Like No Other Lover (5 page)

She understood. Her mouth had gone white at the corners from the strain of maintaining that smile; her breathing was shallower. Her blue eyes were dark with a very pure anger.

She turned her head away from him slowly.

A moment later she swallowed.

For a second or two, as laughter and chatter rustled around the two of them, they comprised a perfect island of stillness. He suspected she was beginning to hate him.

Hate, he told himself, was better than indifference. And she was most
decidedly
seeing him now. Tension banded his stomach muscles. He had the peculiar sensation he was drawing back a bow throughout this conversation, and now it quivered taut in his fingers.

“But
, Miss Brightly…I could tell you things about all of these other gentlemen that would facilitate your quest for a very respectable match. I could…oh, help you narrow your choices. Focus your attentions. Deploy your
assets
most effectively, if you will, in order to help you achieve your aim.”

She turned her head back quickly toward him. Her gaze was flinty with cynicism.

“And you’ll do all of this out of the goodness of your…heart…Mr. Redmond?”

She enunciated the word “heart” doubtfully. Pointedly calling into question whether or not he possessed one.

He appreciated this with a nod and a pitched brow.

“I seldom do things simply out of the goodness of my heart. For where is the logic in that? I am a man of logic, of purpose, of planning, of objective. I suspect you of all people understand that, Miss Brightly.”

She was catching on; cynicism hardened her soft features. “I see. And what do you require in exchange for your valuable information, Mr. Redmond?”

Tension snapped; the arrow flew.

“A kiss.”

Cynthia took the measure of her tormentor: broad-shouldered and formidably framed; not lean like his brother Lyon, but not awkward with his size, either. His hands were large; his fingers long and quiet against his thighs. Most men, she’d learned, betrayed internal preoccupation with fidgets, by fingering a coat button or drumming fingers against their thighs even as they mouthed words meant to charm her. This man was still, but not unnaturally so. It was the stillness born of focus.
She
was his entire focus. His attention was enveloping. It created a world of the two of them.

And then there were the spectacles, which she often found absurd on men. But the dark eyes behind his spectacles had that quality unique to doorways into mysterious darkened rooms: they beckoned, they disguised; they invited and unsettled. His face was long and his nose was…
significant
was unfortunately the word that seemed most apt—and his jaw a join of lines so elegantly articulated it could have been drawn with a protractor. Hair dark and fine and longer than it ought to be dropped softly down over a brow high enough to contain what
surely
must be his multitude of tremendously important thoughts.

She’d gone sarcastic in her thoughts out of self-defense.

But his mouth…It was a sensual tourist in that face: firm, wide, finely drawn. Like his eyes, it implied things. Specifically, it implied Miles Redmond skillfully used it for purposes besides tasting food and tormenting his guests. She thought about native women and debauchery.

He interrupted her scrutiny. “Am I correct in assuming that you have been kissed before, Miss Brightly?”

There went the mouth again: tormenting. Yet no footman extending a platter of sweetmeats had ever sounded more blandly deferential.

This must be why she never spoke to men who wore spectacles, she thought darkly. Some instinct for self-preservation. For this…
scientist—
she turned the word into a pejorative in her mind—this wealthy, indolent
heir
—this last word she faltered over, hesitating to turn it into a pejorative, as it had been one of her favorite words to date—had sniffed out unflattering truths about her.

She halfadmired it. There was something heady, a peculiar
relief
, in being understood.

But then she thought: if he can see it, who
else
can see it?

She turned her head away briefly from his dark-eyed, windowed gaze. An attempt to rally her composure. His gaze seemed to linger in front of her, the way an image lit by the glare of the sun hovers before your eyes after you close them.

She decided then: only him. Only
he
sees.

She would need to tread very carefully here.

“Rumor has it that you are a gentleman, Mr. Redmond. A…man of honor.” She hoped to flatter him into helping her in exchange only for the pure pleasure of helping her.

He dashed her hopes.

“‘Rumor’ does?” He sounded amused. “Oh, I hardly think I have ever inspired anything so intriguing as a
rumor
, Miss Brightly. Particularly regarding
honor
. Please don’t be tiresome. We were doing so well. Say all that you mean to say and we shall continue our negotiation.”

She sighed, and took pains to sound bored. “Very well, Mr. Redmond.
This
is what I mean to say. I question your motive in offering to help me. My confusion lies in the fact that we’ve just established that you are most decidedly
not
of a romantic or whimsical temperament. And a single kiss as payment for information strikes me as a rather romantic—even quaint—notion.”

His smile took its time forming; slowly it spread; it settled in faintly. His head tipped up a little.

“Quaint.” He repeated the word as though it had an unfamiliar taste and a texture. A whimsical one.

He returned his eyes just as slowly to her. “You have never kissed
me
, Miss Brightly.”

Cynthia stopped breathing.

Their eyes met and held. His words were low, matter-of-fact, comprised entirely of a terrifying confidence. His voice matched his eyes. She felt it peculiarly at the base of her spine; it had an edge that scraped pleasantly over her senses, like ragged silk or the bristly beginnings of a beard brushed against her cheek. She wanted to hear more of it, even as it said appalling things. Her breath rushed out.

And now she was afraid. For the reason she could make comparisons between Redmond’s voice and the beginnings of beards was that she’d
felt
bristly short whiskers brush her tender cheeks late, late at night, after balls, when young men trembling with eagerness and worship had pressed kisses upon her. But the reason Cynthia was stingy with her favors was twofold: a beautiful penniless girl could keep a man at arm’s length and hope for a good marriage only as long as her virtue was known to remain entirely intact.

And Cynthia did not precisely dislike being kissed.

But no kiss had yet been a match for her bone-deep pragmatism and sense of self-preservation.

