The Fireside Inn

by Lily Everett

  He thought he could manage to sit through a few love poems, as long as they were read aloud in Serena Lightfoot’s clear, bell-like voice.

  Leaning back on his elbows, Leo crossed his legs and ankles and savored every point of contact between them. He was close enough to feel the brief shiver that ran through her, and he tilted his face up into the thin warmth of the winter sun with a smile pulling at his lips. “Go ahead, I’m listening.”

  Serena, who’d frozen when he lay down perpendicular to her with his head practically in her lap, unthawed enough to clear her throat. “You want me to read you some options aloud?”

  Humming in agreement, Leo let his tense back and shoulder muscles melt into the blanket. This was the most relaxed he’d felt since Miles issued his reading challenge. He opened his eyes and cocked his head to watch Serena dither sweetly over which book to choose first. She finally plucked a blue hardcover with gold gilt lettering engraved on the front and tucked her finger into the pages where she’d marked her spot with a pink sticky tab. All the books she’d brought were bristling with sticky tabs, Leo realized, glancing around at the portable library scattered across the blankets.

  “How much time did you spend culling through all these tomes for wedding readings?” he asked, warmed by more than the sun.

  “Not that long,” Serena said defensively, pushing her tortoiseshell glasses up her nose. “I had some ideas right off the bat, and there are online resources, wedding forums where people suggest readings, that type of thing. It was all very interesting. From a research perspective, obviously.”

  “Obviously,” Leo agreed, enjoying every moment with her. “What was the most popular reading on your Internet forum?”

  “Well, the favorite Bible verse is probably that one from Corinthians I: ‘Love is patient, love is kind…’ It’s mentioned frequently enough to make it number one.”

  “Love beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things,” Leo quoted dreamily, the final words of the verse rising out of his memory with ease.

  Serena caught her breath. “Yes. It sounds like you’re familiar with that one—although what is that? The King James version?”

  Leo shrugged, the movement hitching his shoulders up enough to pillow his head on Serena’s khaki-clad thigh. Oh, that was lovely. “Good old Church of England. I won a prize for Scripture knowledge at school once, you know.”

  There was a slight pause, then Leo felt Serena relax under his head. Settling in happily, he kept his eyes closed to better focus on soaking up the heat of her body.

  “If you have Bible verses like that one already memorized, surely there’s something in there that will work,” Serena pointed out.

  “Undoubtedly,” Leo said agreeably, cracking one eye open to peer up at her inquisitively arched brows. “If only—that would have solved a lot of problems. But Greta and Miles—well, more precisely, Greta and her mother, want to choose the Bible readings. My job was specifically defined as coming up with a secular reading.”

  “Okay, well, I have a lot of options for us to explore here. Where do you want to start?”

  Hurriedly shutting both eyes once more, Leo nestled his head against the smooth, firm muscle of her leg and inhaled the salt-sweet floral of her scent. “You choose. Surprise me.”

  “Okay. This is kind of fun.” Some of the same passion Leo had admired the day before crept into Serena’s tone. “I’ve got quite the range here, from Plato’s Symposium—the bit about how the twin souls split apart, trying to find their way back together—to an excerpt from a Miss Manners essay on marriage, which is actually wonderful. She makes the point that it’s unrealistic to expect to find one other person endlessly fascinating, forever and ever, but that the world around us is endlessly fascinating. So marriage should be about finding that one other person to walk through life and experience the world with.”

  “I like that. Lord knows, my parents could have benefited from that advice early on.”

  With studied nonchalance, Serena said, “Oh, you mean your father, the Earl of Rochester?”

  It took everything Leo had in him to stay loose and pliant, sprawled across the blanket, rather than bolting up out of Serena’s lap. “How did you—?”

  “Hello? Research librarian?” He could hear the eye roll in her tone. “I looked it up. It’s not exactly a secret, is it?”

  “I suppose not.” Leo grimaced. “Although part of the reason I moved to New York was to be amongst people who neither knew nor cared about my illustrious parentage.”

