“Good God, Simms. My arm is not a foal to be birthed.”

“Almost there.” She slid her fingers over the crest of his shoulder and partway along his sleeve.

“Simms.”

She looked up. They were standing mere inches apart. His lips were very, very close to hers.

Her fingers involuntarily flexed, digging into his biceps. He winced.

“Oh.” She sucked in her breath, apologetic. “I’m so sorry. I’d forgotten your wound.”

“It’s not my arm, Simms. It’s everything. We’re alone in the garden while a ball goes on. I can’t stop staring at your breasts, and your hand is . . . violating my topcoat. It is time to face hard truths. As attempts at avoiding entanglement go, this one isn’t working. At all.”

“But . . . but it could be worse.”

“It’s hard to see how.”

She didn’t know what made her say it. The words just came from her lips. “You could be kissing me.”

Chapter Ten

“Kissing you,” Griff echoed. He tried to make it sound as though the words were some outlandish sentiment spoken in a foreign, unfamiliar tongue—and not the exact same thought he’d been harboring.

She was so close and so warm. They were entangled, and her deft, impertinent hands were all over him—reminding him just how long it had been since he’d been touched, stroked, fussed over. Given a damn about.

The hell of it was, none of her attentions were soothing in the least. Only provoking, arousing. Inflaming the hurt not only in his slashed arm, but in those raw, hollowed-out chambers of his heart.

“You’re right,” he told her. “Kissing is the one thing that would undoubtedly make this moment worse.”

“Oh, Lord.” She leaned forward until her brow met his chest. Then she lifted her head slightly. Then let it fall forward again. After a few more repetitions, he understood the meaning behind this strange gesture.

His chest was the brick wall, and she was bashing her head against it.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

“This is terrible,” she moaned. “I can’t fail at this, too. I just can’t. My life before this was bad enough. What kind of hapless, hopeless person fails at failing?”

“I’m not following you.”

She snuffled a little, using his pocket square to wipe her nose—without actually easing it from his pocket.

“At home,” she said, “my sister and I, we’re always those Simms girls who mean well. They say that because we can’t do anything right.”

Her breasts were now pressed against his chest, soft and springy. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Didn’t help.

“I’m no stranger to humiliation,” she went on. “The day you came into the Bull and Blossom, I’d been having the worst morning of my life. Everything went wrong. And I agreed to come to London with you because this was my chance. Surely, I thought, social disaster is the one thing I can do right. I’m expert at it.” Her voice tweaked. “But just look at this. I can’t even succeed at failure.”

She wriggled the hand trapped deep in his sleeve. Those breasts trapped against his chest now shimmied in a little dance.

He took a deep breath. He had to take control of this situation, fast—or he would lose his grip entirely. “Listen, Simms. Let’s just remain calm.”

He sent a mental message downward: That goes for you, too.

“First, extricate your hand from my sleeve.”

She obeyed, and he suffered all the same torture in reverse as her fingers dragged and wrestled over his shoulder, then his chest. But once it was done, he could step back, put some distance between them. They were only tangled in one place.

He nodded toward a nearby bench. “Now sit. Give me a moment, and I’ll have this sorted.”

He worked his own gloves free, then set about exploring the connection between his sleeve and her side. He found the place where his button had snagged. By now the cursed thing had twisted several times. He turned it this way and that, looking for the slack, resisting the urge to rush. Haste would only make it worse. This was a task that required patience.

Patience, and extreme fortitude.

God, what she did to him. Her brandy-colored hair made him yearn for a drink. He breathed deeply instead. A mistake. She smelled of French-milled soap and dusting powder and crisp, new linen. Now he wanted, quite desperately, to taste her bare skin. To run his tongue down that delicate slope of her neck, all the way to the graceful curve of her shoulder.

Then lower . . .

Lower, lower, lower.

“I had a dozen ways to be a disaster this evening,” she said softly. “I’d thought them all out.”

“Such as . . . ?”

“Eating far more than is ladylike, to start. Gentlemen despise indulgence in a lady.”

This was news to Griff. “We do?”

“Of course you do.” She gave him an incredulous look. “Secondly, I was going to express far too many opinions. A lady never airs her opinions.”

“That can’t be one of my mother’s lessons. That woman never formed an opinion she didn’t share.”

“I didn’t learn it from your mother. I read it in a book.” Her voice took on an affected tone. “ ‘Save for unsightly mustaches, there are few things gentlemen find less appealing in a lady than a political opinion.’ Well, I couldn’t grow any whiskers. But I’m prepared to make six outrageous statements about the Corn Laws.”

“The Corn Laws?” He couldn’t help but laugh.

“You don’t think it improper?”

“I think you’re greatly overestimating a man’s ability to heed conversation about the Corn Laws while confronted with a sight like this.”

He let his gaze dip to her bosom, where it had been wanting to stray all night. Two soft, pale mounds pressed to the border of her neckline. Like twin pillows. His attention bounced back and forth between them.

“It’s all right,” she said in a playful whisper. “I can’t stop looking at them either. This corset is a feat of engineering.”

