Page 16 of His Beauty
Heat crept up her neck. “Forgive me,” she said. “I often read aloud when I find something I like. It is a terrible habit.”
“Dinnae apologize,” he said, so immediately that she blinked.
“I—” She stopped, then started again. “My mother used to say it was the height of self-indulgence.”
“Yer mother,” he said, in a flat tone which made his opinion of that woman perfectly clear, “was wrong.”
Bonnie stared at him. In her experience, peopletoleratedher eccentricities.
Oh, her sisters loved her for them, of course. But no one had ever simply, flatly, told her that the people who found her too much werewrong. It was such a small thing, and it settled in the center of her chest like a coal.
“Read it again,” he said gruffly, dropping his gaze as though embarrassed to have said it. He picked up his pen and bent over his work, as if he didn’t want to meet her eyes when he commanded, “From the beginning of that bit.”
So she did.
She read slowly this time, savoring it, watching him from beneath her lashes. His pen scratched across the paper, and she couldn’t see what he was working on, but she could tell he was listening. Listening with focused, frowning attention, as if he agreed that the history of nameless medieval women deserved to be taken seriously.
When was the last time someone had listened to her like that?
She reached the end of the passage and hesitated, wondering if she should continue.
He made her decision for her.
“There are three more volumes,” Lyon announced abruptly. He jerked his chin toward the far shelf. “The second one has more on the siege business. A woman held Dunnottar Castle for months against an English garrison.”
“Youknowthis,” she said, and she heard the wonder in her own voice before she could contain it.
He looked faintly defensive. “I’ve read the books in my own study.”
“Of course you have.” She smiled at him, helpless to stop it. “Of course you have.”
He picked up his pen again. She picked up her book. But neither of them, she noticed, was entirely paying attention to what was in front of them.
It was perhaps an hour later that Keith appeared at the door, bare-knuckled and bright-eyed, his pugilist’s wrapping cloths already in hand.
“Ready?” he asked Lyon, with the easy confidence of a man who knew he’d be welcomed by an Earl’s son, once more making Bonnie wonder who thisbutlerreally was.
Lyon didn’t look up from—she squinted—the sketch he had been fiddling with for the last forty minutes. “Nay.”
Keith blinked. “Nay?”
“Ye heard me.”
The younger man’s gaze traveled, with great interest, across the room to where Bonnie sat. She immediately looked back at her book. The thing could have been upside down, for all the attention she was giving the words.
“Ye’re sure?” Keith asked.
“I’m content where I am,” Lyon growled.
There was a pause.
Bonnie pretended great interest in her book, but she couldn’t help raising it enough to block the way her gaze darted to Keith, to Lyon, and back to Keith. The two men were glaring at each other. When Lyon eventually dropped his scowl back to his work, Keith’s speculative gaze darted to her.
Ducking her head back over her book, Bonnie’s cheeks warmed at the way the butler-turned-boxing-partner’s lipshad curled into a delighted smile before he backed out of the room.
She did not look up.
She was almost certain that if she looked up, Lyon would see everything on her face.
