How to Be a Proper Lady: A Falcon Club Novel by Katharine Ashe Page B

her cheeks and brow, smelling the thick brine of the sea. “I knew what I was looking for and retrieved it quickly. My men know—”
    He grabbed her shoulder and spun her around.
    “I am not one of your men and I did not know that you are likely to hurl yourself into a rough sea.” His crystal eyes glittered in the pale light, fingertips digging into her flesh.
    She shrugged out of his hold, her skin hot where he’d touched her.
    “You sound like a hen-wife, Seton. Go nag someone else.”
    His gaze, intense and hard, scanned her face. But there was something else in the blue, something seeking. Quite abruptly her knees weakened.
    Her knees weakened?
    She clutched the washstand. “Go away.”
    “Goddamn it.” His voice was low. “You behave as though possessed sometimes.”
    “Possessed by the rapidly increasing regret that I signed you on?”
    “What is in the box, Viola?”
    Viola. Only Viola . Not Miss Carlyle. Not Captain.
    The air petered out of her lungs. Perhaps she was insane. At the very least, a fool. The mere sound of only her given name upon his lips, that simple familiarity, turned the remainder of her joints liquid. No man had called her by her real name in fifteen years. Not even her father.
    “A letter.”
    “What letter?”
    “If I knew that, would I have swum under the belly of a ship in a freezing ocean to get it?”
    “ Viola .”
    “A letter to his wife and children.” She shrugged. “Nothing, really. He’d told me he always nailed a box to the underside of his ship whenever he was making ready to set off on a journey. That way if brigands took his boat and threw him overboard someone might someday find the letter and send it to his family. As a final good-bye of sorts.”
    His chest jerked in a sharp inhalation but he said nothing.
    “I told him that was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.” She waved it off, but her motion was unnatural. “What pirates would send a letter to the wife of the man they killed? And there was every chance it might end up at the bottom of the sea, in any case, or just rot away no matter how finely soldered the box. But he said that if there was even one small chance it might reach . . .” Her voice faltered beneath his regard and she was shaking now, soaked to the bone. “I mean to say, it didn’t seem very logical for him to . . .”
    His lips parted as though he might speak, but still he did not.
    “Why are you looking at me like that?” she snapped.
    “You risked your life to retrieve a dead man’s last letter to his family?”
    “I already told you there was no risk in—”
    He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her close, knocking a gasp from her. He bent his head, his breath filtering over her chilled skin. She fought not to close her eyes, not to wish for what she was wishing.
    “Going to bite my nose again like a ten-year-old, Seton?” Her voice quavered.
    “No.”
    At that moment Viola discovered that the perfect mouth felt even more perfect than it looked. He kissed her, and quite abruptly the question of whether she would allow it became instead how long she could make it last.
    It was not a short or simple kiss. Not from the moment it began. They met, fully, and they held, immobile. Far too long. Far too close. Far too intimate. Far too much like he might have been wanting to kiss her as much as she had been wanting to kiss him and now if they were to move or part even slightly the reality of it might scamper away. As though he were imprinting the feel of her upon him. Aidan had never kissed her like this. Aidan kissed her like he could step away at any moment, like kissing her was something he bestowed upon her as a favor and he might cease easily enough.
    This was different. This was possession. It was relief and certainty at once. It was a need to be close and remain so for as long as possible without breathing. To underscore the impossible intimacy of it, his hand scooped behind her head and held her still, attached