Free A Most Naked Solution by Anna Randol

leaning across the desk and taking the tart from her fingers with his mouth. Of tasting the treat on his lips.
    But he shook his head, his focus on her mouth. It wasn’t until he dropped his gaze back to his paper that she was able to breathe again.
    She finished reading off her list, but Camden continued with his work. She supposed she should leave, but she loved watching how his lips pursed to a firm, tight line. How he’d push his spectacles back up his nose with the back of his wrist.
    Sophia allowed her spine to soften and sink against the upholstered leather. Her fingers traced along the arm of the chair absently for a few minutes until she realized the pattern her fingers followed matched the creases on his forehead.
    She rested her elbow on the arm of the chair and propped her chin onto her fist. Then she tucked her feet under her. A slight smile pulled at her lips. Richard would be rolling over in his grave at her lack of manners. How she wasn’t chatting and charming and ensuring the man across from her was enchanted. She could sit with him in silence and feel comfortable.
    That peace wasn’t something she’d ever felt before, not in the home of her diplomat father, and definitely not with Richard.
    But she’d found it here.
    C amden rubbed the back of his neck. A faint pink light colored the room. Dawn. He hadn’t expected to get anything done. But he’d preferred it to sitting in his room with Sophia asleep only a few doors down.
    Now she was asleep only a few feet away.
    And he’d accomplished far more than he would have imagined. It was as if her presence inspired him and awoke parts of him long dormant and unused.
    Could one have a mathematical muse? Or were the words inherently contradictory?
    He was a beast for not waking her. She was curled in the stiff leather chair, her head tucked into the crook of her arm. Her neck would surely be aching when she woke.
    But he liked having her there. Both her soft voice as she read and now the soft cadence of her breath.
    Yet he didn’t want her to regret spending the night with him.
    He dropped his face into his hands until images of her wrapped around him in his bed dissipated, not trusting himself to touch her until then. When the parts deep within him ceased aching, he stood and scooped her into his arms.
    She stirred, murmuring something he couldn’t hear, but then her face nuzzled against his chest and she quieted.
    He walked slowly to her room and laid her gently in the bed. He drew the blankets over her to ward off the early morning chill and brushed a lock of her silken blond hair from her face. This close, he could see a small bump along the bridge of her nose where it had been broken before.
    He barely choked back the urge to draw her into his arms again and will away every horrible thing that had happened to her.
    After he’d returned home from the war with a bullet wound to the thigh, he’d almost visited her. He’d been desperate to refresh the image of the young woman he barely remembered, but whose words meant everything. It had been easier to convince himself that she’d written him the letter on a whim. She’d still been a young woman in the midst of her first Season. He’d been sure she’d find someone better. When he’d seen a notice that she’d married a few months after he returned, he thought he’d made the right choice.
    What had his uncertainty cost them both?
    He stepped back, watching her sleep for one more instant before he retreated to his own room.

 
    C HAPTER E LEVEN
    S ophia stretched in the bed, groaning at the stiffness in her neck. Her arms reached up across the soft down of the pillow, her toes dug down farther under the sheets.
    This wasn’t her bed.
    She blinked her eyes open and found herself staring up at a frothy white canopy. Camden’s house. How had she gotten back to bed? He had carried her. A fleeting memory of warmth and coat buttons pressing against her cheek returned.
    Her cheeks burned at the