beside his.
After a quick gaze in her direction, he moved to the fastening of his knee-length breeches.
She didn’t want to watch his fingers undoing the buttons, but the sight riveted her. The deftness with which his large hands moved came as a surprise. He tilted his hips to gain enough room to remove his breeches. She forced her gaze back up the length of his chest, fighting to maintain a disinterested expression. Only a few minutes earlier, she’d claimed to be hard to shock. Now she had to prove it.
Though the carriage creaked and jounced noisily across the moors, she was acutely aware of the sound of fabric sliding down Dalton’s hips, then lower. She kept her focus trained on the hollow of his throat, but her mind filled in the details, coaxing her to envision his thighs, roped and hewn. And—there was no helping it—she imagined his cock, nestled in thick dark hair.
Don’t look. For the love of your pride, do not look.
His voice rumbled out of the darkness. “Doesn’t cost anything to have yourself a peek, love.”
“Dalton!” Marco snapped. “Treat Miss Warrick with respect, or I’ll polish your teeth with a bullet.”
She waved a hand. “It’s a small matter if Mr. Dalton encourages me to contemplate his shortcomings.” Then, deliberately, she let her gaze fall to his groin. “My jacket must be extremely warm, for I had no idea the night was so cold. That is the explanation, isn’t it, Mr. Dalton?”
He made a sound midway between indignation and amusement.
Satisfied with his response, she moved her gaze to his face. He might be able to see the heat staining her cheeks, yet there was nothing she could do about her body’s unwanted response. Truly, she had seen men in all states of dress and undress, knew exactly how their bodies looked, and even how they felt. There was no mystery to the male physique. So why was she so affected by the sight of a naked Jack Dalton?
It was purely logical. After all, they had met only hours earlier. He was a stranger, and a dangerous one, at that. No wonder her pulse accelerated when she looked at his penis, the most intimate part of a man’s body.
Despite her belittling claim, she finally had the answer to the question about men with large feet and large hands. They were … proportional.
Consider the spirit of scientific inquiry fulfilled, she thought with an inward smile.
“If you’re quite finished attempting to incite Miss Warrick to a lust-crazed frenzy,” drawled Simon, “get dressed.”
Fortunately, Dalton didn’t complain about Simon’s command. He clearly saw the value of arriving at the train station clothed rather than nude. After undoing the bundle, he removed a shirt, trousers, waistcoat, jacket, and boots.
“None of this is going to fit,” he said. “Not even the boots.”
“We went off your vital statistics from your file,” Marco answered.
“That was before I did five years of hard labor. Gotten bigger since then. My feet spread, too.”
“Stopping at the high street shops is impossible,” she said. “So you’ll have to squeeze into what we’ve got.”
He shrugged, and went about the awkward task of dressing in a moving carriage shared with three other people. She would never admit to anyone her small, internal sigh of relief when he dragged on the trousers. The waist fit him well enough, with actual room to spare, but his thighs strained against the material. He could barely pull his arms through the shirtsleeves. The shirt actually tore a little on the shoulder seams, and he grimaced.
“The waistcoat and jacket will hide that,” she said, brisk.
Except he couldn’t button the waistcoat, and the jacket was taut across his shoulders, its cuffs inches above his wrists.
Marco tried to fasten the collar to Dalton’s shirt. “It’s like dressing a lion as Little Lord Fauntleroy.”
“You’re sodding choking me,” Dalton rasped.
Frustrated, Marco flung the collar to the ground. “Unless we have a spare
Learning to Kill: Stories