Chapter Thirty-Three

“Y ou said that everybody has a secret?” She cocked her head and eyed Alfie from her head down.

He nodded.

“Even you?”

Now he shrugged.

“Tell me.”

Alfie flattened his lips and gave a faint shake of his head.

Bea narrowed her eyes. “You don’t trust me then?”

“I trust you to accomplish many impossible feats, Bea. You have the delicate touch of a great diplomat. It was plain to see at the Langleys when you made List talk. And you were the one who made sense of it.”

“You made the truth serum for him,” she said.

Alfie raised his brows and inclined his head. “But it was you who made it work.”

“Except I didn’t have the skill to discover your secret.”

Now he gave a mischievous tilt of his head. “Ah, but if I hadn’t known about the truth serum…You’d be excellent as a spy, I think.”

“My mother would expire at the thought.” Bea couldn’t suppress a smile. “Perhaps I should enlist at the Foreign Office.”

“Then you should test your skills to uncover truths.” Alfie widened his stance and Bea realized that he was hiding something about his persona.

“Based on your defensive stance, it’s not something around you that you’re hiding. It’s something about you.”

He didn’t move.

“You’re not really Alfie Collins but the lost pirate son of Jean Lafitte and you’re smuggling opium.”

Alfie gave her a crooked smile. “If I had as much money as Jean Lafitte, I wouldn’t mix ointments for the Ton in London.”

“True. You’re also not sunburned enough to have spent much time in the open sea.”

“How do you know?”

Bea crossed her arms but then lifted one hand and patted her mouth with her index finger. “You are strong, not sunburned, and you always have enough supplies. I know!”

He narrowed his gaze.

“You’re a smuggler at the docks! So you work at night, lifting heavy crates with pulleys and climbing from ship-to-ship.”

He grinned. “As enticing as that sounds, I don’t like to get my hands quite that dirty. And the docks smell like fish.”

Bea stepped closer.

Then, as he stood his ground, even closer.

She knew his scent already and had spent hours in bed conjuring it up. He had tasted fresh and minty when she’d kissed him and his scent was earthen, real, and oh so masculine that she wished to strip his clothes off him and taste every inch of his body.

Then a thought grabbed her, and she couldn’t wriggle out of it with any argument of propriety and being a lady.

What did his body look like?

One more step and she could smell him again. His freshness mixed with something that was just him. Bea hesitated for a moment, but he just stood there, his arms now hanging from his sides. So she grabbed his collar and tugged gently. He leaned in and she evaded his face, nuzzling his neck instead. He smelled so wonderfully like Alfie. “You smell smart.”

“Smart?” He looked down at her with a combination of manly cockiness and boyish vulnerability. “Like books at a library?”

“Like reading one thick book in front of the fire on a snowy day.”

“I’m not sure what this scent is,” he whispered, still holding her gaze.

“Call it the scent of my intuition.”

“Is that your female intuition?”

“Perhaps.”

“And what would confirm your suspicion of how smart I am?”

“An examination.”

“I assure you that I have passed all my exams with highest grades.”

“Not a paper exam, a physical.”

After a moment’s blink, there was a glint in his eye of a man who’d been naked before many women. He looked like a warrior who’d used many a sword and always returned from battle victorious. At least, that’s what Bea thought. He’d certainly seemed to know his way around the female anatomy after her oatmeal bath.

“What gives you the credentials to perform such an exam?” he asked, but he’d already tucked his index finger under the cravat and loosened the knot. It was a simple knot à la sentimentale and Bea pulled one end, watching it slowly unfurl, and then she pulled the white fabric out of his collar.

“My female intuition.”

“Of course,” Alfie nodded, letting his eyes fall to her cleavage. “You have a great supply of that.”

Now he was speaking to her décolleté, and Bea should have been scandalized, but she felt heat rushing to her head instead.

Caught in a wave of brazen courage, she unbuttoned the top of his shirt.

She didn’t dare look in his eyes now and focused on the buttons. After all she’d permitted after her bath, she tried to tuck away that pesky thought that she had effectively ruined her reputation already regardless of whether anyone else knew.

Then his hands came to her upper arms, and he gave her a gentle squeeze. “Bea?”

“ Hm-hm .” She focused on button number four and then five, avoiding his gaze.

“If you want me to take my clothes off for you, all you have to do is ask,” he rasped.

She swallowed and tried to remember to breathe but she couldn’t concentrate anymore. His shirt was split in the middle and from underneath, masculine perfection emerged. The effect of seeing his skin, so much of it, sent her mind into a hazy space as if she’d stepped onto a cloud and was about to reach for the next.

“I mustn’t.”

“If you asked, I wouldn’t say no, so why not try?”

If she was flushed before and heat rose to her head, she was now about to incinerate.

“I’ve lost my only virtue—or what’s left of it. If I say it aloud, it becomes too real.” She focused on button six, pushed the little white circle through the hole and exposed another section of chiseled abdomen. A slight tuft of dark hair covered his skin, and Bea stroked his chest carefully, almost afraid to touch something so beautiful for fear of breaking it—no, of losing the moment.

Then his hand covered hers and she flattened her palm against his body. “Your reputation is by far not your best virtue.”

She dropped her head. “It’s what matters to the Ton.”

“To stupid men who don’t deserve you and don’t see you for who you are, perhaps. But I hope that none of them will ever have you.”

She tried very hard not to look at him because even though he was half naked, she felt more exposed than she had when she was nude and wet in his arms.

“You are not… I mean, you’re learned, and you have diplomas, honors, and apprenticeships that make you far more worldly than me.”

