Too Wicked to Tame (The Derrings #2)(8)

Portia arched an eyebrow at him, curious to see what kind of “show” the locals regarded so highly.

“C’mon,” Clive bellowed.

Sighing, Heath strode across the room and plucked the knife from Clive’s fist. She watched as he straddled the bench, splayed his large hand flat on the table, and proceeded to stab between each finger in a frenzied blur of movement. She jerked at each thud of the knife in the wood table, certain that he would cut his hand at any moment. Her shocked gaze lifted to his face, to the bored expression there.

What kind of boyhood had he led?

Finally, he stopped, and she remembered to breathe again. He rose and sent the knife slicing cleanly through the air. It landed square in the center of a faded and smoke-mottled painting above the hearth.

Clive chortled and slapped the table in approval.

“Do you have a death wish?” she demanded upon his return to their table. “Reckless riding, reckless”—she waved a hand at the table where he had conducted his perilous demonstration, groping for the appropriate words and arriving at—”knife play!”

He replied with aggravating equanimity, even as something furtive gleamed in his gaze, ” ‘The worst evil of all is to leave the ranks of the living before one dies.’ ”

She shook her head, frustrated—mystified—at the man before her who quoted Seneca.

“Ain’t nothing,” Clive called out. “You should see him climb Skidmoor with his bare hands. In winter, too.”

“Skidmoor,” she echoed.

“It’s just a hill,” Heath explained.

“A hill?” Clive guffawed, shaking his head. “Right. More like a mountain.”

He climbed mountains in the dead of winter?

“Heath,” a serving girl squealed from across the taproom.

Portia eyed the woman’s scandalously low bodice and instinctively drew her cloak tighter about her shoulders as if she could hide her lack of similar attributes.

“Mary, you’re looking well.” Heath grinned in a way that made him look suddenly young, boyish. Not nearly so intimidating as the stranger from the road.



Mary sashayed across the room, rolling her hips in what Portia felt certain to be a practiced walk.

“Better now that you’re here,” she purred.

With no thought or regard to her presence, he grinned wickedly at the serving girl, his teeth a flash of white in his sun-browned face. How his skin managed to brown in this sunless country baffled her. No doubt further evidence that he was more devil than man.

The curvy serving girl lowered herself into his lap, tossed her plump arms around his neck and then, for all the world to see, planted an open-mouthed kiss on him.

Portia looked away, embarrassment stinging her cheeks. She studied her hands in her lap, ran her thumbs nervously over the backs, over the cold, puckered gooseflesh of her exposed wrists.

Unable to suppress her morbid curiosity, she sucked in a breath and lifted her eyes to observe the unseemly display.

Her gaze collided with his storm-gray eyes.

He watched her—Portia.

Heat flooded her face to be caught staring, as if she were interested, as if she cared who he kissed. His ravenous wolf’s stare never wavered from her face. Amusement gleamed in the gray depths as he kissed the female atop his lap.

She wrenched her gaze away and twisted her fingers in her lap until they ached.

Do not watch. Do not watch. Do not grant him the satisfaction of knowing he fascinates you.

Unable to stop herself, she snuck another look, compelled, beckoned by the magnetic pull of his taunting gaze. His eyes gleamed wickedly, ensnaring her, whispering her name. She gawked as he trailed a hand over Mary’s plait, watched as his long, tapered fingers unraveled the rope of hair, twining the tendrils in his elegant, blunt-tipped fingers.

Her stomach clenched and knotted. Something hot and unfamiliar ignited in her blood as she watched him kiss the woman with slow thoroughness, all the while devouring her with his eyes.

Was she such a wanton? Her quickening pulse seemed answer enough. Blood rushed to her ears, blocking out the steady patting of rain on the thatched roof, the hiss and pop of the fire in the hearth, the sound of her own excited breath. She moistened her lips with a flick of her tongue and his gray eyes darkened, twin beads of jet as they followed the movement, scanning her face, then dropping to the rise and fall of her chest beneath her soaked clothes.

She lifted her chin and tried to convey her contempt, her absolute disgust at their vulgar display—that she was a lady unmoved in the presence of such wickedness. Yet her breath betrayed her, falling fast and hard from her lips. Her cheeks felt aflame and she worried that color flooded her face.



“Mary,” bellowed a man, presumably the establishment’s proprietor. “Stop molesting the customers and get in the kitchen, girl.”

Mary ended the kiss, a cat’s satisfied smile on her face—as if she had just feasted on a bowl of cream. Wiping her lips with the back of her hand, she sent one last glance Heath’s way before departing.

Heath rose to his feet, eyes glittering like embers as he looked down at her. Her eyes dropped to his mouth, moist from the kiss of another woman. Her pulse leapt and she looked away, her gaze flitting about the room like a bird looking for a place to land. His boots slid over the dirt-packed floor, scraping to a stop in front of her. She trained her gaze on those soiled boots, not daring to look up at that face, his dark good looks, the heated gaze that for some reason made her squeeze her thighs together beneath her skirts.