“Where’s your room?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.
“Too close to my sister’s. Yours?”
“In the guest wing. We’ll go there.”
“Yes. Okay, yes.”
“Where are you taking me?” he asked as they continued walking in the opposite direction of the massive front door. “The servants’ entrance?”
“The kitchen.”
“Right, of course.”
She’d told Maxine and George she was checking out the kitchen, and though she suspected they knew it was a ruse, she tried to be a woman who told the truth. Besides, the kitchen drew her, she realized as she walked into the restored order of a clean kitchen between meals.
If the body had a core, as her Pilates instructor insisted, then so, she reasoned, did a house. Or even a castle. To her, that core was the kitchen. Somehow, walking into the order and efficiency of this place, where she created both art and nourishment, fed her in some indefinable emotional way.
She liked that she’d met Jack in the kitchen. She liked that he was here with her as she walked around, making sure the sink sparkled, putting the basket of eggs in the refrigerator. She and Mrs. Brimacombe were going to come to blows, she suspected, over eggs.
Jack watched her, this elegant, voluptuous woman at her homely tasks. She’d changed subtly when she entered the kitchen. She moved with a sense of purpose and control. Pride, he realized, when she ran a hand across the counter, as though patting it good night.
Arousal was a funny thing, he’d found. The older he got, the more he’d learned to appreciate the finer aspects. More than the blood-pounding urge to take and conquer, he’d discovered the slower, softer pleasures of desire. The subtle shifts in feeling, the myriad ways one woman is so wonderfully different from another. So he could watch Rachel with the fever of impatience to have her, and at the same time hang onto his ability to appreciate all the tiny things about her that added to her appeal.
She was a mystery, this woman he’d known only a few hours. Such a mystery. On the one hand he wanted to treasure the moments she remained a mystery, and yet he was as anxious to discover all her secrets as a boy on Christmas morning, holding that special package from Father Christmas.
The urge to rush forward now, quickly, pulled against the desire to go slowly, take his time, savor, so there was a fine tension inside him.
When she was done with her checking and rearranging, she flipped off the lights, plunging them into darkness.
Wordlessly, they slipped through the door that led from the kitchen into the main house.
It was quiet. The soft night lights that George had installed illuminated the way for visitors who might otherwise end up lost and wandering the old pile until daybreak.
They crept by the marble bust of a Roman emperor, watched on their way by five-hundred-year-old ancestors of George’s looking down on them in various aspects from virtuous nobility to licentiousness. He imagined the naughty ninth earl giving him a nudge-nudge-wink-wink as he made his way, with Rachel’s hand in his, through the long gallery to the guest wing.
Even the tireless Wiggins seemed to have taken himself off to bed, or perhaps was enough of the discreet, trusted servant to make himself scarce when a man took a lady who was not his wife to bed.
They didn’t speak on the way; he felt the warmth of Rachel’s hand in his, heard the slight swish of velvet as she walked.
They entered his room and he noted that the bedside lamp was on, the bed turned down. As in a good hotel, but also, he knew, the way things had been done in Hart House for generations.
Maybe they’d had to downsize the staff, but little courtesies to guests would be one of the last things to go.
Rachel let go of his hand and gazed around, as though surprised to find herself here.
He slipped off his jacket, hung it over the back of one of the wing chairs, and switched on the fire.
She’d walked to the window. Then, obviously realizing she couldn’t distract herself with the view outside, turned.
“Would you like a drink?” he asked her. “No ice, I’m afraid. But there’s”-he looked at the bottles arranged on a silver tray-“port, cognac, scotch.”
“No. Thank you.”
He walked over to her and did what he’d been dying to do all evening. He pulled the pins from her hair. She trembled when he touched her, but didn’t stop him, so he took his time and watched in delighted fascination as the thick curls tumbled around her shoulders. He’d imagined the hair would go on forever, all the way down her back, but no. It brushed her shoulders, thick and wild.
Pushing his hands into it, he found it silkier than he’d imagined, but exactly as sexy.
He gazed down at her, eyeing the mouth he was about to kiss, his body so on fire he could barely think straight, when she said, “I think I would like a drink.”
He noted what he should have seen before. Her eyes were wide with uncertainty, her posture tense.
“Of course,” he said, releasing her. “ Cognac?”
“Yes, fine.”
He poured two glasses, handed her one. She didn’t sip for pleasure; he rather thought she gulped for courage.
He sat in the armchair, leaning back, letting her know in as subtle a way as he could manage that a chat and a drink was fine with him. It wouldn’t be his choice, but he tried to be philosophical. At least he’d seen her with her hair down. It was a start.
She didn’t sit, but wandered the room, touching things. Running her fingers over the bedcover.
When she finally came back to him, she put her drink down on the table. He felt he was losing her, felt he had to make a final try to keep her with him, even for nothing more than talk.
“You have lovely hands,” he said, watching them curled around her glass.
She laughed. “No, I don’t.” She stuffed them out of sight, at her sides.
He reached for her wrist and she let him bring it closer. “I noticed at dinner. You were the only woman not wearing nail lacquer.”
“That’s because I don’t like to draw attention to my least attractive feature.”
“But they’re lovely.” He smoothed the fingers onto his palm and she let him. “These are the hands of an artist.”
“You’re nuts. They’re burned, scarred, banged up by years in kitchens.”
He stroked her fingers. “A warrior’s hands, then.”
“More so than an artist’s.”
“Well, I think you are a little of both.”
He brought her wrist up to his mouth and kissed it, loving the smooth, soft feel of her skin, the skip of her pulse beneath his lips.
He noticed a white scar with a line of Xs emerging from the base of her thumb. He traced it with his fingertip and felt a quiver run through her. “What happened there?”
“I was in a hurry. Tried to core an apple with a carving knife and the apple broke. I don’t recommend it. I think I had seven stitches.”
“So noted,” he said, and kissed the line of Xs.
“Is this one a burn?” He traced the discolored, puckered shininess on the side of her hand.
“Yes,” she said, her voice growing husky. “Industrial oven accident.”
He touched his tongue to the mark.
Chapter Six
He’s making love to my hands, Rachel thought in amazement, my ugly, scarred, chef’s hands.
Jack was bent over her, studying her like a very sexy palm reader. His hair was short, but thick. She glimpsed the back of his neck, the pale skin corded with muscle. She felt the warmth coming off his body, smelled the clean, somehow English scent of him.
“These are your war wounds. Honorably acquired and therefore beautiful.” He kissed the misshapen nail on her left hand and she told him without being asked about the time she’d slammed it in the restaurant fridge. She watched him bending over her hands, so intent on her. So interested. Amazement washed over her along with a wash of lust that left her weak-kneed.