Chapter 6

W hen she’d been but a small girl, left in the care of old Bertha and alone with no children about for company, Livian discovered an injured bird.

With her nursemaid’s help, Livian had named the fragile creature, Hope, and together they’d cared for it until one day Hope’s wing had been properly healed.

Livian, a lonely child, cried the day it’d come to say goodbye to the tiny animal who’d become a friend to her. Whereas, Hope? Hope danced back and forth on her tiny, webbed feet along the crude perch in a cage made by Livian and Bertha.

Hope squawked and nearly battered herself against the stick doorway in a bid to get free as quickly as possible. The minute Livian lifted the stick-made door, Hope took to the skies without so much as a backward glance for Livian.

Right now, with the tension in Mr. Lachlan Latimer’s body and the frantic way he surveyed the taproom, he put Livian very much in mind of her beloved wren.

“Are you looking for someone, Lachlan?”

“Hmm?” He continued his scan of the empty establishment.

Then, it made sense. The reason he’d been so chatty and bold one moment, and the next had the look of a man running from the reaper.

Livian removed her hand from Lachlan’s.

“Ahh, I see .” And as the bastard daughter of a bigamist, Livian most certainly did.

As she’d expected that brought him frowning visage back to hers.

“What exactly is it you think you see, darlin’?”

Livian folded her hands primly and laid them on the table before her. “You are afraid to speak with me.”

He laughed in her face. For all the arrogant Lachlan Latimer’s amusement, she’d uttered a jest to rival the Great Bard’s.

“Sweetheart,” he drawled, “I’m not afraid of anyone.”

“I didn’t say you were afraid of me ,” she clarified, “but rather, you are uncomfortable around me.”

He snorted. “Darlin’ there’s never been a more ridiculous—”

Livian propelled herself forward in her seat, mimicking his body’s earlier placement, and, in delightful reversal of roles, the big, fearless, Lachlan Latimer, recoiled in his seat.

Livian laughed. “Oh, Lachlan,” she gave her head a rueful shake. “The thing about it with you gentlemen—”

“I’m not a gentleman.”

“—is you believe young ladies are of a different species than experienced women. Just moments ago, you were all too happy to sit and converse with me and tease me, Lachlan.”

All of which she’d enjoyed so very much. It had distracted her. He had distracted her, from thoughts of what awaited her journey’s end.

Shaking those melancholic musings, she dropped her voice to a hush. “Let us be honest with each other, Lachlan. The moment you determined I wasn’t some young widow or a lonely, unhappy, married woman you could hop into bed with,” she said, finding entirely too much joy needling him, “you were ready to run.”

He narrowed his eyes.

“Aye, darlin’, that’s right, I was,” he said bluntly. “I don’t deal with virgins and as a lady, I trust you’d understand that. Just as much as you no doubt understand married ladies don’t talk to men who aren’t their relatives, and they certainly don’t go around calling male strangers by their given name.”

His words hit her like an arrow all the way through and she winced on the outside and hurt on the inside.

“I’m well aware of the stringent expectations placed on ladies,” she said quietly. “I hardly require you , a man who by his own admission is not a gentleman, to tell me.”

As it was, since Verity’s marriage to Malcom, Livian found herself bombarded with those daily reminders.

“Given, however,” she continued with a calm at odds with the pain his words had wrought, “you seem just as schooled in propriety and the rules governing interactions between men and women, then, I believe you would also note, you were the one who approached me, again .” She placed that slight emphasis to drive home a reminder of how they’d first become acquainted.

Bringing her shoulders back, Livian gave a toss of her head. “You are the one who took the liberty to seat yourself at my table, invade my space, and who can just as easily walk away as you did join me.”

“ Pfft.”

Pfft? He’d say? Just…pfft?

“Pfft, what ?” she snapped.

“Trust me darlin’,” he said dryly. “If I could, leave, I’d have done so—”

“The minute you learned I was Miss Lovelace and not Mrs.?”

He winked. “Exactly.”

“Oh, you can most certainly go, Lachlan,” she seethed. “Do not let my virginal self keep you here.”

