Regency Rogues and Rakes: Silk is for Seduction / Scandal Wears Satin / Vixen in Velvet / Seven Nights in a Rogue's Bed / A Rake's Midnight Kiss / What a Duke Dares
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She was aware of her heart beating faster with every deal, though her cards were good for the most part. Twenty-one once, twice, thrice. Most of the other hands were good. But he played calmly, for all his concentration, and she couldn’t be absolutely sure his luck was worse.
Ten deals played it out.
Then they turned their cards over, slapping them down smartly, smiling coolly at each other across the table as they did so, each of them confident.
A glance at the spread-out cards told her she’d beat him all but four times, and one of those was a tie.
Not that she needed to see the cards laid out to know who’d won. She had only to observe his stillness, and the blank way he regarded the cards. He looked utterly flummoxed.
It lasted but an instant before he became the jaded man of the world again; but in that look she glimpsed the boy he used to be, and for a moment she regretted everything: that they’d met in the way they’d done, that they were worlds apart, that she hadn’t known him before he lost his innocence…
Then he looked up and met her gaze, and in his green eyes she saw awareness dawn—at last—of the problem he’d created for himself.
Once again, he recovered in an instant. If he was at a loss—as surely he must be—there was no further sign. Like her, he was used to covering up. She should have covered up, too. He ought to have second thoughts. It was no more than she expected. His consternation, however faintly evidenced, rankled all the same, and more than it ought to have done.
“You’ve been rash, your grace,” she taunted. “Again. Another silly wager. But this time a great deal more is at stake.”
His pride, a gentleman’s most tender part.
He shrugged and gathered up the cards.
But she knew what the shrug masked.
His friends had seen him at the opera in the box of an aging actress, seeking an introduction to the actress’s friend. Émilien knew she was a London dressmaker, and by tomorrow night, at least half of Paris would know she was a nobody: no exciting foreign actress or courtesan, and certainly not a lady of any nationality.
What would his friends think, when they saw him enter a party he wouldn’t normally attend, bringing a most unwelcome guest, a shopkeeper?
“What hypocrites you aristos are,” she said. “It’s all well enough to chase women who are beneath you, merely to get them beneath you—but to attempt to bring them into good company? Unthinkable. Your friends will believe you’ve taken leave of your senses. They’ll believe you’ve let me make a fool of you. Enslaved, they’ll say. The great English duke is enslaved by a showy little bourgeoise.”
He shrugged. “Will they? Well, then, watching their jaws drop should prove entertaining. Will you wear red?”
She rose, and he did, too, manners perfect, no matter what.
“You put on a brave show,” she said. “I’ll give you credit for that. But I know you’re having second thoughts. And because I’m a generous woman—and all I want, foolish man, is to dress your wife—I’ll release you from a wager you never should have made. I do this because you’re a man, and I know that there are times when men use an organ other than their brains to think with.”
She gathered her reticule, arranged her shawl—and instantly recalled the brush of his fingers upon her skin.
Crushing the recollection, she swept to the door.
“Adieu,” she said. “I hope a few hours’ sleep will restore your good sense, and you’ll let us be friends. In that case, I’ll look forward to seeing you on Friday. Perhaps we’ll meet on the Quai Voltaire.”
He followed her to the door. “You’re the most damnable female,” he said. “I’m not accustomed to having women order me about.”
“We bourgeoise are like that,” she said. “No finesse or tact. So managing.”
She walked on, into the deserted corridor. From one room she heard low murmurs. Some were still at their gaming. From elsewhere came snores.
Mainly, though, she was aware of his footsteps, behind her at first, then alongside.
“I’ve hurt your feelings,” he said.
“I’m a dressmaker,” she said. “My customers are women. If you wish to hurt my feelings, you’ll need to exert yourself to a degree you may find both mentally and physically debilitating.”
“I hurt something,” he said. “You’re determined to dress my duchess, and you’ll stop at nothing, but you’ve stopped. You’re quite prepared to give up.”
“You underestimate me,” she said. “I never give up.”
“Then why are you telling me to go to the devil?”
