Chapter 9 #2
“The other night at Vauxhall Gardens—”
Blaze groaned. “Just so as we’re not getting ourselves confused, what those folk were getting up to was not an expression of love.”
Her mouth snapped shut. She might be all het up with righteousness, but she knew a sound argument when she encountered one.
Using her disorientation to his advantage, he reached for the manuscript. But instead of opening it to page one, he cracked it open in the middle. “Here’s as good a place as any, I reckon.”
His opponent across the table clenched her jaw and shoved back in her chair, arms crossed over her chest.
His index finger following along the page, he read, “The rat—” There was an e at end of the word, so… “The rate,” he corrected, and Viveca nodded, though it was miserly given. He continued. “The rate…of…her…”
Hmm. The next word was a conundrum. There was an e at the end of the word, but when the u was long, it didn’t sound in his head like any word he’d ever heard.
“Can you spell the word out for me?”
“P-u-l-s-e.”
“Pulse,” she said.
“Pulse,” he repeated. Then he read again, “The rate of her pulse…in-cr-ea-sed—”
“Increased.”
“Increased at the mare—”
“Mere.”
“At the mere…s-i-g-h-t.”
“Sight.”
“Sight,” he repeated, then started again. “The rate of her pulse increased at the mere sight of him.” His brow furrowed, and he met Viveca’s gaze across the table. “This is what romance is all about?”
“As I explained, romance is likely not your cup of tea.”
Oh, she was irritated, all right.
“Just so we’re clear,” he said, even as he understood the little devil perched on his shoulder was winning. “There are certain elements in the act of romance that are very much my cup of tea.”
Her cheeks blazed with sudden color.
He should have resisted.
But he hadn’t—and he didn’t feel all that regretful about it.
He kept at it for that reason alone. “But so had his, she…coo-ld…” He glanced up. “What’s this word?”
He instantly regretted the question, for Viveca stood and came to his side of the table, leaning over him as she read the word aloud. “Could.”
His eyebrows crashed together with disbelief. “That’s could?”
“It is,” she said, the laughter in her voice making it melodious to his ears. “English is not for the faint of heart.”
As Blaze took in the dulcet lilt of her voice and her scent of vanilla and sugar, he thought it prudent that she returned to her side of the table.
But thinking and asking were two different things, and he couldn’t make himself ask.
Not to save his life, he couldn’t.
“The rate of her pulse increased at the mere sight of him. But so had his, she could see from the…th-rob…throb of the…ve-in—”
“Vein.”
“Vein…in his neck.”
He made the mistake of craning his head around to meet her eyes.
There, within inches of his lips, was her pretty pink mouth.
He knew what it was to kiss that mouth.
And throb was but one word for the feeling the memory incited.
He sat back in his chair, the better to meet her eyes—and put a little distance between him and that pretty pink mouth of hers. “Well.”
“Well?”
“Something strikes me.”
She swiveled and propped her bottom onto the edge of the table, her arms crossed over her chest.
If she was thinking to look forbidding or inaccessible, then her thinking was wrong.
It would be the work of fewer than three seconds to have her dress above her knees and him between them.
“I’m not the only purveyor of vice in this room, now am I?”
“How do you mean?”
“This.”
“The written word isn’t vice.”
“These written words are.” He snorted. “Throbbing veins?”
“Why is that?” Oh, she was getting good and het up. “Because those words make you feel something? Why is feeling equated with vice? Or is it only vice when it’s feeling in the body? To my view, vice is apparent by its outcomes—addiction and ruin. But love…when it’s consensual between two people—”
“You don’t think a person can become addicted to love?” For some reason, he felt himself rising to the argument. “You don’t think a person can be ruined by it?”
“But what two people feel in their hearts—”
“I’m not speaking of the love two people feel with their hearts.” He tapped the passage he’d just read. “I’m speaking of the love that’s happening between the lines of those words. The kind of love that can only be expressed between two bodies.” He snorted. “I’m speaking of throbbing veins.”
“Yes, a vein throbbed in his neck.”
“Are you too innocent to know that veins throb elsewhere, too, milady?” he asked. “But I think you do know that.”
Learned it last week, he didn’t say.
A beat of the clock ticked past, and he expected her blush to deepen.
He waited—anticipated, in fact.
But her blush did no such thing.
Her pretty pink mouth, however, did something.
It smiled.
And the smile on his mouth?
It froze.
She uncrossed her arms and planted a hand on the table as she leaned forward—toward him. “There is something you should understand, Blaze.”
Blaze.
Some of that power he’d been exerting over the situation…she was taking it for herself.
His gut had enough sense to fill with foreboding.
He was in trouble.
And he wasn’t sure he minded all that much.
For here was the thing—Viveca was a lady who knew what she wanted.
And she was looking like she might want him.
“And what is that?” he managed to ask, though his voice was like gravel.
“No well-read young lady is a complete innocent.”