Revealed by Kate Noble Page B

follow the length of her collarbone.
    A shiver raced down her spine. Unknowningly, she parted her lips, let him inside. As his tongue danced with hers, she leaned into him, put her silk-covered length against his wool. Her hand found its way to his hair, ran through it, the other grazed his jaw, followed the length of his collarbone—and all Phillippa wanted was to feel more.
    But just as surprisingly, as suddenly as the kiss had begun, it ended.
    He pulled away, slowly. Phillippa followed, at first, until he broke their connection, the cool air filling the space between them. She opened her eyes, slightly bewildered, her heart beating at an alarming rate. His face reflected her wonder, as he let out a long, slow breath. But then that corner of his mouth slid up, arrogant and taunting, letting her know that he knew every single feeling that had coursed through her body in those last few moments.
    Want.
    Need.
    Desire.
    So, considering the time, the place, and position she found herself in, Phillippa did the only thing she could think of as situationally appropriate.
    She hauled back and slapped him.

Eleven
    W ELL to be fair, he’d deserved it. Marcus didn’t know what had come over him. They had just been talking—flirting, really, as he turned the conversation away from her ridiculous plan, and suddenly, her voice had become a siren’s call, the candlelight played off her skin, and he was thinking about things he shouldn’t.
    And then he acted on those thoughts. Impulsively. And Marcus Worth was many things, but he was never, ever impulsive.
    But Phillippa was such a different person than he expected, Marcus thought, as he shivered against the cold, standing in a narrow winding alleyway in one of the less desirable sections of Whitechapel, a patched and threadbare coat his only protection from the unseasonable chill. He was waiting for the signal from the broken slit of a window across the street, and until he got it, he was unfortunately apt to let his mind wander. And it was unfortunately apt to wander to his activities the previous evening.
    Phillippa Benning looked, from afar and within the constraints of Society, like one of the meaner, slyer women with lucky advantages of birth and fortune to propel them to their current status and allow them to be provocative. Women who wouldn’t normally give him the time of day, and he wouldn’t normally give a second thought to. But then their conversation let out her surprising sense of humor, and her wit proved . . . seductive. Oh, he couldn’t deny she was a singularly beautiful young lady, but he had thought her beauty a bit hard around the edges, as if polished to a point. But some of his opinion had been chipped away during their interlude in a sarcophagus, and the rest fell free when she had, without intending it, leaned into him and opened her mouth to his.
    He smiled at the memory—until it was quickly replaced by the memory of a well-placed slap across the face.
    Well, as he’d said, he’d deserved that.
    After he restored Phillippa Benning back to the ladies, she stayed another few minutes before taking her leave, giving excuses that she and Mrs. Tottendale were late for another engagement, leaving Mariah to go into raptures of Mrs. Benning’s grace and dress and manners, and fearful aspersions regarding how she herself acted and if she gave any reason to offend and wonder if her orphanage would benefit. Marcus, meanwhile, was left to determine his next course of action. That led him here, standing outside in this unnaturally cold spring day and waiting for a bloody lamp in a window in a part of town no respectable person cared to venture.
    Overloaded carts carrying the skinned carcasses of fatted lambs trundled down the street, their blood dripping off the back, bleeding red into the groves between the cobblestones. Women lost to liquor and time plied whatever was left of their wares in broad daylight, taken up by men who used them for mere minutes to