Page 63 of A Spy’s Guide to Seduction

“I’m interested.”

When she judged that the wet compress had had sufficient time to do its work, she lifted it from his arm. Gently, she peeled his shirt away from the skin, pleased to see that the blackened fibers remained attached to the torn shirt and the wound itself had only a little black residue around the edge. She put aside the stained compress.

“Now, your waistcoat and shirt.”

“You won’t stop until you have me naked, will you?”

“I do like the idea of you naked, but I suspect the doctor will only need to see your arm.”

She made him stand briefly to get the waistcoat off and pull his shirttails free of his trousers. He was a bit wobbly on his legs, so she pushed him gently back down into the chair. She undid his cuffs and worked the shirt off his uninjured side and over his head before pulling it from the wounded arm.

She held the linen, warm from his body, and stared at what she’d uncovered. She wanted to run her hands over the fine broad shoulders, and down the chest with its swells of muscle and swirls of soft dark hair to the taut belly. The bullet had passed through a bulge of arm muscle just below his shoulder. Blue and yellow bruises marked his ribs and torso.

“Barksted’s men,” he said, watching her.

She nodded. They had wounded his flesh, but the faint line on his imperfect mouth was the real wound, the old hurt that had sent him off alone to rescue a woman who didn’t wish to be rescued. Emily traced it with her finger. He shivered under her touch.

“You may wonder,” he said, “that I came to Lady Ravenhurst’s assistance when I should simply have taken the papers and been on my way. Had I found Walhouse alone, I would have done just that.”

Emily waited, holding her breath, stilling every judgment.

He released a long, shaky breath. “When my mother left, I thought I could stop her. I pleaded and argued. I tried to fight her lover to keep her with us, with my father and me. She wept, but she watched him beat me.”

Emily had wanted him naked, but this was more, this baring of the hurt he kept concealed behind his cool, bored indifference. She wanted to tell him that he had been young, that she knew what it was to be young and to imagine that you could right wrongs in the world by your own valiant efforts.

“You aren’t that boy anymore. You are wiser, and better armed.”

He laughed. “But still wrong.” He looked at her, his dark eyes filled with honesty and something more. “I was wrong yesterday again, wrong to try to stop her...alone. I should have waited to bring my partner with me—you, Em.”

It was an unlikely admission, an admission of need. Lynley, she realized, had been determined to need no one from the time of the disaster. His aunt called it a disaster because it involved the family in scandal, but the real disaster had been the grave injury to the heart of a loving boy. His aunt and his uncle had completed the work begun by his mother and her lover until he had refused to be vulnerable or open.

Emily dropped his ruined shirt and leaned over to kiss him. With his good hand he pulled her down into his lap and settled her against the unhurt shoulder. She pressed against him and placed her hand on his heart, a heart that could now heal.

But as she felt its steady beat, she was tempted to move her hand over his chest, to fill her senses with the textures of his skin, the rough and smooth, the taut ridges of muscle, the soft swirls of hair, and the flat coins of his nipples. He was sensitive there, and when she felt his body flex in response to her touch, she smiled, her lips brushing his collarbone.

She owed him this. He had, after all, been teasing her senses for days, awakening yearnings she had not felt before.

“Are you seducing me?” he asked.

“Is it working?”

He nodded wordlessly, and Emily continued the explorations that seemed more likely than any saline draft to distract him from the pain of his wounded arm.

Chapter Twenty-Three

What numbers of girls are turned out in London each Season, dressed and coiffed with the elegance their families’ means allow, feeling only that they must attract the notice of gentlemen around them and that it is the duty of those gentlemen to choose a wife? The husband hunter must not be like one of these—ignorant of human nature and unacquainted with her own heart, lacking a plan of action and with no sense of her duty to shape her destiny. To become a woman, she must act. She must choose. Unless she takes charge of her life, she remains, though a wife, a perpetual girl.

—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

The doctor came near dusk as the sky grew pale and the trees turned to black rustling shadows. Mr. Windle was a bewhiskered gentleman in an old-fashioned brown coat, with a brusque manner.

He hollered a greeting from the door, and at Emily’s reply, he tromped into the little parlor.

“What’s this I hear about a man who’s been shot?” he asked, coming to a halt in front of Lynley, his bag in his hand.

Lynley pulled aside the coat he’d been using for warmth.

Windle’s eyes widened at the sight of the bullet hole. “Bring that light closer, miss,” he ordered.