“Then let me tell you that your qualities far exceed even your reputation as a diamond of the first water. Your beauty goes beyond being the belle at every ball. And the fortune a man would have if he married you cannot be diminished to your beauty alone.”

Bea swallowed hard and tried to calm her thrumming heart. “You think so?”

“I know so.”

She sniffled and moved her hand on his chest when he moved his own, giving her complete access to his torso. “About the physical exam…”

“Do you know what this muscle is called?” he asked, flexing it beneath her palm so it grew hard and rounded.

She shook her head.

“Pectoralis major.”

“Does it cover the heart?” She instinctively met his gaze as she awaited an answer. Somehow, her physical exam had turned into a tutoring lesson on male anatomy, and she was the student.

Well, she was.

And she wanted nothing more than to learn from him.

*

Alfie would model for her and teach her whatever she’d be willing to learn about the human body, and especially how to experience the most exquisite pleasures. But he was no fool and knew that she’d teach him about making love, for it didn’t matter how well-versed he was at the mechanics of it, Bea was a new discovery and an experience he wasn’t sure he could ever stop learning from.

If simply kissing her had changed his mind, holding her had changed this heart, and whatever followed now would change his fate.

He pulled his shirt out of his breeches and then removed it entirely, exposing even more of his body.

The black pupils nearly eclipsed her lovely green eyes, but she didn’t step back. She looked at him, getting her fill, and he would die to know what she was thinking. She bit her lower lip.

Oh how he wanted to bite it a little bit, too.

But not now.

Not yet.

“What’s this one called?” She moved around him slowly, taking him in with huge eyes as she trailed her fingers along his upper back.

“ Trapezius .”

“Like a trapezoid?”

“It’s that shape if you isolate it.”

She furrowed her brow. “And this?” Her fingers brushed down toward his upper arm and over his shoulder.

“ Deltoid .”

“And why the ridges?”

Alfie pinched his eyes shut. She was too sweet, too na?ve, and he had to control himself to not lift her up, lay her on the bed, and give her a taste of how well he knew the female anatomy, too. He regained that control by thinking about the male anatomy instead.

“The fascia connects muscle groups and if there’s no fat to mask it, these ridges appear.”

He flexed his biceps, but her hands trailed to his abdomen. She lay both hands flat.

“There’s no fat here. Are these abdominal muscles?”

Then her hands went to his sides and although it tickled a little bit, he didn’t laugh. “And that is a large muscle, the oblique abdominis .”

She held him for a moment and then stepped squarely in front of him, as if she tried to measure her frame against his.

Nothing like this had ever happened to Alfie before and he wasn’t sure how to reconcile the lust throbbing through his middle with the tenderness overcoming his heart. If she stepped away, it would hurt more than a blow to the gut. So he waited for as long as he could—which wasn’t very long, he reckoned—and then wrapped his arms around her.

He just wanted to hold her tightly.

Preferably forever.

But she seemed to have something else in mind and turned her face toward his chest, placing a butterfly kiss on his skin.

Then another.

Alfie’s breath hitched when she gave his nipple a little lick.

“Bea!”

“You said you tasted me and thought I was delicious. Now I want to know.”

Alfie’s vision blurred and he nearly finished in his breeches, but he somehow managed to stand still.

She kissed a trail from his pecs to his shoulder, trailed her hands down his arms and back up over his back and then stepped behind him.

“Do all the muscles on your back have names, too?” She asked from behind him.

Alfie squeezed his eyes shut and tried to cool the heat in his crotch. “The superficial muscles of the back and flank are the trapezius, latissimus dorsi, levator scapulae , and the major and minor rhomboids .” Her hands followed his from his neck downward. “The deep muscles are erect—” Alfie coughed, “ Erector spinae , the transvers spinalis group consisting of semispinalis —”

“And this?” Her hands slipped into his waistband, and she tried to grab his bottom.

Alfie sucked his lips in but dutifully untied his breeches in the front.

From behind him, Bea pulled them down, underwear and all, until they pooled below his knees.

Then she grabbed his bottom tightly.

“ Gluteus maximus .”

“Is it made for sitting only?”

Too sweet. Too na?ve. Dangerous.

“It supports the pelvis. It’s responsible for movement of the hip and thigh, playing a crucial role in extending, rotating, and abducting the hip.”

She was an apt student, following his words with her hands as she came back around to face him, her hands on the ridges above his hip bone. He gave a little flick, and her gaze fell to his manhood. At that, she sucked her lower lip in.

She lingered there and Alfie knew that he’d long left the island of propriety and was setting sail to a scandalous ocean of passion with the woman he loved—if only he’d manage not to drown.

“Can I touch you?” she asked, her eyes still on his middle.

“Anywhere you want Bea. I’m all yours.”

She reached down and wrapped her fingers around his shaft. He couldn’t help but gasp. And when her eyes met his, Alfie barely managed, but he said it anyway, “I’ve loved you even when you were just the girl in the veil in Delhi, but now that I know you, and now that I know how you feel, I could never be whole without you.”

She narrowed her gaze. He pressed his hand over hers on his most sensitive part.

“Bea, do with me as you wish. But I won’t go further unless—” he swallowed his words. This was exactly what he wasn’t supposed to say.

“Unless what?”

“You marry me.” Alfie blinked at her as if she were the sun blinding him, necessary for his survival and yet sure to burn if he stared too long. “I love you so much.” She was so precious, the simple words didn’t do the feelings he harbored for her justice.

“And I love you.” Bea’s voice came out with a squeal. She inhaled sharply and a slow smile built on her face. “I want to marry you,” she whispered onto his mouth and wrapped her hands around the back of his head. Alfie’s heart swelled with something he’d never experienced, and he vowed to wait until their wedding night to continue. But first, he had to kiss her.