Chapter 6 #3
“Is your hearing failing you, my lord?”
“No, you’re distracting me with thoughts of the last time you bathed me,” he responded honestly as he tried to hold the anger roiling through his body. “You’ve been here the entire month after I specifically asked you to leave?”
She rinsed the linen out in the basin, wrapped it around the bar of soap, and began stroking the bar as if there was something entirely different in her hands.
He narrowed his eyes and studied her expression.
Everything he saw told him she had no inkling of how her actions might affect a man, and her actions were definitely having an effect on him.
Down boy.
“You didn’t tell me to leave,” she said.
“I most certainly did.” This conversation was getting harder and harder to follow. He closed his eyes and concentrated on another part of his body not betraying his desire.
“You are mistaken, my lord.”
“Mistaken?” Like bloody hell. “I specifically told Ross you were not to return.”
“No message of the sort was conveyed to me.”
“Of course I did, the day—” He closed his eyes and cursed under his breath.
“Do you mean the day you proposed to Máira?” She asked.
He pursed his lips and nodded. He definitely wasn’t getting a sponge bath after that slip of the tongue.
“If I recall correctly, I told you your servants would be taking care of you from then on and that I wouldn’t save your life if Ross called you out for ruining my sister.”
“I didn’t ruin your sister.”
“I know.”
Her response was the distraction he needed to keep his mind off images of her delicate fingers wrapping tightly around his cock. He searched her face. “You do?”
“Yes. She is now married to the father of her baby. The Earl of Dorset, I believe that is his title.”
“He’s not an earl.”
“But he is,” she insisted.
“No, that was just the cover he used to seduce your sister.”
“I’m not sure I’m going to like this story.”
He didn’t like the story. Máira’s condition was because of his need to be rescued. It was hard to regret his life being saved, but he did regret what her sister experienced. “No one has told you?”
“Told me what?”
He decided to give her the bare minimum. “Elias Drake is a pirate.”
“A pirate! My sister is married to a pirate?”
“Calm down. He’s actually a privateer.”
She dropped the linen into the bowl as if she were done with the entire affair. “Very little difference between the two.”
“One involves hanging, the other does not.” He shrugged when she stared at him in disbelief.
“That depends on who captures you.”
“True. Do you want to hear the story or not?”
“How do you know the story?”
“I was there.”
“You were sick and injured.”
“Caillen! Enough. I feel like I’m arguing with six-year-old twins and losing.”
Her eyes twinkled with delight. “You are, losing that is.”
“I would say arguing with six-year-old twins was the correct part of that statement.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “Astley, you were saying…”
Damn, she’d reverted to his title. He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I was kidnapped by the French from a ship that was traveling from America to Spain.”
“What were you doing in America?”
It was hard enough knowing what he knew, but he couldn’t tell her. Not yet. “You have a right to know, but I can’t tell you.”
“So, you traveled to America investigating my father’s murder?”
His body stiffened, his defenses rising to block any onslaught of questions she threw at him. “What would make you say that?”
“The letter you had me write to Sir Williamson.”
He’d known she was too intelligent for that mistake to go unnoticed. “Sir Williamson?” He asked with a yawn, hoping she would think him too tired to continue the conversation.
She rolled her eyes. “You have written to him four times a week for the last month.”
“How would you know that?” Blasted incompetent, disloyal, ungrateful buggers. He’d fire every one of his servants, starting with the butler, Mandal and Mrs. Bernard, his housekeeper.
“I hand delivered them myself.”
“You did what? I’ll toss every one of my servants out on the streets.
The blocks, the stones, the worse than senseless things…
they should run to their houses, fall on their knees and pray to the gods to intermit the plague that needs must light on this ingratitude.
” She was smiling and it only made him want to hit something.
“Using Shakespearian insults toward your servants when they’re not even present is a bit juvenile,” she said.
“Then I’m bloody juvenile, because I feel like I’m in the midst of the Julius Caesar’s betrayal and conspiracy.”
“Simon, someone had to deliver them. Why not me?”
“Because it’s dangerous,” he said as he picked up his book and slammed it down on the floor. He was acting like a child and he knew it. He just couldn’t stand the amount of danger she had placed herself in thanks to him.
“Life is dangerous.”
“This is even more so.” He reached for her hand, desperately trying to make her recognize the threat she faced.
Except to Caillen, he was the threat, and he instantly regretted his actions even more.