Spectacles! She glanced up at him, lips parting in amazement. She also required them to read comfortably. But like him, she never wore them in public.
So we are both a little bit vain, she thought. The idea made her smile. It was becoming something of an obsession, uncovering the small things which they might have in common. His loyalty to his family. His love for her brother. His disregard for the opinions of idiots and shriveled snobs.
He made a soft noise, and she froze. In the moonlight, in slumber, his face looked boyish, almost innocent. He would need to shave on the morrow; she wished she dared to touch the shadow on his chin, to stroke it simply for the pleasure of the texture beneath her fingertips. But as she reached out, her fingers curled into her palm. Some superstitious conviction came over her: if she woke him the wrong way, everything would go wrong. Fairy tales often emphasized this point. There was only one right way to stir a sleeping person if one wanted them to fall in love.
But I do not want him to fall in love with me, she reminded herself. I am not here because I am dreaming of a future with him.
What would a future with him even look like? He had no interest in the country, no taste for England, no care for settling down.
If he fell in love, he would still want to chase the wind. His beloved would simply have to race alongside him.
It did not seem a very restful life.
Some strand of discontent was threading through her resolve now. Of course he would not fall in love. Not with anybody. No need to feel so ill-tempered toward this faceless woman able to race with him when she would never, in fact, exist. Alex was the most determined bachelor known to her.
The thought gave her courage. It was one thing to deny a woman in public. But to find her in his bedroom, at night? Any man would take such an invitation.
Emboldened, she leaned down to inhale the scent of him. Cognac fumes still clung to him, but beneath that was something else—the smell of his bare skin? She pulled in a deeper breath. Yes, that was it. The scent of a warm, healthy, muscular man in his prime. The scent of Alex.
His eyes opened.
She froze.
He studied her for a moment with sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes.
Her heart gave a painful jolt.
The next moment, he came awake. She saw it happen. Saw his expression focus and narrow.
The only sound was the thumping of the wheels over the ties.
Or, no: the breath rasping in her throat seemed embarrassingly loud, too.
“How wicked do you want to be, then?” he murmured.
She had not planned for him to speak. With a single question, he seemed to seize control of the moment. She felt powerless, suddenly, to answer him, or to say anything at all.
His eyes, dark in the shadows falling across his face, rested unblinkingly on hers. He pushed himself up on one elbow, supple and fluid as a cat, and his open shirt parted and fell away. The muscles of his flat abdomen rippled as he moved.
Her mouth went dry.
All right. This was not at all a sisterly feeling.
“How wicked?” he asked again softly.
“I—” The word yielded to a breath she hadn’t realized her lungs needed. “Very,” she said as she exhaled.
“And?”
She hesitated. And? And what? “You . . . do you not want to?”
“Gwen.” He tilted his head slightly, so his expression was further lost to the shadows. “When you wake to find me watching you, you may begin the discussion by asking what I want. But tonight, it’s your turn to speak first. What do you want?”
Why must he make this so difficult? Wasn’t it clear what she wanted?
Or did he just wish to hear her stutter and stammer for his amusement?
Probably.
Why had she come in here? Why hadn’t she brought her green corset? “Never mind,” she muttered. “Go back to sleep.”
His mouth curved slightly. “Gwen,” he murmured, and his voice was like a siren’s song, a balm, luring her to turn back toward him. His voice addled her, she thought. Low, smooth, steady—everything sounded persuasive, wrapped up in those polished vowels. Such a voice could recite Bible verses to atheists, rally troops to suicidal charges . . . and coax a woman ten meters from the mountaintop into jumping off a cliff.
“What?” she breathed.
“You keep telling me you want to live freely,” he said. “But what’s the point in breaking free if you don’t even know what you want? Why are you here? Do you even know?”
She wrapped her arms around herself. “I do know what I want. But you—” Make it very difficult to get it, she added silently.
He leaned forward, toward her, bringing one of his large, muscled shoulders into the moonlight flooding the bottom half of the bed. Her eyes fixed on it. She wanted to touch it. She wanted to press her lips to it.