“I’ve done no such thing,” she said. “I’ve forgiven the wager, as it is the winner’s prerogative to do. If you’d been thinking clearly, you would never have proposed it. If I hadn’t allowed you to provoke me, I should never have agreed. There. We were both in the wrong. Now go find your friends and arrange to have them carried home. I have a long day ahead of me, and unlike you, I can’t spend most of it recovering from this night.”
“You’re afraid,” he said.
She stopped short and looked up at him. He was smiling, a self-satisfied curve of his too-sensuous mouth. “I’m what?” she said quietly.
“You’re afraid,” he said. “You’re the one who’s afraid of what people will say—of you—and how they’ll behave—toward you. You’re quite ready to sneak in like a thief, hoping nobody notices, but you’re terrified to enter with me, with everybody looking at you.”
“It distresses me to shatter you illusions, your grace,” she said, “but what you and your friends think and say is not as important to other people as it is to you. I hope no one will notice me for the same reason a spy prefers not to be noticed. And it seems to escape you that the thrill of going where one isn’t wanted and hasn’t been invited—and getting away with it—will make the party more fun for me than it will be for anyone else.”
She walked on, her breath coming and going too fast, her temper too close to the surface. Her self-control was formidable, even for her kind, yet she’d let him provoke her. She only wanted to dress his wife-to-be, but somehow she’d been drawn into the wrong game altogether. And now she wondered if she’d bollixed it up, if he’d got her into a muddle with his beautiful face and falsely innocent smiles and his fingers brushing her skin.
His voice came from behind her.
“Coward,” he said.
The word seemed to echo in the empty passage.
Coward. She, who at scarce one and twenty had gone to London with a handful of coins in her purse and overwhelming responsibilities on her shoulders: a sick child and two younger sisters—and staked everything on a dream and her courage to pursue it.
She stopped and turned and marched back to him.
“Coward,” he said softly.
She dropped her reticule, grasped his neckcloth, and pulled. He bent his head. She reached up, cupped his face, dragged his mouth to hers, and kissed him.
Chapter Four
Mrs. Clark is as usual constantly receiving Models from some of the first Milliners in Paris, which enables her to produce the earliest Fashions for each Month, and trust that her general mode of doing business will give decided approbation to those Ladies who will honour her with a preference.
La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, Advertisements for June 1807
It was no surrender, but a slap in the face of a kiss.
Her mouth struck and opened boldly against his, and the collision rocked him on his heels. It was as though they’d been lovers a long time ago and hated each other now, and the two passions had melded into one: They could fight or love, and it was all the same.
She held his jaw with a powerful grip. If she’d dug her nails into his face, that would have seemed fitting: It was that kind of kiss.
Instead she damaged him with her soft mouth, the press of her lips, the play of her tongue, like a duel. She damaged him, above all with the taste of her. She tasted like brandy, rich and deep and dark. She tasted like forbidden fruit.
She tasted, in short, like trouble.
For a moment he reacted instinctively, returning the assault in the same spirit, even while his body tensed and melted at the same time, his knees giving way and his insides tightening. But she was wondrously warm and shapely, and while his mind dissolved, his physical awareness grew more ferociously acute: the taste of her mouth, the scent of her skin, the weight of her breasts on his coat, and the sound of her dress brushing his trousers.
His heart beat too fast and hard, heat flooding through his veins and racing downward. He wrapped his arms about her and splayed his hands over her back, over silk and the neckline’s lace edging and the velvety skin above.
He slid his hands lower, down the line of her back and along the curve from her waist to her bottom. Layers of clothing thwarted him there, but he pulled her hard against his groin, and she made a noise deep in her throat that sounded like pleasure.
Her hands came away from his face and slid between them, down over his neckcloth and down over his waistcoat and down further.
His breath caught and his body tensed in anticipation.
She thrust him away, and she put muscle into it. Even so, the push wouldn’t have been enough to move him, or-dinarily; but its strength and suddenness startled him, and he loosened his hold. She jerked out of his arms and he stumbled backward, into the wall.