“I think it’s sorcery.”

“You’re right about the illusion part. Here.” She took his hand and brought it to her breast.

Griff froze, lust rocketing through him.

“There’s cotton batting in the corset,” she said. “Can’t you feel it?”

She kept her hand over his, molding his fingers around the ample swell of fabric and the soft flesh beneath.

He swallowed hard. “Yes. I can feel it.”

He could also feel her. Warm and supple and enticing.

“See? It’s not real. So there’s another strike against me.” She adopted that strange tone of voice again. “A young lady who employs artifice to catch a gentleman’s eye will never secure his admiration.”

With profound reluctance, he let his hand slip from her breast. “Believe me. Right now, I only wish you could decrease my admiration. My admiration is currently rather . . . large.”

She looked him in the eye and blurted out, “I’m not a virgin.”

Damn. Just like that, he went fully erect, with a swiftness that rivaled swordplay. Upon reflection, he wasn’t sure he could have drawn an actual blade that quickly. Were he wearing a metal codpiece, his cock would have met it with an audible clang.

“That won’t help,” he told her. “What makes you think that will help? I’m not a virgin, either.”

“I didn’t think you were, but—”

“But nothing. I was hoping to hear something like, ‘I have a creeping skin disease.’ Or, ‘I hoot like a barn owl when I reach orgasm.’ Those would be deterrents. I’m not sure the second is strong enough, actually. Curiosity might win out over trepidation.”

“But noblemen don’t want a woman who’s lost her virtue. Mrs. Worthington was very clear.”

“Who is this rabidly ill-informed person you keep quoting? Mrs. Who-ington?”

“She wrote an etiquette book. Haven’t you heard of it? Mrs. Worthington’s Wisdom for Young Ladies. That book is how I know exactly what a proper young lady should—and shouldn’t—do.”

“Did my mother give you that?” The title sounded vaguely familiar, but he didn’t think such a book could be from his library.

“No, no. I’ve been reading it for years. There are copies of it all over Spindle Cove. Miss Finch—she’s Lady Rycliff now—wanted to remove every copy from circulation. There are hundreds of them in the village, just heaped everywhere.”

Griff frowned, remembering that first afternoon in the village. “Right. I remember it now. They had stacks of them. And they were ripping them apart to make tea trays.”

She nodded. “They try to find uses for them. It used to be powder cartridges for the militia, but since the war’s over, they’ve moved on to tea trays.”

The logic in this eluded Griff, but he didn’t want to interrupt.

“Anyhow,” she went on, “a few years ago I took a copy home from the tavern. I knew they wouldn’t miss it, and I’d never had a proper book of my own before. I wanted to see what it was that had the ladies so angry. A good half of the book is twaddle, I’ll grant them. But the rest is just practical advice. Recipes for orange flower water. How to write invitations to parties and sew your own silk gloves. Suggestions for polite dinner conversation. Reading that book was like peering through a window onto a different world, until . . .” She dropped her gaze. “ . . . until my father slammed it shut.”

“Your father?”

“He found the book. I caught him staring at it. He can’t read much, you know. But still, he stared at that title for the longest time. He didn’t have to read the words to understand what it meant. It meant I wanted something more.”

Reaching up, she plucked a low-hanging leaf and twirled it between her fingertips. “All my life, he’d made it no secret that he was disappointed in me. He’d wanted a boy to help with the farm, and he never hid the fact that he viewed me as useless. But when he found that book . . . For the first time, he was seeing it went both ways. That I might not be happy with the life he’d given me. Oh, it made him so angry.”

Griff was becoming rather furious himself. Not with her. Never her.

“What did he do to you?” he asked.

She hesitated.

“Tell me.”

“He picked up that book in one hand.” She held the leaf in her fingertips and regarded it. “Said, ‘That’s not for you, girl.’ And then he struck me with it, right across the face.”

I’ll kill him.

The intent roared to life in Griff’s chest before his mind could even conceive the words. He was harboring elaborate fantasies of finding a horse and a blade, then haring down to Sussex to have a very short exchange with Amos Simms. One that began with “You rat-faced bastard” and ended with blood.

He was calculating just how long it would take, and how much daylight he’d have when he arrived. Whether he’d permit the man to beg for mercy, or skip straight to—

“I was nineteen years old,” she said.

He closed his eyes and breathed deep, forcing himself to abandon his thoughts of the far-off villain who deserved to be run through. He should concentrate on the woman who needed him, here and now.

“Nineteen,” she repeated. “Already a woman grown. I helped with the farm and earned wages for the family. And he struck me across the face like a child, just for wanting to improve myself. To learn.” She let the leaf twirl to the ground. “Then he threw the book in the fire.”

Griff cursed, sliding closer on the bench. He’d given up on disentangling his button for the moment. He didn’t give a damn about the people inside, what they might think or conclude. For now, his only goal in this garden—in this life, perhaps—was to guard her. And to make her feel safe, which he suspected would be the more difficult task. Too many people had failed her that way.