Page 48 of When the Scoundrel Sins

“I’m going swimming, just as I always do. So go away if it bothers you.” Her fingers trembled as they slipped daringly beneath the neckline of her shift. “If not, then…”

He crooked a brow at that, and she could read on his face the question of whether she was about to issue an invitation to join her for her swim. Oh, she should do just that! It would serve him right to have all his preconceived ideas about her destroyed.

She would enjoy it, too. God help her, even now her heart raced beneath his intense gaze, staring at her with such obvious arousal that she shivered from the heat of him. To have the full attention of a man like him on her, to know that he wanted her as much as he’d wanted those London ladies with their Parisian silks and well-practiced flirtations—

And destroy what little dignity she had left.

No matter how tempting, she wasn’t ready yet to go quite that far. She still had her pride, albeit a dwindling amount of it each unmarried day that drew nearer to her birthday, and she wasn’t willing to cast it aside. Not even for Quinton Carlisle.

“Then turn around,” she finished, her shoulders sagging.

Blowing out a frustrated breath, he turned his back to her and looked instead at the cover of thick bushes and trees surrounding the pond.

She slipped out of her shift and dived quickly into the pond, the cold water engulfing her heated body and quenching the fires he’d started beneath her skin. With her quiet strokes through the water rippling the mirror-like surface, she swam out several yards as she always did, to that place where she could just barely reach the bottom of the pond with her toes and the water cooled up to her neck.

He turned around then to watch her.

“You should leave now,” she told him, her voice quiet on the soft morning air.

He shook his head. “I’m staying until your birthday.”

That wasn’t what she meant, but her belly tightened into a knot of gratitude just the same. Quinn was irritating and bothersome, but he was also her ally. Of a sort.

“My wedding, you mean,” she corrected, hiding the bitterness in her voice by dipping beneath the surface, then rising to smooth back her wet hair.

“Your birthday,” he countered firmly, “by which time we’ll have discovered a way for you to keep Glenarvon without having to marry.”

The conviction behind his words showed her in spades how much he’d matured since the last time she’d seen him. The brash man she remembered who thought he could prove his manliness by cutting a swathe through London by drinking, fighting, and bedding every merry widow who smiled at him was gone, and in his place stood a man of resolve and ambition.

She stared at him through droplets of water clinging to her lashes. It wasn’t hope that now warmed her belly and tickled at the backs of her knees. But something just as good.

He bent down to yank off his boot and dropped it to the grass beside her discarded dress.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, a prickling unease rising inside her.

He reached for the second boot. “Going for a swim.”

“But you can’t!” she protested with a soft gasp. “It’s scandalous!”

He sent her a lazy grin. “My reputation be damned,” he repeated, throwing her words back at her as he unbuttoned his waistcoat.

Fuming to hide the rush of nervousness, she slapped her hand on the water’s surface. “Don’t you dare!”

Ignoring her, he shrugged away his waistcoat and let it fall to the ground.

“Fine,” she bit out, forcing herself not to care that he was undressing. Not one whit! “When we’re found together like this, you’ll be forced to marry me after all, and all my problems will be solved.”

He drawled in a deep voice that wound a ribbon of heat all around her, even in the cold water, “Have to be caught together first.” He pulled off his neck cloth and let it trail away to the ground. His eyes locked with hers across the surface of the pond. “And I don’t see anyone in sight to catch us, do you?”

Anger flared through her. “You scoundrel!”

His only reply was a slow, wolfish grin.

She slammed her mouth closed. Oh, this was all her fault! She should never have agreed to let him help her find a husband, should never have proposed to him—she was mad to have thought of it, madder still to think she could trust him.

Yet when he stripped his shirt off over his head, she watched shamelessly. Her eyes traced over the hard muscles of his shoulders and along the trail of golden hair that dusted his chest and down across the ripples of his stomach, to disappear at his—oh my.

Working on the estate, she’d seen many shirtless men before, but never one who looked as mesmerizing as Quinton. Not just muscles, not just the golden look of him in the fading shadows, butallof him drew her, exactly as he had six years ago for that kiss beneath the roses. Exactly as he had last week among the ruins for something far more than only a kiss. And just as he did now, despite her knowing better.