She gave a short laugh, then bent and collected her reticule. She brushed a stray curl back from her face, and with an easy, careless grace, rearranged her shawl.
“This is going to be so much fun,” she said. “I can hardly wait. Yes, now that I think about it, I should like nothing better, your grace, than to have your escort to the Comtesse de Chirac’s ball. You may collect me at the Hotel Fontaine at nine o’clock sharp. Adieu.”
She strolled away, as cool as you please, down the passage and through the door.
He didn’t follow her.
It was a splendid exit, and he didn’t want to spoil it.
So he told himself.
Yet he stood for a moment, collecting his mind and his poise, and trying to ignore the shakiness within, as though he’d run to the edge of a precipice and stopped only inches short of stepping into midair.
But of course there was no precipice, no void to fall into. That was absurd. She was merely a woman, the tempestuous type, and he was a trifle…puzzled…because it had been a while since he’d encountered her kind.
He went the other way, to find his friends—or the bodies of the fallen, rather. While he arranged for their transport to their respective lodgings and domiciles, he was aware, in a corner of his mind, of a derisive voice pointing out that he had nothing more important to do at present than collect and sort a lot of dead-drunk aristocrats.
Later, though, when he was alone in his hotel and starting a letter to Clara because he couldn’t sleep, he found he couldn’t write. He could scarcely remember the performance. It seemed a lifetime ago that he’d sat in the theater, anticipating his next encounter with Madame Noirot. His notes about the performance became gibberish swimming before his eyes.
The only clear, focused thought he had was of Madame de Chirac’s ball looming mere hours away, and the fool’s bargain he’d made, and the impossible riddle he’d insisted on solving: how to get the accursed dressmaker in without sacrificing his dignity, vanity, or reputation.
When Marcelline returned to her hotel, she found Selina Jeffreys drowsing in a chair by the fire. Though the slender blonde was their youngest seamstress, recently brought in from a charitable establishment for “unfortunate females,” she was the most sensible of the lot. That was why Marcelline had chosen her to play lady’s maid on the journey. A woman traveling with a maid was treated more respectfully than one traveling alone.
Frances Pritchett, the senior of their seamstresses, was probably still sulking about being left behind. But she’d come last time, and she hadn’t taken at all to playing lady’s maid. She wouldn’t have sat up waiting for her employer to return, unless it was to complain about the French in general and the hotel staff in particular.
Jeffreys awoke with a start when Marcelline lightly tapped her shoulder. “You silly girl,” Marcelline said. “I told you not to wait up.”
“But who will help you out of your dress, madame?”
“I could sleep in it,” Marcelline said. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Oh, no, madame! That beautiful dress!”
“Not so beautiful now,” Marcelline said. “Not only wrinkled, but it smells of cigar smoke and other people’s perfumes and colognes.”
“Let’s get it off, then. You must be so weary. The promenade—and then to be out all night.”
She had accompanied Marcelline on the Longchamp promenade and obligingly faded out of sight when Marcelline gave the signal. Unlike Pritchett, Selina Jeffreys never minded in the least making herself inconspicuous. She’d been happy simply to drink in the sight of so many rich people wearing fine clothes, riding their beautiful horses or driving their elegant carriages.
“One must go where the aristocrats go,” Marcelline said.
“I don’t know how they do it, night after night.”
“They’re not obliged to be at work at nine o’clock every morning.”
The girl laughed. “That’s true enough.”
While she was quick, it was efficiency rather than hurry. In a trice she had Marcelline out of the red dress. She soon had hot water ready, too. A full bath would have to wait until after she’d slept—later in the day, when the hotel’s staff were fully awake. Meanwhile Marcelline needed to scrub away the smell of the gambling houses. That was easy enough.
The taste and smell of one gentleman wouldn’t be eradicated so easily. She could wash her face and clean her teeth but her body and mind remembered: Clevedon’s surprise, his quick heat, the bold response of his mouth and tongue, and the thrumming need he’d awakened with the simple motion of his hand sliding down her back.
