And Then He Kissed Her (11 page)

“Not all of us have your confidence. I don’t.”

“Don’t be absurd, of course you have confidence. Yes, you do,” he insisted when she shook her head. “You are the one who resigned her safe, secure post to go off and write for a living. If that’s not confidence in one’s abilities, I don’t know what is.”

Unexpectedly, she smiled, a winsome, wide curve of her lips. “That wasn’t confidence at all. It was rage. I was furious with you because you didn’t know who Mrs. Bartleby was.”

He’d rarely seen her smile, and he liked it. “Now, that’s a sight, by heaven,” he murmured. “You must smile more often, Miss Dove, for I vow, you look very pretty when you do.”

He was rewarded for this by seeing her smile vanish at once, and he remembered how she’d accused him of insincerity. He suddenly felt self-conscious, and he didn’t like the feeling. He wasn’t used to it. She had described him as glib, and he supposed he was, for he didn’t often say the wrong thing, especially to women. But with this particular woman, it seemed he couldn’t ever manage to say the right thing. She stirred in his hold, and he let his hands fall away.

“Don’t stiffen up and get all starchy,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to pet you or soothe you or anything of that kind. I simply decided I like your smile, and I said so.”

“I didn’t mean to…to get all starchy, as you put it. It’s just that…” She tugged at a loose tendril of her hair. “It’s just that I’m not accustomed
to receiving compliments. From you, I mean. I don’t know quite how to react.”

“I believe the established mode when given one is to say thank you.”

That made her laugh. “I’ll try to remember that. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. And I cannot believe I am now dispensing advice on etiquette. Who’d have thought it?”

“My influence rubbing off on you, perhaps?”

“No doubt.” He bent and picked up his dispatch case from the floor beside the door. “Next time I need to come here, I’ll send my card up and you can receive me in that drawing room downstairs in the proper way. I hope that meets your notions of propriety.”

“It does. And in light of our new spirit of cooperation, I shall endeavor to accept compliments more graciously.”

“And you’ll smile more often.”

“Yes, yes, all right, that, too! Are you satisfied now?”

“Satisfied?” He lowered his gaze to her mouth and noticed for the first time that her lower lip was very full and looked very soft. “No, I’m not satisfied at all.”

Innuendos such as that were clearly wasted on her, for her face took on a hint of bewilderment that told him she hadn’t the first clue what he meant. That was probably for the best. Kissing her was a bad idea. Arousal stirred again inside him. A very bad idea.

“Did you want to go over those revisions now?” she asked.

“Revisions?”

She gestured to the dispatch case in his hand. “Isn’t that why you came?”

“Of course. Yes.” Harry struggled to remember the reason he was here. “Quite right.”

“Very well, then. Go downstairs to the parlor, and I’ll follow you directly.”

“We could just stay up here,” he suggested with a naughty grin, only half in jest. “Liven up the lives of your neighbors, you know, and give them something sensational to talk about.”

She didn’t seem to find that suggestion as intriguing as he did. “If they talk about something sensational, it isn’t going to be me,” she told him and opened the door. “Go,” she urged in a whisper when he didn’t move, “and make certain no one sees you.”

He looked at her with mock sadness. “There is no sense of adventure in you, Miss Dove,” he murmured, shaking his head as he started through the door. “None.”

Harry went downstairs in a hole and corner manner, his efforts to avoid detection in a ladies’ lodging house making him feel rather as if he were the dastardly villain in a comic play, but all his skulking proved unnecessary. He encountered no one on his way down to the parlor. The place was quiet as a tomb.

He sat down on a terribly uncomfortable horse hair settee in the parlor to wait, but he
didn’t have to wait long. Miss Dove entered the room only a few minutes later.

“What revisions did you have in mind?” she asked, sitting down beside him.

He handed her the typewritten sheets she’d sent him three days before, sheets now marked with his scribbled notes and comments. She began to look them over, but almost immediately glanced at him again. “You were serious,” she said, pointing to his query in the margin of the first page. “You weren’t teasing.”

“Well, I admit I’m not quite up to snuff on what young ladies are allowed to eat, but why the wings? Why can’t they eat other parts of the chicken?”

“Because the wings are the only pieces that have no human equivalent.”