  “Sorry. I guess I shouldn’t have brought it up, but I’ve never met a real live lord before.”

  “I’m not actually a lord. It’s a courtesy title for a younger son. My brother will inherit my father’s title. It’s meaningless, in every sense of the word.”

  “That can’t be true.” Serena’s finger hesitantly brushed at the tense spot between Leo’s brows, smoothing away the frown he hadn’t been aware of. “If it meant nothing, you wouldn’t have had to leave England to escape it.”

  Leo tensed for a heartbeat, then breathed it out on a huffed laugh. Opening his eyes, he studied her face from this strange angle. “Perceptive as well as beautiful? I believe I may be heading for trouble.”

  This time, he was sure the pink that rose to her cheeks was all his own doing. “You’re not in trouble,” she said stoutly. “Because we’re not kissing again. Remember?”

  “I remember exactly what I agreed to in this deal, and never kissing you again was not part of it.”

  Black lashes fluttered down, veiling those extraordinarily dark, velvety brown eyes. “You know, your title and ancestry aren’t the only things I found when I looked you up.”

  Turning his head to nuzzle his cheek into her leg, Leo flirted up at her with a smile. “No?”

  She gazed down at him narrowly. “Leaving England didn’t save you from the limelight, it seems. Vanity Fair, Page Six, Town & Country… There are photos of you at a different party with a different woman on every society page.”

  Leo shrugged, obscurely uncomfortable with the knowledge that Serena had seen those stupid pictures. “One wants to keep busy.”

  “You’re a very busy bee, apparently.”

  Trying to analyze her expression, Leo pondered her words for a long moment before finally decided to try an unusual tack. “You’re right. I’ve been with a lot of women. And I could lie and say I’m trying to follow your Miss Manners’ advice, searching for that one special person to share my life with so I don’t end up like my parents, who are so bored by one another they can’t come up with enough conversation to carry them through breakfast.”

  Serena’s fingers fluttered through his hair in a caress as light as if a butterfly had landed on his head. “But you won’t lie to me.”

  There was a certainty in her tone, combined with soft, pleased wonder that gave Leo the uncomfortable sensation of wishing deeply to be the man Serena thought he was.

  He could never be that man—he’d been lying to her since he met her—but he could be honest about this, at least. “The truth is, I like women. I like the way you smell, the way you walk, the softness of your skin and the sweetness of your smiles, and the lithe, unexpected strength of you. Every woman has her own individual beauty, and I consider it my privilege to discover and appreciate it.”

  Serena gazed down at him, her fast, light breaths moving her stomach against his cheek. The look on her face was easier to read, this time: lips parted, cheeks red, pupils blown wide. “So when you say you want me…”

  “It’s because you’re beautiful. Unique. Unlike any other woman—and I’ve known my share.”

  “I feel as if I should be put off by that,” Serena breathed, cupping his face with one ink-stained hand. “But no one has ever honestly wanted me just for my body before. It makes for a surprisingly nice change.”

  Chapter 4

  “Not only for your body,” Leo protested, his big shoulders shifting restlessly against
her. “That makes me sound awfully frivolous and shallow. Which I am, of course—but I’d rather you didn’t realize it.”

  Serena grinned down at him, not fooled in the slightest. She felt giddy with the sense of having uncovered a secret about Lord Leo Strathairn; one she’d bet his bevy of socialites and aspiring actresses didn’t know.

  He wasn’t nearly as frivolous and shallow as he liked to pretend.

  I like the way you smell, the way you walk, the softness of your skin and the sweetness of your smiles, and the lithe, unexpected strength of you.

  Liquid heat pooled low in her belly and between her thighs at the memory of those words. He’d been talking about all women, but Serena had felt every word like a dart to the heart, piercing and perfect. How was she supposed to resist this man?

  She’d been drawn to him before she ever even saw his face, and her only defense had been her determination not to fall for yet another guy who only wanted to use her for her brain.