Kissing him had not been the wisest move a woman could make, but really, what was the alternative? Slap him? A cliché. Punch him? That hard body? That stubborn jaw? She’d only hurt her hand—and make him laugh.
She doubted he was laughing now.
He was thinking, and he would need to be thinking very hard. Harder, probably, than he’d done before in all his life.
She felt certain he wouldn’t back down from the challenge. He was too proud and too determined to have the upper hand—of her, certainly, and probably the world.
It would be entertaining, indeed, to see how he managed her entrée into the comtesse’s party. If it ended in humiliation for him, maybe he’d learn from the experience. On the other hand, he might come to hate Marcel-line instead, and forbid his wife to darken the door of Maison Noirot.
But Marcelline’s instincts told her otherwise. What-ever his faults—and they were not few—this was not a mean-spirited man or the sort who held grudges.
“Go to bed,” she told Jeffreys. “We’ve a busy time ahead of us, preparing for the party. Everything must be perfect.”
And it would be. She’d make sure of it, one way or another.
Awaiting her was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, nearly as important as stealing the about-to-be Duchess of Clevedon from Dowdy’s.
Clevedon had complicated what ought to have been a straightforward business. On her own, getting in would have merely demanded expert camouflage, evasive maneuvers, and, of course, thorough self-assurance. But no matter. Life had a way of wrecking her careful plans, again and again. Roulette was more predictable than life. Small wonder she was so lucky at it.
Life was not a wheel going round and round. It never, ever, returned to the same place. It didn’t stick to simple red and black and a certain array of numbers. It laughed at logic.
Beneath its pretty overdress of man-imposed order, life was anarchy.
All the same, every time life had knocked her plans awry, she’d made a new plan and salvaged something. Sometimes she even triumphed. She was nothing if not resilient.
Whatever happened this night, she’d make the most of it.
That night
It would have served the insolent dressmaker right had Clevedon made her wait. He was not accustomed to taking orders from anybody, let alone a conceited little shopkeeper. Nine o’clock sharp, she’d said, as though he was her lackey.
But that was a childish reaction, and he preferred she not add childishness to the list of character flaws she seemed to be compiling. She was sure to ascribe any delays to cowardly heel-dragging. She’d already as much as called him a coward, in offering to release him from the wager.
He arrived promptly at nine o’clock. When the carriage door opened, he saw her outside at one of the tables under the portico. A gentleman, whose manner and dress proclaimed him English, was bent over her, talking.
Clevedon had planned so carefully: what to wear to the ball and what to say to his hostess and what expression to wear when he said it. He had taken up and discarded half a dozen waistcoats and left his valet, Saunders, a heap of crumpled neckcloths to tend to. He had composed and rejected scores of clever speeches. He was, in short, wound up exceedingly tight.
She, on the other hand, could not have appeared more at ease, lounging under the portico, flirting with any fellow who happened along. One would think she’d no more on her mind than an idle conversation with yet another potential payer of dressmakers’ bills.
And why should she consider anything else? It wasn’t her friends who’d be whispering behind her back and shaking their heads in pity.
He could easily imagine what his friends would whisper: Cupid’s arrow had at last struck the Duke of Clevedon—and not on account of Paris’s greatest beauty, not on account of its most irresistible courtesan, not on account of its most fashionable, sought-after titled lady.
No, it was a nobody of an English shopkeeper who’d slain his grace.
He silently cursed his friends and his own stupidity, stepped down from the carriage, and strolled to her table.
As he approached, her dark glance slanted his way. She said something to the talkative fellow. He nodded at her and, without taking any notice of Clevedon, bowed and went into the hotel.
When Clevedon came to the table, she looked up at him. To his very great surprise, she smiled: a warm, luscious upturn of the mouth that had nearly brought him to his knees.
But he was not slain, not by half.
“You’re prompt,” she said.
“I never keep a lady waiting,” he said.
“But I’m not a lady,” she said.
“Are you not? Well, then, you’re a conundrum. Are you ready? Or would you prefer a glass of something first, to fortify yourself for the ordeal?”
“I’m as fortified as I need to be,” she said. She rose and made a sweeping arc with her hand, drawing his attention to her attire.