She felt fury welling. Despite the spectacles, the verbal fencing, the penetrating observations, the fortune, and the superciliousness, this one was like all the others beneath the skin:

He simply wanted to kiss a beautiful woman. He wanted to kiss
her
.

And no doubt no beautiful woman would
freely
consent to kiss him.

She was about to call his bluff.

“Before I kiss you, I shall need proof, Mr. Redmond, of the quality of your information.”

Mr. Redmond froze as though her words were a thrust between his ribs.

Ha!
She knew a moment of triumph.

But then he inhaled thoughtfully, exhaled on a nod of agreement, and gestured subtly with this chin to a ruddy, expensively clothed man so rawboned and rectangular he made the teacup he held seem crushable as an egg. He was pretending to enjoy the conversation of Lady Windermere, whose wide rubbery mouth moved and moved and moved animatedly.

“Lord Milthorpe”—Miles Redmond’s voice was quiet, laconic—“is the Marquis of Blenheim—an ancient title. Twenty thousand pounds a year.” He paused briefly, as if to allow Cynthia’s heart to skip a beat over the majesty of the figure. “Clever investor—a member of the hallowed Mercury Club—arrived expecting to find my father here, and will stay until my father returns. A widower. Two vast estates, one in London, one in Sussex. Not adverse to another marriage. A bit suspicious of fortune hunters, however. Prefers the country to the city. A blush would not go amiss. Mention dogs.”

He snapped his head back toward her with predatory swiftness.

Just in time, she knew, to see the astonishment and hope and hunger fleeing her face.

Bloody man
.

This—
this
—was precisely the sort of thing she needed desperately to know. How much easier her task would be if she was armed with this kind of information.

They both watched Lord Milthorpe cast the china cup a wistful glance, as if he knew he was bound to crush it eventually and was issuing a silent advance apology.

“When
was
the last time you blushed, Miss Brightly?” Miles asked suddenly, sounding genuinely curious.

“Blushing,” she was snappish with nerves now, “is the province of naive fools.”

His brow furrowed and he nodded as though she’d said something Socratic.

She desperately wanted something to do with her hands, and cursed the fact that she’d left her own cup of tea atop one of those tiny shining tables, well out of reach. Across that thick, languidly patterned, aristocratic carpet was another small world, a world where Violet Redmond was laughing gaily about something unimportant, where the worthy-of-Miles-Redmond Lady Georgina sat looking untouched and demure, where Lady Middlebough, for some reason, was watching Miles Redmond with big dark eyes.

And where a smoldering-eyed, golden-haired man was pretending not to look at Cynthia. Lord Argosy.

Ah! Her interest perked up. She wondered what Miles knew about
him
.

Bloody hell.

She returned her gaze to her tormentor. Who looked intolerably amused. He’d seen the direction of her attention.

“I do not want to kiss you, Mr. Redmond.” She was appalled to hear her voice had gone threadbare.

“But I think you will kiss me anyway.”

More of that soft, secretly amused, bloody,
bloody
confidence.

Walk away,
she told herself.

Unfortunately, her feet and her brain were not in communication at present.

She looked up at him wearing a mask of a social smile. Eyes, spectacles, nose, mouth, height: the sum of his appearance meant that in another circumstance she would not have given Miles Redmond another glance. But this, too, she realized now, had everything to do with his self-possession. She understood now that if one did not notice Miles Redmond, it was simply because he did not wish to be noticed.

“I can give you such a list for every man in this room, Miss Brightly. Just
imagine
the use someone like you could put it to.” He was still diabolically, quietly cheerful. “It seems like such a waste not to share it. I’ve stated my price for it. Nod your assent and we shall seal our bargain straight away. Shake your head, and I shall abandon it altogether, and wish you happy hunting.”

Cynthia’s heart was kicking painfully now. Her mouth had gone dry.

One kiss. One kiss could help her secure her entire future, or permanently shatter her reputation if the man could not be trusted to stay quiet about it. She thought of her slim purse upstairs, and the angry woman in the bath chair in Northumberland, and her own pride, which refused to accept the idea of a post in Northumberland or to abandon the idea of a grand marriage.

Miles took one small, impatient, warning step away from her.

She had promised herself she would be good. She would not foment mischief when brilliant opportunities for mischief arose. She would be very careful not to encourage men to shoot each other over her. She’d promised herself she would no longer gamble with her future, regardless of past successes, as she had so very little left to gamble with. Literally and figuratively.

But was it her fault if gambles continually found
her
?

Don’t do it. Don’t do it
.

She sealed her fate with a duck of her head.

“Alcove,” he said instantly. The word was a low command. And he turned and melted from the room.

Well, then.

His large frame rounded the corner, which she knew opened onto a hallway off which lay other rooms.

So smooth had been his departure, no heads turned to witness it. Lady Windermere talked on and on. Lord Milthorpe’s chin was slightly turned toward the window like a weathervane, as though his body very much would have preferred to be outside. Violet giggled at something her cousin said, mercifully oblivious to the fact that her brother was about to kiss her guest.

And Cynthia slipped out of the room to follow Miles, her heart knocking inside her chest with woodpecker ferocity.

She saw him nowhere.

But suddenly she heard a throat clear from the aforementioned alcove, a halfcircle carved for the situation of a statue that had been removed for cleaning or whatever wealthy people did to statues. He fit into it like a statue himself.

With a peculiar sense of observing herself do it, Cynthia went to him.

Paused before him.

He loomed both like shelter and an encroaching storm: dark hair, dark eyes, dark coat, large hands, and she was momentarily confused, like a vole finding sunlight blotted by the shadow of a hawk.

He
hesitated not at all. One of his large hands came to rest, very lightly, at her waist. She steeled herself. And put her face up as Miles put his face down.