  With a few short sentences, Leo had convinced her he wasn’t playing at desire. He’d been completely up front about his motives. He’d asked for her research help, and he’d made it clear that his ulterior motive was getting her into bed.

  For someone who’d only ever experienced the reverse—being led on by someone who had no real interest in her while he mined what he actually wanted from her brain—there was something devastatingly appealing about Leo’s honest lust.

  In fact, the phrase “devastatingly appealing” applied to pretty much everything about Leo Strathairn.

  Striving to remember that she’d known this man for about twenty-four hours and that she wasn’t the kind of woman who had meaningless affairs, Serena put on her best stern expression. It was the one she used when trying to get the four-year-old reading group to settle down and stay in their seats—and it was about as effective on Leo as it was on them. So basically, not at all.

  His unrepentant grin and the mischief glinting in his bright eyes made him look boyish and carefree. Smothering the sudden urge to lean down and nibble that wide smile, Serena said, “We have a job to do, Mr. Frivolous. Unless you want to stand up there in front of all those wedding guests with nothing to read.”

  With a powerful twist of his broad shoulders, Leo settled more comfortably against her and closed his eyes once more. “I’m at your mercy. Do your worst.”

  Serena laughed. “Just for that, I should read you this passage I marked from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.”

  “Like the song in that movie about the hitchhiker and the galaxy?” he asked lazily.

  Serena cocked her head and stared down at him, taken aback. “Like the Douglas Adams book the movie was partially based on,” she said slowly. “One of the funniest science fiction writers of all time. Have you really never heard of him? He’s British!”

  Something flashed through Leo’s eyes, gone so quickly Serena couldn’t be sure she’d seen it at all. “I know the U.K. is smaller than the U.S., but it’s a much larger island than this one. We don’t actually all know one another.”

  “No, I realize that, I just…” Serena shook her head. “Not important. This passage is probably a little too out there for Miles and Greta anyway, but I do love it. There’s a part at the end, where the hero, Arthur, has this long silence with a woman he barely knows, and instead of getting awkward and weird, they share a true, intimate moment. It always makes me think of how hard most people find it to be silent together.”

  He hummed thoughtfully. “I know what you mean. I’m quite guilty of that, I think—I have a tendency to want to break the silence, fill it up with noise.”

  “Well.” Serena paused, unsure how personal to get. “It sounds to me like the silence you grew up with between your parents could easily have made you distrustful of what hides underneath the silence.”

  Leo’s body turned to stone against her, his handsome face cast in rigid lines like a marble statue. But before Serena’s apology for her inappropriate presumption could rush out of her mouth, Leo shuddered and turned over to lie on his front.

  Sliding one arm beneath Serena’s thighs, he pressed his face to her stomach. His breath was hot and moist through the fleece of her sweatshirt, tickling the sensitive skin and stealing Serena’s breath.

  “You’re a wonder,” he mouthed against her belly, the words the barest whisper of sound. “How do you understand so much about me?”

  Serena gave in to the impulse to thread her fingers into his tousled auburn curls and cup the nape of his neck, cradling him to her. “I got lost in the psychology section of the library last month. Couldn’t help picking up a few things.”

  “It’s not entirely comfortable for me,” Leo admitted, his arms tightening minutely around her. “I’m not used to being seen through. Am I truly so transparent?”

  The genuine worry in his tone had Serena frowning. “Why does it matter? I already know you want to sleep with me, and that you’re not sticking around Sanctuary Island past the wedding. You’ve been totally up front that you want an island fling, and you want it with me. You’re smart enough to realize I’m actually considering it. So what is there left to hide?”

  Tension uncoiled from his shoulders in the instant before Leo got his knees under him and sat up, pulling Serena into his lap as if she weighed nothing. He gathered her in close to his chest and her arms went instinctively around his neck like a bride about to be carried over the threshold.

  “You’re considering it, are you?”