He supposed a woman would have a name for it. To him it was a dress. He knew that the sleeves would have their own special name—à la Taglioni or à la Clotilde or some equally nonsensical epithet, comprehensible only to women. Their dresses were all the same to him: swelling in the sleeves, billowing out in the skirts, and tight in the middle. It was the style women had been wearing throughout his adulthood.
Her dress was made of silk, in an odd, sandy color he would have thought bland had he seen the cloth in a shop. But it was trimmed with puffy red bows, and they seemed like flowers blooming in a desert. Then there was black lace, yards of it, dripping like a waterfall over her smooth shoulders and down the front, under a sash, down over her belly.
He made a twirling gesture with his finger. Obligingly she turned in a complete circle. She moved as effortlessly and gracefully as water, and the lace about her shoulders floated in the air with the movement.
When she finished the turn, though, she didn’t pause but walked on toward the carriage. He walked on with her.
“What is that dreadful color?” he said.
“Poussière,” she said.
“Dust,” he said. “I congratulate you, madame. You’ve made dust alluring.”
“It’s not an easy color to wear,” she said. “Especially for one of my complexion. True poussière would make me appear to be suffering from a liver disease. But this silk has a pink undertone, you see.”
“How can I make you understand?” he said. “I don’t see these things.”
“You do,” she said. “What you lack is the vocabulary. You said it’s alluring. That is the pink undertone, which flatters my complexion, and the magnificent blond lace, close to my face, is even more flattering as well as adding drama.”
“It’s black,” he said. “Noir, not blond.”
“Blond lace is a superior silk lace,” she said. “It doesn’t mean the color.”
This exchange took them to the carriage. He had braced himself for a continuation of last night’s battle, but she behaved as though they were old friends, which disarmed and bothered him at the same time. Too, he was so preoccupied with the nonsense of blond referring to every color under the sun that he almost forgot to look at her ankles.
But instinct saved him, and he came to his senses in the nick of time. As she went up the steps and took her seat, she gave him a fine view of some six inches of stockinged, elegantly curving limb, from the lower part of her calf down.
Last night came back in a dark surge of recollection, more feeling than thought, that sent heat pumping through him. He saw himself bending and grasping one slim ankle and bringing her foot onto his lap and sliding his gloved hand up her leg, up and up and up…
Later, he promised himself, and climbed into the carriage.
A short time later
“I hope you will do me the kindness of allowing me to present Madame Noirot, a London dressmaker of my acquaintance,” the Duke of Clevedon said to his hostess.
For a time, the noise about them continued. But about the instant the Comtesse de Chirac realized she hadn’t misunderstood the duke’s less-than-perfect French and that he had actually uttered the words London dressmaker in her presence and referring to the uninvited person beside him, the news was traveling the ballroom, and a silence spread out like ripples from the place where a large rock had landed in a small pond.
Madame de Chirac’s posture grew even tighter and stiffer—though that seemed anatomically impossible—and her chilly grey gaze hardened to steel. “I do not understand English humor,” she said. “Is this a joke?”
“By no means,” Clevedon said. “I bring you a curiosity, in the way that, once upon a time, the savants brought back remarkable objects from their travels in Egypt. I met this exotic creature the other night at the opera, and she was the talk of the promenade yesterday. I beg you will forgive me, and in the interests of scientific inquiry, overlook this so-great imposition upon your good nature. You see, madame, I feel like a naturalist who has discovered a new species of orchid, and who has carried it out of the hidden places of its native habitat and into the world, for other naturalists to observe.”
He glanced at Noirot, whose stormy eyes told him she was not amused. The tan and black she wore made her look like a tigress, and the bursts of red might have been her victims’ blood.
“Perhaps, on second thought, a flower is not the most apt analogy,” he added. “And all things considered, I might have done better to put her on a leash.”
The tigress slanted him a smile promising trouble later. Then she bowed her head to the countess and sank into a curtsey so graceful and beautiful—the lace wafting gently in the air, the butterfly bows fluttering, the fabric shimmering—that it took his breath away.