“What?” It took him a moment to appreciate what she meant. “Now you’re teasing me, Miss Dove,” he said. “A young lady can’t eat a chicken thigh or breast because human beings have thighs and breasts?”

A blush tinted her cheeks at those words. “I know it seems a bit fastidious, but—”

“Fastidious?” He began to laugh. “It’s absurd.”

“No doubt you think so,” she said, giving him a look of reproof. “But it’s a matter of delicacy.”

He gestured to the pages in her hand. “If that’s so, then why can’t young ladies eat quail? A quail’s wing is delicate enough for any girl, I daresay, for it has just enough meat on it to feed two ants at a picnic.”

“Exactly, which is why quails are served
whole
. Since young ladies can’t eat the…umm…”

“Breasts,” he supplied, vastly amused.

She folded her arms. “The point is that because quails are served whole, young ladies do not eat them at dinner parties.”

“They don’t eat much else either, from what I can see.” He moved closer to her on the settee so that he could read from the top page of the sheaf in her hand. “No plovers, no pigeons, no snipe. No oysters, mussels, clams, or whole lobsters. No artichokes, no savories, no cheese.” He paused for breath, then went on, “Nothing too rich, nothing too highly seasoned. And never more than one glass of wine. Did I miss any no-noes?”

She sighed. “When it comes to my work, I do wish you would be serious.”

“I am serious,” he assured her. “After reading this, I understand why women have such tiny waists and go about fainting all the time. I thought it was corsets, but no. You’re all
hungry
.”

Miss Dove pressed her lips together, but not before he saw the smile she was trying to hide. “I’ve never fainted in my life.”

“Maybe not, but you must admit I have a valid point. Life is far too short to live half-starved.”

“Hardly that. These rules are reserved for dinner parties, and are usually observed among only the young, unmarried ladies.”

“Which explains why they all want to get married,” he answered at once. “If I had to exist
on a diet of plain puddings and chicken wings, even I might begin looking for a spouse.”

That did the trick. She burst out laughing. “Really, my lord,” she said, “I don’t know why you are so surprised by all this. You’ve attended many dinner parties. Surely you know when carving that you always present the chicken wings to the young ladies.”

“No one who knows me ever asks me to carve at table. I cut the beef too thick and saw at the chicken.”

“You just want to give young ladies plenty of meat so they won’t expire before dessert.”

He straightened on the settee, staring at her. “Why, Miss Dove, you made a joke.”

“Clearly, it wasn’t a good one, or you would have laughed.”

“It was dreadful,” he agreed with her, “but it proves one thing. You were wrong, and I was right.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You said the two of us could never work together as equals. That we wouldn’t be able to get along. This conversation proves you were wrong. I think—” He paused and leaned closer to her, lowering his gaze to her mouth. “I think we’re getting along splendidly, Miss Dove.”

Her lips parted, her lashes lowered, and it crossed his mind that in one more moment they would be getting along as well as a man and a woman ever could. But then she scooted away from him on the settee, and his hope vanished into oblivion.

She rustled the papers in her hand and cleared her throat. “So, now that I’ve satisfied your curiosity about chicken wings, my lord, shall we go on?”

Harry forced himself back to the task at hand. He explained some of idiosyncracies he’d observed in her style of writing, especially her tendency to explain things in too much detail. He argued with her over particular paragraphs he’d crossed out or where he’d edited her too heavily for her liking.

Despite all that, she seemed to take his criticisms rather wall, perhaps because their talk of hungry young ladies and chicken wings had broken the ice. They finished on a note of agreement over his suggestion that she include at least one article for men in every issue, and she promised to have one written by the time they met again, on Wednesday, as they had originally planned. She then began sharing with him some of the ideas she had in mind for future issues.

Harry tried to give her work his full consideration, he truly did, but it wasn’t long before he found his attention wandering to a far more intriguing topic than picnic luncheons and drawing room presentations. As she rambled on about various picnic viands, he stared at her mouth and started imagining again what it would be like to kiss her. By the time she stopped talking, he’d imagined it about twenty-seven different ways.

It was the silence that brought Harry out of his luscious contemplations with a guilty start,
and he found her watching him expectantly as if waiting for his opinion.