Wonder of wonder, and triumph of triumph his cheeks went flush with color.

Taking advantage of his being welcomely tongue-tied, she pressed on. “In fact, a short while ago when you dragged me out of the same bed you could be sleeping in now, I observed for myself you possess the stamina to do far more with your legs.”

Lachlan choked; his face reddened, and he struggled to breathe.

She frowned.

She’d apparently somehow gone too far. But how?

When her table companion finally regained the ability to properly breathe, Livian spoke more evenly.

“You may go now, Lachlan.” Livian grabbed her book and snapped it open.

As she made to raise her volume and block him out, the smug lummox opened his mouth.

Knowing exactly what he was about to say, she cut him off and denied him that choice. “Be careful about instructing me anymore on not using your Christian name,” she threatened. “I have a whole host of far better monikers and names by which to call you that are a good deal more inventive, and a whole lot less respectable than Lachlan.”

Livian made a show of reading her book—as if she could actually read anything or even remember—with this powerful figure seated across from her. She did have the foresight this time, to move her eyes slowly from left to right to put on a better show than she had before when he’d studied her in the same intent way he now did.

“It’s not my legs that are the problem,” he said.

Livian forced herself to continue moving in her gaze along the page.

“You’re the problem, darlin’.”

That really was enough.

With a gasp, Livian slammed her book down on the table. “I am no problem of yours or anyone’s—”

“You see, sweetheart,” he said simply, “that’s it exactly. You’re here, alone, without even the benefit of a room. You’ve got no husband, no brother, no uncle, hell, you don’t even have a maid. You’ve got just two small lads and one incompetent servant, who didn’t have either the sense or loyalty to guard your door and keep you safe from any possible harm.”

Livian frowned. “I’ll not allow you to call the servants accompanying me into question. If you’re looking to find fault, I told Mr. Dryver—”

“I don’t care if you told Mr. Dryver, to take a high, flying leap from the cliffs of Dover.” With every word, the glint in Lachlan’s eyes darkened, turning them to a shade very nearly black. “Whatever protestations you made, whatever rest he may have needed or wanted, he had an obligation to guard you against any possible harm. He should have been willing to lay down his life for you,” he said quietly.

While he spoke, Livian found herself drawn deeper and deeper under some sort of spell, he cast with his every low, sonorous utterance.

Her eyes slid shut. This…concern for her well-being and his worry about her safety revealed Lachlan Latimer to be a man who would guard with his life whatever woman he took as his bride.

And Livian, couldn’t keep herself from envying whoever that woman would be. Or was.

“But he didn’t, Livian,” he murmured, bringing her eyes open.

The way he spoke her name, not mockingly, but as if he’d claimed it for himself, compelled; it altered her heart’s rhythm.

“For if he had, Livian?” he asked. “If he’d been there, Mr. Dryver would have found me waiting, stopped me from entering.” His harsh gaze locked with hers. “He’d have included the very important detail Mr. Felchlin omitted: that the rooms occupant was in fact a young lady. And then all of this,” he slashed a hand back and forth between them, “could have been avoided.”

This…as in them.

To keep from smiling, she pressed her lips together.

“Did something I say amuse you, darlin’?” he asked, like a perturbed child.

“Yes.”

Her directness appeared to knock him off-balance.

Livian pulled her chair close to the table. “It’s just, you’re like an entirely different person than you were when you came down. It’s as though you believe men and women are incapable of being alone in one another’s company,” she charged. “That we are nothing more than animals who require handlers.”

“Aye.”

She snorted. “Next, you’ll say you don’t think men and women can be friends.”

He stared at her weirdly.

Livian widened her eyes. “You don’t!”

“I don’t think that, sweetheart,” he drawled.

“Oh, that is reassuring, Lachlan. As I was starting to take you for one of those stuffy—”

“I know men and women can’t be friends.”

Livian burst out laughing. When had she enjoyed herself this immensely? It felt good, so good, to just freely laugh…that it took a moment for her to register his graveness.

