Heart of Steel - Meljean Brook [30]
He was treading close to the unforgivable, he realized. His captain possessed a heart of steel, but he’d managed to wound her pride.
God help him when that bracelet came off.
“Zenobia still intends to write those,” he told her. “All of England loves Mina Wentworth. They want more adventures featuring women hunting kraken on airships, and my sister is nothing but practical. I am the romantic.”
“The fool.”
“I’m a man of sense and restraint.” To prove it, he walked to the table and lifted the silver dome from the plate. God, a man could weep. Cubes of seasoned lamb on skewers lay atop fluffy yellow rice. The scent of saffron and garlic wafted upward on a cloud of steam. Archimedes prayed he’d be alive long enough to eat a few bites. For now, he only plucked a swollen purple grape from the cluster beside the plate. He turned to Yasmeen and approached her with slow steps. “My sense tells me that I could derive no greater pleasure than to feed you grapes and lick the sweet juice from your lips. A rational man needs only to take one look at your delicate fingers to know that heaven could be found in the scratches across his back, and then to wake you the next morning with a kiss to your mouth . . . and then I’d kiss you everywhere else.”
She watched him come, heat burning through the cold amusement. “This is sense?”
“And restraint. Because I also know that if I tried to kiss you now, you’d kill me.” Stopping an arm’s length away, he popped the grape into his mouth, and triumphed when she laughed. “Don’t pretend that I’m the only fool in these quarters, Captain. My father’s cabin spat in the face of love and companionship. Yours invites it in. And he certainly didn’t keep a pair of lovebirds.”
“This cabin merely invites my own comfort. The birds remind me of the difference between caged and free—and that cage might free me, one day.” She tilted her head and studied his features, her gaze caressing his face like the flat side of a razor. “Do you love me, Archimedes?”
He couldn’t have mistaken the calculation in her eyes. If he loved her, she was already deciding how to use that emotion against him. God, what a woman. Never accepting defeat, and using any means necessary to win.
When he did fall in love with her, he’d fall painfully hard. It would be as inevitable as death . . . but he hadn’t yet dug his grave.
“Not yet,” he said. “I’ll need encouragement first.”
“Encouragement from me?” She laughed when he nodded. “Then we’re both safe—and you should be relieved. Two men have said they loved me. You’ve probably heard stories of what happened to them.”
He had. One gutted, the other stripped naked and hung from her ship, his ass bared to his own city when she’d flown into the Castilian port. “Loving you would be worth it.”
Her laugh seemed to catch on a bitter note. Perhaps some man had said those words to her before?
Perhaps they hadn’t.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to prove that he meant it. “Our hour is almost past. I need the sketch.”
“I don’t have it aboard—”
“Use the key around your waist.” He regretted the hardening in her eyes, but it couldn’t be helped. “These were my father’s quarters—and my sister reminded me of the hideaway behind the wardrobe.”
Archimedes preferred to forget the hideaway behind the wardrobe. Their father had used it to hide them away whenever they’d spoken out of turn—or simply spoken.
“Goddammit.” She turned toward the wardrobe with a growl of frustration. Her fingers dipped beneath the sash at her waist, withdrew the silver key. “You and your sister. Wily foxes, the both of you. You chose your name well.”
“It was a toss between that and the equally apt ‘Archimedes Stallion.’ But Zenobia won.”
“Yet she still calls you Wolfram.”
“To her, Archimedes Fox is a character, or a disguise I wear.”
“And you? Do you still think of yourself as Wolfram?”
“Only when I’ve done something foolish or I’m about to die.”
“And who are you now?”
“The man who plans to fall in love with you.”
“Wolfram,