He moved to the other side of the table and stood there, arms crossed, watching like a hawk. A few moves later, he flinched, and she hastily lowered her elbow. “Better?”
“Yes.”
“You’re hardly helping your own cause by correcting my stance,” she said, glancing up.
Mostly Jeremy watched her breasts rather than her stance.
He felt surprisingly alive. What’s more, the realization didn’t throw him into a cauldron of grief, the way it usually did. Tonight, in this shadowy, quiet room, it seemed a good thing to be alive.
To be making a foolish wager, and lusting after a woman’s breasts, and generally behaving like a member of the human race.
She caught him looking at her bosom again.
He cocked an eyebrow.
“Last shot,” Betsy said, scowling at him. If she made this, the game was over.
She kept her elbow down. He watched her eyes and realized that she was planning a simple shot: left wall to the right pocket.
The cue struck the ball, the ball struck the wall . . .
Jeremy’s mouth curled into a smile.
Slowly, Betsy straightened and met his eyes.
Chapter Seven
“That’s the game,” Betsy said, feeling a wave of relief that put her slightly off-balance.
She’d won an adventure.
She would go to London in a pair of breeches. She would play billiards with the best players to be found in England. She sucked in a deep breath.
Jeremy had come around the table and was standing before her. “You did indeed win, Bess.”
For the moment, she ignored his adulteration of her name. “I get to wear a pair of breeches,” she said, smiling. “I used to borrow a pair of Leonidas’s breeches and put them on under my dress when I was a girl. I adored wearing them.”
“That would explain why you have such a damned good seat on a horse.”
“Yes.” Betsy’s heart lit with the pure joy of sharing a secret. “I’d take my sidesaddle off in the meadow and practice riding bareback.”
“How improper,” he observed, but his eyes were laughing.
“I also practiced archery,” she confessed. “I had a target. And standing on top of my horse’s back, as I told you before. She was an old mare with a broad back. It was so much fun.”
“Why did you stop?”
“I could only do it because an accommodating stableboy, Peter, never told anyone. He helped me with the saddle and the rest. I was only ten years old when I first showed him my breeches.”
“He must have been horrified!”
She shrugged. “He was twelve. We rode out together whenever I could arrange it, but a couple of years later he decided to apprentice to a blacksmith.”
“I’m amazed your brothers didn’t stop you.”
“Alaric and North are quite a bit older than I am,” she pointed out. “Leonidas was always away at school. I’m very close to Joan and Viola, but they are both far more ladylike than I am, and Viola is afraid of horses.”
Jeremy bellowed with laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
“You are widely seen as the most ladylike maiden on the marriage market.”
“And so I am . . . in public.” Happiness swelled up inside Betsy. “Could we leave on Monday, do you think?”
“Not without a chaperone.” He stepped backward. “I’m sorry, Bess. You did win, and I agreed—but I highly doubt that anyone will agree to chaperone us. I am friends with North and Parth, and neither of them will approve.”
“Why do we need a chaperone? I’ll be dressed as a boy! No one will know who I am, and I trust you implicitly.”
“How do you intend to explain your absence from the castle? With me? The family would be within rights to believe that I had kidnapped you and was planning to marry you at Gretna Green or something equally absurd.”
“They would never believe that,” Betsy said, wrinkling her nose.
“Why not?”
She gave him a little push. “Your lack of interest in me is obvious and everyone’s seen it.”
Either that, or they’d decided he was as feeble as an octogenarian. “Your reputation would be damaged,” he said, stating the obvious. “Your downfall would be all the greater because so many fools have put you on a pedestal. We’d be forced to marry.”
“Who would possibly find out?” Betsy grinned at him, mischief glowing deep in her eyes. “You don’t understand, Jeremy. I look good in a pair of breeches. No one will guess I’m not a boy.”
How in the hell had she been able to conceal that she was the wildest of the Wildes?
“I won’t do it unless you tell a member of your family and that person accompanies us,” Jeremy said, putting his cards on the table. “If I marry someone, I’d prefer to choose the woman myself than face the end of His Grace’s dueling pistol.”
“I am so tired of being treated like a piece of china that will break at the slightest jarring,” Betsy growled. “I am a grown woman.”
Jeremy stepped forward again, eyes intent on hers. Suddenly she was acutely aware of his size. Her mind neatly supplied her with an image of the sharply defined muscles on his chest.
If she pushed him again, she might feel those muscles under her fingertips.
Slowly she raised her eyes from his powerful neck that a half-open neck cloth did nothing to conceal. To his square chin and blunt cheekbones.
Jeremy looked like a warrior. He could have been in the legions of angels commanded to guard heaven’s door. Until he fell.
A dark angel, then.
She lifted her eyes all the way to his, because the room had gone peculiarly silent. She could hear his breathing, and her own.
For most of the evening, he’d sat in the shadows. But now they both stood within the pool of light thrown by the lamp hanging over the billiard table. The light was bold and bright, since a shadow might throw off a player’s calculations.
Jeremy’s eyes were not black, as she’d always thought, but flecked with gray. Dark gray with a lighter ring around the outside.
She stilled when she saw the expression in them.
In the last two months since he had arrived at the castle, she had seen him scornful, bitter, grieving, desolate. Buried in guilt. Pained as if he’d been stabbed in the chest. Issuing withering sarcasm, mostly directed at her but occasionally flaring in all directions, even at Aunt Knowe.
Outrageously arrogant.
But this she had never seen.
Need.
What was in his eyes was pure physical need. For her?
Her lips parted, surprised, and her hand began to rise to his chest before she snatched it back.
“That’s right, Bess,” he said, his voice cordial but still low, a growl hidden in its depths. “I am not a safe companion. Especially not if you put on breeches and I could see every outline of your luscious bottom.”
“Jeremy!” she breathed. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Don’t lust after you? They all lust after you, princess, don’t you understand? All those men who proposed to you.”
“No, they don’t!” she said stoutly.
“Surely you don’t believe they’ve fallen in love with you, poetry or no poetry.”