Scoundrel:. Zoe Archer
this man’s strong body would be weapon enough.
“Is it within the rules to ask what brings you to Greece?” London asked.
“Never said there were any rules.” A small dimple appeared in the corner of his mouth. London wanted to touch it. Or, better yet, feel it with her lips.
“If there were,” she said, “you don’t play by them.”
He gave an unapologetic shrug. “Following rules means there’s no fun or pleasure in life.”
She was certain he had both in abundance. “And decorum? Responsibility?”
“Decorum stifles. Women, especially.”
London picked up the scarf and draped it around her shoulders, as a lady might at the ballet. “That sounds like a libertine’s well-practiced speech to lure women into dalliance.”
“There’s always truth in seduction. That’s why it works.” He stepped closer and loosened the scarf from her shoulders, then he gently wrapped it around her waist like a sash. She felt it like an embrace. His deft, long fingers tied the fabric into a decorative knot. “Much better. More Greek,” he murmured in approval.
London’s pulse sped at his nearness, yet she did not step away. “But what of responsibility?”
He gazed at her levelly, and in his clear aquatic eyes, she saw a steadiness of purpose that she had not anticipated. “I take my responsibilities seriously.”
“They must be the only things you take seriously,” she answered.
No mistaking the way he looked at her, how his gaze flicked down to her mouth and held there for more than a moment. “Try me, little troublemaker.”
She felt herself standing above the sea, the warm water beckoning her to plunge into its wet, welcoming depths, frolic in its waves. She wanted to jump. She was afraid of the height. “Sir, you are more dangerous than a Barbary pirate,” she said, after a breathless pause.
Again, he laughed, something he seemed to do readily. A bedroom laugh. Teasing. Intimate. And such a laugh made her body respond without thought. Her skin felt sensitive, and a molten heat gathered in her core. Oh, it had been a long time since a man touched her, and not a single half-hearted caress from Lawrence affected her as one laugh from this stranger did. She recalled how, moments earlier, his fingers had brushed her hand, and the strange, intense response even that minor contact had engendered.
“Know many Barbary pirates?” he asked, one eyebrow raised.
“I do, now.”
It was then that she realized something. All this time, he had been speaking to her as his equal. Granted, he was a devil of a flirt, but he did not seem to consider her female sex a liability. He talked truthfully, openly, without the polite phrases or evasions so common to the speech of every other man she knew. And when she answered him, it was as if she’d unlatched a little door inside herself and could meet him on the level ground, confident in herself.
“I think you are the dangerous one,” he said, “but you don’t know it yet.”
Again, their eyes caught and held. No, she was not imagining it. Something hot and knowing in their shared look. And that other thing, that tie that bound them in ways she did not understand.
“We should get back to the hotel, madam.” Sally’s voice was sharp. Ah, blast, London had almost forgotten about the chaperoning maid. But it truly was a marvelous thing to flirt with a devastatingly handsome man far from home. To pretend, for a moment or two, that she wasn’t esteemed gentleman and governmental adviser Joseph Edgeworth’s daughter, a paragon of English virtue.
London sighed and stepped back. As intoxicating as this stranger’s company was, she did have to go to the hotel. Father expected her. “All right. We’ll go.”
“Tell me the name of your hotel,” the stranger said. “I’ll call later tonight. We’ll share some hot…tea.”
“You know I can’t,” London said with reluctance. Probably no woman ever refused him. She could not blame them, but London’s careful deportment won out. “That would be most indecorous. I don’t even know your name.”
“Ben Drayton.” He took her hand and, like a man at an elegant assembly, pressed a kiss to its back. Even though her glove covered her skin, London felt the warmth of his lips through the thin leather. “Now you give me your name.”
She tugged her hand free, though she had an impulse to turn it over so she might feel his lips on the more sensitive flesh of her palm. “I have to disappoint you.”
“I’m a man who loves to unlock mysteries.”
London was about to say more, when she caught sight of a familiar figure at the other end of the market square. She gritted her teeth. How like Father to send Thomas Fraser out to find her. It was bad enough that Fraser was going to be accompanying them on their journey to Delos, as she had learned to her dismay yesterday when they docked, but now her father’s associate was being made to police her. As if London could not be trusted to take care of herself. For goodness sake, she was twenty-six, not sixteen, the naïve days of her youth long passed. At least the English stranger recognized she was a grown woman.
London did not wave to Fraser to alert him to her presence. If he was so determined to monitor her whereabouts, let him earn his duty. It would give her the opportunity to say good-bye to Mr. Drayton.
But when London turned back to speak to him, she found only air. He had vanished.
She blinked in confusion. “Where did he go?” she asked Sally.
The maid shrugged, and sniffed, “I’m sure I don’t know, madam. One moment he was here, and the next, gone. Like some kind of phantom.”
A chill trickled down London’s spine. Mr. Drayton’s exit had been positively eerie—soundless and immediate. What kind of man could disappear into the air itself? Certainly no one of good character. Perhaps it had been for the best that London had been so circumspect. Maybe he was a thief, or one of those men who preyed upon traveling women of fortune. Or…a mercenary? As she had suspected, a dangerous man. Yet one who attracted her powerfully. Not just for his seductive handsomeness, but the way he made her recognize the capability of herself. She had the feeling that if she had revealed to him her linguistic abilities, he would have accepted and perhaps even admired them. Or were those feelings of trust part of his nefarious arsenal?
Feeling a lingering trace of unease, London turned and waved to Fraser. At once, he began to make his way toward her, showing his usual lack of concern for those around him. A big man, he jostled through the marketplace in his white linen suit, his mildly handsome face looking cross, his pale complexion flushed. Of course, he didn’t look cross when he reached her. She was his superior’s daughter. London was not unaware of the fact that, as soon as her mourning for Lawrence had been finished, Thomas Fraser had been one of a number of men who paid her particular attention. She did not think they were drawn by her personal charms, but rather by her being Joseph Edgeworth’s daughter.
“There you are, Mrs. Harcourt.” He took off his hat and fanned himself, strands of wheat-colored hair sticking damply to his forehead. “What an awful din in this beastly market. And deuced hot, too.”
“I find it rather comfortable, especially after a gloomy English spring.”
“Ah, well.” He replaced his hat. “That’s a pretty sash you’ve got there. Quite dashing.”
London had forgotten about the scarf Ben Drayton had tied around her waist. She started to untie it, but then stopped. She would keep it as a souvenir of the strange and exhilarating day. Reaching into her reticule, she found a silver fifty-lepta coin with which to pay the vendor, but not before her fingers brushed the pottery shard Drayton had urged upon her. A wicked man, she thought.
After she paid, the very un-wicked Fraser asked, “Would you do me the honor of accompanying me to the hotel? Your father would like you