  The deep rumbling purr of his voice shivered through her, that accent making her go all loose and trembly. His hard chest flexed against the taut, aching points of her breasts. Serena gasped and pressed tighter, blood pounding so heavily that each heartbeat shook her in the frame of his embrace.

  Sucking in oxygen to try and clear her head, Serena struggled to pull back long enough to study his face. She wanted to try and read whatever secret he was holding back, but when her eyes met his, all she could see was the depth of his hunger.

  Dark and fathomless as the ocean, Leo’s need for her was real and undeniable. Whatever else she didn’t know about this man, she knew that. And for Serena, whose experiences had taught her over and over that her only value was locked inside her brain, it was intoxicating to know that Leo Strathairn truly wanted her—all of her.

  Yes, she was a smart, capable person, a dedicated librarian who valued intellectual work and lived a lot of her life between the pages of books. But when Leo looked at her like that, Serena felt her neglected body wake up and turn to him like a flower turning toward the sun—because she was more than her mind. She was flesh and blood, too.

  Make that tingling flesh and hot, pounding blood.

  As Serena’s gaze dropped to Leo’s mouth, she realized that this was her chance to find out what all those poets and playwrights and authors were writing about. With Leo, she could experience true passion, mutual and satisfying—even if fleeting.

  If she passed up this chance, she’d never forgive herself.

  “Actually,” she said, unable to believe that husky, sexy voice was coming from her own throat, “I’m done considering.”

  Leo’s large hands clenched in the cotton of the t-shirt covering her shoulder blades. “Oh?”

  Serena nodded, their faces so close that their noses brushed, and she had to glance back and forth between his eyes to keep from going cross-eyed. “I’m ready to make a decision. And what I’ve decided is to not let you seduce me.”

  Disappointment tightened Leo’s features, holding him rigid for a moment before he reluctantly began to release her. The moment he’d loosened his hold, Serena took a fortifying breath and shoved at his chest with all her might.

  Leo went down on the blanket with a soft oof, and Serena scrambled up to straddle his trim waist. Clamping her thighs against abdominal muscles strung tight with surprise, Serena bent over him and smiled into his wide, shocked eyes.

  Flushed warm with victory and anticipation, Serena squirmed against Leo’
s hardness and savored the pure pleasure that rocketed through her.

  “I’ve decided to seduce you, instead,” she told him. “It’s my first seduction attempt. How’m I doing so far?”

  ***

  Leo clasped his hands on the subtle roundness of Serena’s hips and fought the urge to thrust against her softness. If this was truly her first seduction, he didn’t want to do anything to startle her into drawing back.

  “Very impressive,” he told her, pleased that the strain he was under barely showed in his tone. “High degree of difficulty in executing your first maneuver. Full marks from the U.K. judge.”

  “But now that I have you where I want you, what am I going to do with you?”

  Loving the playfulness, Leo grinned up at his amateur seductress and moved his hands from her hips to lace them behind his head. “Whatever you like, love. Consider me utterly and completely seduced.”

  Serena’s smile went from naughty to uncertain, her hands on his chest lifting to hover tentatively above the fine Oxford cloth of his shirt. In protest, Leo curled his hips upward in an unmistakably suggestive move that stoked the heat of his passion to a burning flame.

  He growled a little at the crush of his most sensitive bits against the yielding globes of her perfect backside, but Serena’s loud moan drowned him out. Her thighs tightened as she rode back against his thrusts, and her hands clamped down on his shoulders for leverage.

  She leaned to kiss him, her succulent mouth voracious and bold, without a hint of shyness or hesitance, and Leo understood. Serena would meet heat with heat, she would keep pace with his every passionate impulse, but she went cold at the first hint of his indifference.

  As if he could ever truly be indifferent to Serena. But if even playing at it in order to let her take control made her feel unwanted, Leo had the perfect solution.

  Tensing his abs, he surged upward to capture her pretty, elfin face between the palms of his hands. And because Leo had always appreciated knowing exactly where he stood, he said, “I want you.”