“Absolutely sound,” he said, even though he hadn’t heard a single word she’d said during the past hour. “I agree.”

She gave him a wide smile, so he assumed he’d said the right thing, but he knew he mustn’t keep getting distracted this way. What was true when she was his secretary was equally true now. If they were going to work successfully together, he could not indulge in any more lusty imaginings about her. But as he remembered how she’d felt in his hands a short time ago, as he imagined the scents of talcum and cotton, he wondered why he’d never noticed before now what a pretty smile she had. He had the feeling that putting thoughts of kissing Miss Dove out of his mind was going to be like putting Pandora’s gifts back in the box. Tricky, very tricky.

Emma thought their discussions that afternoon had gone very well. Surprising, after the way things had begun.

She lay in bed, staring up at the darkened ceiling of her room, scarcely hearing Mr. Pigeon’s loud purr beside her pillow or the clatter of London traffic through her open window. Her thoughts were fully occupied with Lord Marlowe and what had happened that afternoon.

He’d touched her. Never before had he done such a thing. His intent had been a chivalrous
one, to be sure, assisting her down from the ladder, but then he had not carried it through. Instead, he’d slid his palms down to her hips and held her there. In his hands.

Aunt Lydia’s many warnings about gentlemen and the animalistic aspect of their nature came back to haunt her. Emma knew she should have slapped his hands away, told him in no uncertain terms what she thought of such ungentlemanlike behavior. But instead she’d stood there with his hands on her hips and his thumbs caressing her spine, too shocked to move, with a strange, hot sort of tension flowing through her, something she’d never felt before.

No man had ever touched her, at least not in the way Marlowe had done today.

She thought of Mr. Parker, the only man with whom she’d ever shared any sort of intimacy. Their friendly conversations in the drawing room of Auntie’s genteel little house had been conducted in chairs spaced half a dozen feet apart. Their strolls around the park in Red Lion Square as he’d told her his plans to become a barrister had been side by side, without even a brush of hands. Their waltzes together had been beyond reproach, their bodies separated by the perfect distance. And always there had been Auntie hovering nearby, ever watchful of Emma’s virtue and reputation, ever ready to intervene should young Mr. Parker make any untoward advance upon her young niece.

But he never had. A clasp of hands, a kiss on her knuckles, a hand on her waist during a waltz.
But nothing more than that. Not a single thing that was improper.

Not sliding his palms down her hips. Not caressing the small of her back with his thumbs in slow circles that made her burn and tingle in the strangest way. Nothing like that.

She closed her eyes, and put her hands where Marlowe had put his. Before she could stop herself, she slid her palms along her hips just as he had done, and felt again that hot tension in her body. She jerked her hands away.

What Marlowe had done was just the sort of thing Auntie had always warned her against, the sort of thing no gently bred woman should ever permit, the sort of thing that had always made her maintain a cool, impersonal distance toward her handsome male employer. Gentlemen being what they were, Aunt Lydia had often said, it was up to females to enforce the boundaries of propriety with the most scrupulous care.

But he touched me, Auntie. He touched me.

She’d been very wrong to allow it.

Emma sat up, wrapping her arms around her bent knees and curling her toes beneath the hem of her cotton nightgown. She rested her forehead against her knees, hot with guilt and shame, even as she felt an unmistakable thrill. Now she knew the effect a man’s caress, however brief, however improper, could have on a woman.

She could not allow it to happen again.

Emma fell back into the pillows with a sigh. Perhaps she was fretting about nothing. With
that thought, she tried to adopt an attitude of determined optimism. Perhaps Marlowe, like herself, had realized the impropriety of what had happened and would be sure to behave more appropriately in future. After all, once they had moved to the parlor downstairs, things had seemed to smooth out between them, and for the remainder of the afternoon, his demeanor had been quite gentlemanlike.

Despite his warnings, she had not found his critiques to be brutal. And he’d listened to her ideas with an assiduous attention she’d never seen him display before. She’d gone on far too long about the details of her picnic luncheon menus, but even then he hadn’t expressed either boredom or impatience. And though he had occasionally offered a murmur of agreement or a nod of encouragement, he had kept mum for the most part and listened to her in a most polite fashion.