Written on Your Skin by Meredith Duran Page A

available for twirling. “Perhaps…” She licked her lips. “Is it…oh, could you be…Mr. Monroe?”
    “I could be,” he said, and the faint trace of sarcasm in his voice struck her like a slap. She should have known better than to expect gratitude from him. Businessman or spy, no matter; he’d fitted in very well with her stepfather’s friends.
    In lieu of a lock of hair, she wound her fingers together at her waist. It was not difficult to make her voice tremble; she did not enjoy being knocked onto dirty floors. “Mr. Monroe. Thank goodness. You will help me!” And then, on a manufactured sob, she threw herself into his arms.

    He caught her by reflex, and thank God the gun had a trustworthy trigger, or there’d have been blood all over.
    As her small, warm body burrowed into his, a curious feeling broke over him, more complex than déjà vu. For a moment he thought another attack was descending on him, and then he realized the sensation was purely interior, a sense of things opening that he’d tried to seal off. Some things the body could not forget—the fit of her breasts against his abdomen, the way a gun balanced so comfortably in his palm. Touching her felt like brushing up against a dark part of himself, a place where his regrets had gone to die from studious disregard. I was done with this, he thought. God above, he should be done.
    He wanted to reach up and scrub away the sensation prickling at his nape, but her arms wound around him and his own tightened without consultation of his brain. She was still toxic to him, then. “I’m so glad you came,” she whispered.
    As her head fitted beneath his chin, the subtle scent of her hair, like the first strain of long-forgotten music, touched off a whole symphony in his brain: his grim irritation with her, that kiss, Dance with me, Mr. Monroe. He had seen her as an obstacle, a temptation that laid bare all his inherited weakness, a needless weight trying to thrust itself onto his conscience. There had seemed no other way to view her, not until that moment when he’d fallen from the window. Rude shock: running down the lawn, the turf exploding from the bullets’ impact, he had wondered, only once and without understanding his own feeling of loss, exactly what he was leaving behind. And then he had never allowed himself to think of her again.
    He detached himself from her arms, a breath shuddering from his throat. For the first time in months, he felt fleshly, grounded, steady on his feet. He knew better than to like the sensation.
    A delicate flush was spreading across her face, bespeaking, perhaps, embarrassment. “Are you all right?” he asked. He hadn’t wanted to tackle her, but the gun in her hand had limited his options; had he attempted gentler measures, she might have shot him from sheer surprise.
    She knuckled her nose like a little girl after a tantrum. “Yes. Forgive me, I’m…you gave me a scare, that’s all.”
    He studied her clinically, trying to diagnose the accuracy of his memory. He recalled her being quite freakishly beautiful, but the reality was less unsettling. Her each feature seemed, in fact, too perfect to combine with the others into a harmonious whole; the eye, not knowing where to fix, grew frustrated in its search for peaceful lodging. “I’ve spent six days looking for you.” She’d been damned hard to find, and at one point it had occurred to him that he might be the butt of some obscure joke of Ridland’s. But, no, here she was, in all her soft, flower-scented flesh, and he should be relieved to know he’d not made himself a fool. “I feared you might vanish again,” he said, and paused, recalling the question that had seemed uppermost to him before her appearance. “Where were you hiding?”
    Her blue eyes swam like the sea off Amalfi, crystalline and dizzying in her heart-shaped face. “Six days, you say? Poor Mr. Ridland! He must be frantic. I didn’t mean to worry him.”
    Those eyes did not distract