king about?”
He glanced at her. “Do you know any bishops?”
“Bishops?”
“Hmm—we need a special license. I could apply to—”
She braced her hands on his chest, pushed up, and got his immediate attention. Eyes wide, she stared down at him. “Why do we need a special license?”
“Why…” He stared, bemusedly, back at her. Eventually said, “That’s the very last thing I expected you to say.”
She frowned at him. Clambered up and off him, twisting to sit in the coverlet. “Stop teasing.” She looked around. “Where are my clothes?”
Silence reigned for a heartbeat, then he said, “I’m not teasing.”
His tone had her looking, very quickly, back at him. Their eyes locked; what she saw in his set her heart thumping. “That’s not…funny.”
“I didn’t think any of this was ‘funny.’”
She sat and looked at him; her spurt of panic receded. Her brain started to function again. “I don’t expect you to marry me.”
His brows rose; she dragged in a breath. “I’m twenty-six. Past marriageable age. You don’t have to feel that because of this”—her wave encompassed the coverlet cocoon and all it contained—“you have to make any honorable sacrifice. You don’t need to feel you seduced me and so must make amends.”
“As I recall, you seduced me.”
She blushed. “Indeed. So there’s no reason you need to find a bishop.”
It was definitely time to get dressed. She spied her chemise on the floor and turned to crawl out of the cocoon.
Steely fingers closed like a manacle about her wrist.
He didn’t tug or restrain her; he didn’t have to. She knew she couldn’t break free until he consented to let her go.
She sank back into the coverlet. He was staring up at the ceiling; she couldn’t see his eyes.
“Let’s just see if I’ve got this straight.”
His voice was even, but there was an edge to it that left her wary.
“You’re a twenty-six-year-old virgin—I beg your pardon, ex-virgin. You have no other entanglements, romantic or otherwise. Correct?”
She would have loved to tell him this was pointless, but from experience she knew humoring difficult males was the fastest way to deal with their megrims. “Yes.”
“Am I also correct in stating that you set out deliberately to seduce me?”
She pressed her lips together, then conceded, “Not immediately.”
“But today. That”—his thumb had started to draw distracting little circles on the inside of her wrist—“was intended. Deliberate. You were set on having me…what? Initiate you?”
He turned his head and looked at her. She blushed, but forced herself to nod. “Yes. Just that.”
“Hmm.” He went back to staring at the ceiling. “And now, having accomplished your goal, you expect to say: ‘Thank you, Tristan, that was very nice,’ and carry on as if it never happened.”
She hadn’t thought that far. She frowned. “I assumed, eventually, we’d go our separate ways.” She studied his profile. “There’s no consequences to this, no reason we need do anything because of it.”
The corner of his lips lifted; she couldn’t tell which of the possible moods the gesture reflected.
“Except,” he stated, his voice still even, but with the accents increasingly clipped, “you’ve miscalculated.”