Her amusement died. “That is ridiculous. They most certainly—”

“Can’t,” he finished for her. “Ultimately, sweetheart, men are primitive animals who can’t stop themselves from going to the carnal—and I managed to build a fortune based off that very accurate assumption.”

He’d built a fortune off…?

“Women?” he interrupted her puzzling. “They’re no different. They just fight their urges.”

She should be more scandalized at the bold, wicked, words he spoke than at his grim assumption that men and women were incapable of being friends.

“Yes, well, if you go through life putting women into the two categories of ladies too lofty to speak to, or women to bed, Lachlan, you certainly aren’t going to go about making any friends.” Livian gently patted the top of his hand.

A warm current flowed from where her palm touched his naked flesh. Even as the power of this seemingly casual touch kept her paralyzed, a riot of sensations shot off like Vauxhall fireworks, within her.

Her heart beat as it’d never beat before.

All because I’m touching this beautiful stranger.

She went all the more still.

I’m… touching this beautiful stranger?

With a gasp, Livian snatched her fingers back and scrambled back in her chair.

Lachlan curled his lips up in a slow, crooked, all-knowing, half-grin; a grin that said he knew very well, the reason for her jerking away from him.

Oh, the smug lout. She’d sooner lie to the Lord’s face than give Lachlan Latimer the satisfaction of thinking he was somehow right.

Which he most certainly wasn’t.

“Is there a problem, darlin’?” he drawled.

“None at all,” she said, lying all too easily between her teeth.

He quirked a dark eyebrow. “Don’t you mean not anymore?”

Livian frowned. What was he…?

His grin widened. “That is, now that you aren’t touching me?”

“I wasn’t touching you,” she muttered, her cheeks ablaze. “Or I was, but—”

Amusement sparked in Lachlan’s eyes.

“Not that way!” Livia exclaimed.

Her unlikely tablemate gave her a peculiar look. “Which way is that, Livian Lovelace?”

“ Inappropriately .” Her cheeks went several shades warmer.

Availing himself again of her tankard of milk, the bounder helped himself to another sip. “And you feel that needs clarification, darlin’?” he asked, setting the mug near her.

She ignored it. “At the very least, it seemed important to point out that detail, Lachlan Latimer .”

Lachlan rested his palms on the table, framing either side of her leather tome. “And do you know why that is, Livian?”

Unnerved at his proximity to her treasured book, she faintly registered that question. She shook her head.

“Because, human nature has proved time and time again, sexual needs supersede anything and everything in a relationship between a man—”

She made a sound of protest, but in hushed tones, he continued over her. “And don’t pretend sweetheart, you and I aren’t both well aware of our response to one another.”

His gaze locked on her mouth, and a flash of desire darkened his eyes, leaving her all warm and weak inside. “I felt your body tremble upstairs, Livian, and I’ve caught the way your lips quiver and your breath catches.”

This man knew all that?

Livian’s hands shook, and she lowered them to her lap to hide their trembling. “It certainly makes sense,” she said regretfully.

“As I said, it’s human nature, darlin’.” He lifted Livian’s tankard and toasted her.

Her face went hot, again. “Not…that.” She motioned to him. “ You .”

He paused with her drink halfway to his mouth. “Me?”

She nodded. Between Lachlan Latimer’s charm, boldness, virility and the ease and skill with which he’d handled Livian when he’d thought her a widow, he was a man who knew his way about women and seduction.

“You are a rogue, then,” she said, regretfully.

He snorted. “That’s the conclusion you reached?”

“Are you saying you aren’t a rake, Mr. Latimer?” she shot back.

“Yours would certainly be the first time I’ve ever had that accusation leveled at me.”

“That’s something a rogue would say,” she felt inclined to point out.

Lachlan chuckled. “That’s a fair point, darlin’. Truth is, I’m just a regular street tough, who happened to build a fortune selling sex and sin.”

This man was determined to keep her painted in a blush; this time, heat hit every corner of her body.

“Y-you…” she choked out, but couldn’t get out the rest.

Sex and sin?

“I own a gaming hell, Miss Lovelace. A very wicked, very scandalous, and very sexy, gaming hell.”

Oh, my.