formidable barrister herself.

There was also a much dog-eared pamphlet by an Anna Thynne.

It appeared to be about childrearing and was entitled A Mother’s Advice to her Daughter.

This one kept her eye for a moment, and she ran her thumb over the cover, imagining a future where her own letter might be on a young lady’s desk, with passages bookmarked for re-reading.

It was a grandiose and silly fantasy, she knew, but the thought of it made tears well up behind her eyes.

“Is this true?” Abe asked, startling her from her reverie. He was looking over the top of the sofa, holding the third page of her letter aloft.

“Which bit?” Millie asked, rising to walk to him. “I mean, yes, in general, but which bit?”

“The bit about circulating libraries,” he said, frowning. “Is it true that young ladies are prevented from borrowing anything deemed too serious for their minds?”

“Oh.” She gave a humorless laugh. “Yes. When Claire was expecting Oliver, as you know, we had trouble finding a midwife. While Dot searched, I attempted to find her some medical journals on the subject and was stoutly refused on the basis of propriety. And you should have been here the day Dot attempted to simply ask for the information from her father’s physician. He stormed out in a rage.”

“I was here,” he said with a sheepish twist of his lips. “Hiding near the hedgerows. It was the day you finally went inside.”

She blinked at him, startled. “Yes, I suppose it was.”

“It was,” he assured her. “And this thing here”—he flipped back a few pages—“about divorce. It seems damned unfair.”

“Of course it is,” she answered incredulously. “Had you never considered it before?”

“Well, I don’t know anyone who is divorced,” he said, setting aside the manuscript for a moment to think about it, “but I know a great many men who would jump at the opportunity to get a young lady alone and never once consider how it might unravel her life.”

They looked at one another for a moment, the empty room and closed door suddenly feeling like a third presence in the room.

Millie laughed and turned to the side, a blush rising on her cheeks. “Spinsters have more freedom,” she said thinly.

“How would you know that?” he answered lightly, and she could hear the grin in his voice.

Mercifully, she did not have to answer. He took the pages up again and found his place, commenting blithely, “D’you know, my mother is a great lover of the sciences? If anyone tried to prevent her from borrowing a book she wanted, I imagine she’d rain holy hell down upon them.”

“Is she?” Millie rounded the sofa and sat on the chair next to it, curiosity sparking in her mind. “Your father allows her studies?”

“Allows them,” Abe scoffed, shaking his head. “They met at one of her lectures. She’s something of a wunderkind.”

“What! What is her name?”

“Shh,” he said, shooting her a twinkling look over the tops of the pages, “I’m reading.”

“Humph,” said Millie.

There was silence for the next few minutes, save for the riffling of paper. He stacked each read page upside down next to him in a neat stack, his brow furrowed in concentration.

Millie watched him. His focus on the pages allowed her to study the fine lines of his face in a way she would otherwise never be able to get away with.

There was a softness to his features, to the hollows of his cheeks and the sharpness of his chin, that spoke to the soul behind the handsome visage.

She thought she could look at him for days and never grow tired of it. She wanted to run her fingers over the line of his jaw, to draw her thumbs over his brows and eyelids. She thought he was the most beautiful person she had ever seen.

“This is incredible,” he said, startling her out of her reverie.

Somehow, he had reached the end.

“What?” she said, blinking rapidly. “The letter?”

“Yes, the letter,” he answered with a laugh, “or perhaps I’m commenting upon the upholstery? Millie, this is enlightening. I am hardly the intended audience, and yet I found it gripping and full of the type of information one can’t help but feel Society wants to keep hidden.”

“Oh!” She could not suppress the wide smile coming upon her. “Yes, I feel the same way. That it had been deliberately kept a secret.”

“Can’t have the young ladies of the world knowing they have options other than marriage, I suppose,” he mused, thumbing the corners of the stack.

“When you’ve finalized it, I should like to send a copy to my sisters.

The younger one, especially. Rosalind is …

rather obsessed with the whole concept of marriage. ”

“You have sisters!” she breathed, feeling a strange urge to swat at his arm. “Mr. Murphy, there is too much I do not know about you!”

He seemed to still, the smile on his face widening as he watched her. “Does that displease you?”

“Of course it does!” She sighed, leaning forward to touch his knee. “I feel you already know everything there is to know about me. I only know that you were once a Runner and that you occasionally breakfast with Mr. Cresson.”

His smile faltered, his eyes flicking down to her fingers on his trousers, though neither of them moved to amend the clear breach of etiquette.

After a moment, he took a breath and said, with a hint of roughness around his words, “I would teach you many things, would you allow me.”

That offer hung heady in the air, floating into the stagnant emptiness of the room around them.

Its meaning seemed to crackle in the heat like static after a storm.

And still, somehow, Millie could not pull away.

She brushed her thumb along the curve of his knee, watching her fingers as though they belonged to someone else entirely.

“I never considered it,” she said through the heat in her cheeks and the sudden thickness in her throat, “that gentlemen might find anything of interest in my letter.”

“Millie,” he replied, a note of warning in his tone, “I am no gentleman.”

She blinked, that statement startling her enough to return her gaze to his eyes. “Of course you are,” she protested, more out of instinct than anything else.

“No,” he answered, leaning forward and winding his fingers around the back of her neck. “I most certainly am not.”

And then his lips were on hers, soft, at first, but demanding. Intoxicating.

He had come off the cushions of the couch at some stage, she realized, and was looming over her like a conquering warrior, claiming his prize after a long-fought battle.

She wanted to pause, to give herself a moment to observe and retain every detail of this, but her mind seemed to overheat, filling with a primal muddle of steam that left nothing but the ability to feel and react.

She felt her hands come up and grip at his shoulders, her back pressing into the soft give of the cushions behind her.

