“Disagree with you?”
“Yes,” he murmured, his eyes again arrested by her lips. “It’ll be quite novel for someone not to do everything I tell them to.”
“Of course, Your—” She caught herself in time. “Of course … Cole.” Saying his name lent even more intimacy to the moment, so she turned away and poured him a healthy glass of whisky.
“There’s a good girl,” the lieutenant called to her. “Get him soused enough to tell us where he’s off to.”
“Knowing would be your peril, not mine,” Trenwyth quipped, tossing back his drink with one great swallow. “All I can say is that Major Mackenzie is going with me.”
The lieutenant laughed. “You’re a spy, admit it,” he cried good-naturedly. “Secret missions, the matchless uniform, and they’re not letting you stay home despite…” The man seemed to catch himself before he brought up the funeral. “Despite the circumstances. I mean, you’re a duke now, dash it all.”
“I thought we weren’t discussing that.” Once again Trenwyth’s tone was deceptively mild, but the lieutenant blanched. “Besides,” the duke continued wryly. “They’re not secret missions if everyone apparently knows about them.”
“We find out after the fact,” another officer stated. “You’re gone, and then we catch wind of the assassination of a tribal warlord in the desert and you return looking quite brown claiming to have been on holiday.”
“And don’t forget!” The lieutenant was back in the conversation, encouraged by Trenwyth’s enigmatic smirk. “That time you left and the frightening business in the Alps suddenly resolved. I was told by a friend at the military hospital in Switzerland that you were treated there for frostbite just then.” He made noises as though he’d won some sort of athletic competition, receiving congratulations from his compatriots.
“I heard the Demon Highlander, himself, claim that you were just as deadly as he was and twice as skilled,” someone else jibed.
“He was being kind,” Trenwyth said modestly.
“Have ye met my brother?” Hamish asked around a tittering Devina, who’d draped herself across his lap. “He’s never kind.”
Trenwyth let out a sound that could have been mirth or bitterness, it was impossible to tell. When he leaned forward to have his glass refilled, Imogen had the bottle at the ready. “You don’t believe them, do you?” he whispered to her as though they shared a private joke while she poured him another.
“Not a word,” she replied, granting him the first genuine smile she’d given all night.
“I knew you were clever.” She didn’t tense half so much as he again brushed his lips across her shoulder, this time closer to her neck.
Over the course of the next hour or so, Imogen’s back relaxed by incremental degrees Eventually, she allowed her shoulders to lean against him as the men turned guessing his next assignment into a drinking game. The large buttons of his coat dug into her back, so she straightened again. Shifting her effortlessly, he unfastened the buttons with one hand and divested himself of his coat, settling her back into the circle of his arms as though she’d often been there. The movement increased her body’s awareness of him a thousandfold. Also, she noted, most men of her acquaintance weren’t half so thoughtful, and her opinion of him rose incrementally.
Against her back, his wide chest was hard as iron and warm; with every movement she could feel naught but honed muscle bunch and flex beneath her. She even caught herself enjoying the way he smelled, like the cedar chest where he, no doubt, stored his dress uniform and good sharp whisky, underscored by something she couldn’t at all place. Something that couldn’t strictly be identified nor reproduced, like the scent of a rainstorm or a perfectly ripe berry.
The men settled on Afghanistan as his next target, due to the trouble erupting there between Russia, Britain, and the Ottomans, and the drinking games dissolved into drunken stories, then into an abnormal amount of toasts. They toasted the queen, of course, and fallen comrades, living comrades, battles they won, battles they lost, ships they’d sailed on, and, most vehemently, women they’d loved. Imogen found it strange that they didn’t toast the new Duke of Trenwyth, or his recently deceased family. Though, she supposed, he seemed to very much want to avoid the subject altogether.
Of course, it was not her place to say anything, but she found herself sneaking surreptitious glances over her shoulder at him. He didn’t join the toasts, but he certainly drank to all of them. He didn’t tell any stories, but he made the appropriate noises. He seemed pensive. Withdrawn. But his stunningly handsome features were always kind when he looked at her, and his touch was more casually sensual than demanding or tawdry.
That in itself was a pleasant change. Most men tended to become heavy-handed when they drank, pinching, slapping, or squeezing bits of her until she wished she had nothing feminine with which to draw their attentions. But Trenwyth’s hands, while uncommonly large, were caressing as they occasionally tested her curves. He’d rest them in her skirts on her thighs, or slide them up her waist causing her heart to trill in her chest, though he’d stop just shy of her breasts, his fingertips barely grazing beneath them.
Still, it set her teeth, but not with disgust. With … something else altogether.
By now, half the men had disappeared through the curtain adjacent to the bar, behind which a long hallway with many doors stretched the length of the building. Those who went through those doors with one of the kittens paid del Toro first.