“I need you,” Betsy whispered. She tugged again.
He went, because although she didn’t know it, he would always come when she needed him. Whenever she needed him.
Inside the chamber, his eyes went straight to Betsy’s face. She looked as exquisite as ever: A man’s wig suited her. She generally wore towering creations or arranged her own hair into powdered mounds on her head.
A small white wig focused attention on her face, especially her dark, arched eyebrows. She looked unmistakably like a Wilde. She was damned beautiful.
But then, Wilde men were beautiful. It was one of the irritating things about them, to Jeremy’s mind. North and Parth didn’t even have spots, back in school when every normal boy was a pimply mess.
“Did you get spots as a girl?” he asked.
“What? Jeremy, pay attention!”
He was paying attention. Every part of his body longed to look below her chin but he was a gentleman.
“Spots!” she cried. “Who cares? I need help!”
“May I look?” he asked, gesturing toward her lower area.
“Of course, you may look!” Betsy replied, her voice rising. “No one is going to believe I’m a boy.”
His eyes drifted to a decently tied cravat and down to her chest. “How on earth did you flatten yourself to that extent?” he asked, rather stupefied.
“I bound my breasts,” she said impatiently. “Besides, a corset—oh, never mind. That’s an improper subject of conversation.”
“Most of our subjects of conversation are improper,” Jeremy pointed out. “Do you normally stuff your corset? Not that I mind in the least.”
“You needn’t share your opinion of my breasts!” she shot back.
“Your breasts—” But he broke off. A better man than he wouldn’t have ogled her from the corner of the billiard room until he could trace her breasts in his mind’s eye and almost feel them plump into his hands.
“I like your breasts,” he said flatly.
She was wearing a velvet coat buttoned to her cravat. Savoring the moment, he looked lower.
“Well?” she asked, when he remained silent.
“Women should wear breeches all the time,” he said, registering the hoarse sound in his voice without embarrassment.
“You oughtn’t look at me that way,” Betsy said, sounding somewhat delighted.
“What way?” He couldn’t pull his eyes from her rounded thighs, though every gentlemanly instinct in his body—luckily, there weren’t many—demanded that he gaze somewhere else, say, to the corner of the room.
“Heated,” Betsy said.
Jeremy forced his gaze back to her face.
“I am too curvy, especially in profile. If every man looks at me the way you do, I can’t go to the auction.”
Jeremy took a deep breath and rubbed his hands over his face. “Give me a moment. I’ll try to look at you as if you were a stranger.”
Betsy turned and started fussing with her wig, pulling it lower on her brow.
From behind . . .
Her coat was quite short—designed for a young boy—with double vents in the back that were not lying flat. Betsy had an arse designed by the gods. Her coat displayed that curve in all its magnificence. Now he knew what she meant.
“That coat won’t do,” he said, steel in his voice.
“I know!” Betsy cried, whirling about. “I look like a fool, don’t I? It’s far too short and not fashionable.”
“Among other problems.”
She turned to the mirror again. “I can’t go to the auction.”
To his horror, her lower lip trembled before she bit down with even, white teeth. “It was a stupid, stupid idea. Looking like this, I’d be found out. I’d have to live in the country like a hermit because I wouldn’t be received anywhere.” She took in a shaky breath.
Some part of Jeremy’s brain, an ancient, wary part, was instructing him to leave the room. But the part of him that had watched Boadicea Wilde practice with a billiard cue day after day before she sailed into the ballroom to play a role as a demure maiden opened his arms and pulled her against his chest.
Sweaty or no.
“You can do it,” he murmured. “We’ll do it together.”
She snuggled against him, cheek against his chest. “You smell good.” Her voice trembled. “I knew inside that it would never work.”
Jeremy tightened his arms and rested his chin on her bristly wig. “It will work. I am taking you to the auction. I will not fail you.”
“What if we are caught? We’d have to marry and then you’d have to become a hermit as well.”
“I am already a hermit,” Jeremy said, dodging the question of marriage. If and when he proposed to Betsy, it would be at a time of his choosing.
If?
When he proposed to Betsy. She had somehow carved a place in his chest and it wasn’t going to go away.
“All right,” he said, reluctantly stepping back. “I shall pretend that I don’t know you.”
He raked his eyes up and down, pushing away the scorching wave of desire that followed.
“We should make you plump. It would be better if we could find you a different coat, but if you didn’t have such a slim waist, your rear wouldn’t be so obvious.”
Betsy frowned at him. “My rear?” She peered over her shoulder. “What about my legs?”
Jeremy obediently looked down. Lovely thighs. Plump above, slender below.
“Your ankles are rather small,” he said.
“I have boots!” Betsy pulled forward a pair of battered boots and stamped into them. “I used to wear them riding when I was a girl, so I asked Aunt Knowe to have them taken from the attic.”
“You wore riding boots as a girl?”
She nodded. “It looks better, doesn’t it?” she said, before the mirror again. “My legs don’t look as skinny.”
No wonder lust was one of the seven deadly sins. It was as strong as the instinct to live.
“No, they don’t.” His voice could be classified as a groan, if one were so inclined.
A grin crossed Betsy’s face. “Jeremy! Regard me as if I were a stranger, remember?”
“Do you have any more of the material you bound your breasts with?”
“Muslin? Yes. My maid brought rolls of bandages.”
“Wind them around your waist until you look like a stocky young lad.”
Nodding, her hands went to the buttons on her jacket.
“Not until I leave. Where’s your sense of self-protection, Bess?”
“I don’t need that around you.” But she dropped her hands.
It was the work of a moment to wrap his hands around her shoulders, bend his head, and catch her lips in a hard kiss. He was no tamed and toothless alley cat.
She giggled and kissed him back, her tongue lapping his until his mind blurred. And when her teeth closed on his bottom lip? He growled and his hands slid down her back, rounding that luscious bottom.
“You’re sweaty,” she said, sometime later.
That was when Jeremy realized that Betsy had her hands under his shirt in the back, tracing his muscles. He jerked. “Bloody hell.”
Her hands slid from his back. “I watched you pitching snow in the courtyard. I couldn’t stop wondering . . .” To his shock, she raised a slender finger and licked it. His tool throbbed, demanding attention. Demanding her.