His feather-soft kiss progressed with a nip at her lip and the graze of the calloused pad of his thumb against her cheek.

It was hungry and insatiable all at once.

She could taste a whisper of champagne punch on his tongue as he tasted her.

She opened herself to him, sharing in this forbidden indulgence, her need and boldness growing together as she gripped him closer to her. She felt him lean his weight against the chair and wondered for a brief, thrilling moment how the weight of his body might feel atop hers.

Her skin felt alight, as though white-blue flames might burst from her pores and dance over her every inch of bare flesh. She could feel the phantom flames already, triumphant and devastating.

He made a sound deep in his throat, pulling back for a moment and resting his forehead against hers, his breath coming fast and shallow. He tilted her head to the side and descended again to taste the column of her throat, sending an explosion of feeling through her very core.

She gasped but could not form words. His hands had moved to her shoulders, his thumbs tracing the path of her collarbone, hovering dangerously close to her breasts. It was all she could do not to arch her back, to encourage his touch into more forbidden territory.

She had never felt this way in all her life. She wanted to fall into it headfirst. She wanted to forsake everything to follow the lure of the heat until she herself was one of the flames.

He hooked his fingers into the neckline of her gown, his first two fingers vanishing into the cleft between her breasts. His knuckles pressed against that forbidden flesh as his teeth grazed the tender hollow at the base of her throat.

And it might have continued. It might have escalated. If not for the cat.

Queen Mab startled them both, leaping up from seemingly nothing but shadow onto the arm of the chair in which they were engaged and swatted, claws out, at Abe’s forearm.

Millie yelped, a rather high-pitched, undignified sound, while Abe recoiled so suddenly that he fell backward back into the couch. “Twice-damned grimalkin! ” he barked, gasping for breath.

He was panting, his hair askew, while Millie clutched at her throat in disbelief, her eyes locked on the cat.

Queen Mab simply flicked her one ear toward Abe, as though to acknowledge that she’d heard the insult he’d paid her and cared not at all. She licked her paw and then jumped down again, vanishing under the sofa.

She must have been sequestered in the room with them the whole time.

They sat in silence for a moment before the laughter began, sounding almost like a sob as it bubbled up in Millie. She sank her face into her hands and allowed it to overtake her, aware that it was tinged with hysteria.

Abe did not join her in laughing, but when she peeked up at him through her fingers, she found that he was wearing an expression of amused affection, watching her in this state.

Her letter to wildflowers had gotten knocked to the floor; its varied pages of differing sizes and shapes of paper were littered around like so much confetti.

She slid to the carpet, balancing on her knees, and began to gather them up, avoiding the eye of the man she’d just indulged in such impropriety with.

She already felt the embarrassment brewing, and knew if she didn’t act quickly, she’d be stuck in this room with him, unable to ever meet his eye again.

What had overcome her?!

She still felt heat creeping up her throat and over her face, but this particular brand of it felt far less pleasant.

“You’d better get off that floor,” Abe observed with a rise of his sandy brows, “before I lose myself all over you again. The cat might actually kill me this time, protecting your honor.”

Millie gazed up at him in shock, her embarrassment for a moment forgotten. Somehow, she’d thought he would be utterly humiliated by this lack in decorum and eager to escape her after such a breach, but he looked completely at ease, his head propped against his hand on the arm of the sofa.

If anything, he looked satisfied .

She was truly stunned.

“It isn’t that I don’t want to do exactly that,” he continued, oblivious to her confusion. “But I’d rather we did it in my own study, rather than Mrs. Cain’s.”

“You do?” she croaked, staring up at him in disbelief, her letter clutched to her chest.

He laughed, at last. It was a throaty, sincere sort of laugh that came upon him hard enough that he squeezed his eyes shut as it escaped him. He shook his head at her and stood, offering his hand. “Of course I do.”

She took it, hoisting herself to her feet opposite him. “I … am surprised,” she managed to say.

“Millie, I have wanted to do that for a very long time,” he told her in a throaty whisper, rearranging the curl of brown hair on her shoulder. “And now that I have, all I want is more.”

“More?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, his eyes gliding over her mouth and her throat. “Oh, more than you can know. I want to see …” His gaze slid down the front of her dress, lingering on her breasts. “I want to undress you.”

Almost on cue, a hiss emerged from beneath the skirt of the chair. It was a warning, bright and clear.

Millie, whose entire body temperature had flown into her cheeks in the previous moment, released a delicate cough, throwing a look of reproach to the chair in question. “That cat is meddlesome, isn’t she?”

“She is,” Abe agreed with a sigh, tearing his eyes from their scandalous location and returning his gaze respectfully to Millie’s face. “That cat hates me, specifically.”

“That seems a little dramatic,” Millie said, the levity releasing a ball of anxiety she hadn’t even noticed was forming in her chest.

“We’ve a history,” he assured her, taking a respectful step back from where she stood, his hands raised in the air as though to guarantee he wouldn’t send them roving over her body once again.

It was clear that the moment had been shattered, and the party on the other side of the door beckoned. Millie looked at that door and back at the man in front of her and gave a defeated grimace.

“You go first,” he offered. “I’ll follow in a few moments.”

She hesitated, wishing she knew what to say to preserve the magic of what had transpired here. But there was nothing to do but follow his lead, she realized, and she was on the other side of the door before she knew she’d even taken a step toward it.

On the other side, the party thrived as though they’d never left. The music hit her in a wave of impossible volume, and the chatter of voices rose in a swell, like she was surfacing from underwater.

She realized she was still holding her letter, but she couldn’t go back into the study now. She set it as neatly as she could on a side table near a bouquet of roses, and, squaring her shoulders, re-entered the fray.