My Pleasure (25 page)

He abandoned his pose, and then slowly, giving her a chance to erase her telling grin, turned around and faced her. “Do you think you can replicate my stance now?” he asked equitably.

“Oh, I think so.” Confidently, she struck the same pose he’d held. Honesty forced him to admit that she did a more than fair approximation of it. But he was in no mood to extend mercy.

“Pitiful,” he said.

Her head snapped around in comical disbelief. “What?”

“I have seen carriage posts more supple.”

Her skin pinked, but she gamely attempted to arch her back more fully, and in doing so badly overcompensated.

“Ah! I see,” he said sagely. “You are planning a career as a contortionist and are demonstrating your skills for me. Brava. Now, shall we try fencing?”

She scowled. “Don’t mock me. Show me.”

Just the invitation he’d been waiting for. He moved in behind her looping his arm around her waist and pulling her tightly against his chest. At once she stiffened. He ignored the tensing of her body, molding her soft curves to the hard line of his torso, spreading one hand flat over her belly, her bum nestled intimately against his groin, her shoulder blades pressed like wings into his chest.

He bowed over her and slid his free hand languorously down her bare arm to clasp her slender wrist. He pulled her arm up, bending it gently so that her elbow fit snugly into the crook of his arm. Then he wrapped her hand around the hilt of the smallsword. He enveloped her with his body, fitting himself over her lithe, well-curved form.

Her heart jumped into a patter. He could feel its anxious rhythm like rain strikes against his breast, light and urgent. Her belly muscles tensed beneath his broad palm.

He lowered his lips and whispered, “Relax, Miss Nash. Swordplay is just another dance: a dance of death.”

A shiver rippled through her. He could feel the light aura of heat rising from her skin. “It’s a dance mercurial and elegant, stylized and spontaneous,” he murmured. “The wary salute, the irresistible invitation, the passionate encounter, the breathless disengagement.

“Easy, Miss Nash. You’re trembling. Lie back against me.”

“I can’t.”

Such honesty. ’Twas much more provocative than false bravado.

“Why is that?” he whispered, brushing the silken hair at the nape of her neck.

“You have me articulated so far forward, sir, that if I relax I’ll fall over.”

His head jerked up as though she’d doused him with ice water. Which she had. Verbal ice water.

“I’ll catch you,” he said, trying to recapture the warm, intimate tone he’d been using.

“Is that supposed to be comforting?” she asked. “Because I am decidedly
not
feeling reassured. And I do not believe you mean me to be, do you? Tell me, Mr. Munro, by saying you will catch me if I fall, do you desire that I feel grateful, secure, or threatened?”

Well, damn, she had him there. He straightened a little, giving her question serious consideration. “I’m not sure,” he admitted.

“Ah.” She nodded, craning her neck around to look him in the eye. “I understand. You are at variance with yourself.”

“I am?” Lord, but she was fascinating. Even more fascinating than beautiful. Which was saying a good deal.

She twisted around even more so that she could speak to him eye to eye, and thus he found he was actually holding her suspended now, one arm around her waist, the other still supporting the arm he held out above them. They must look like some bizarre statue, he thought dazedly, Man and Woman caught in some eternal struggle to see which one would poke a hole in the ceiling.

He looked down into her eyes. Their expression was sympathetic.

“Yes,” she said. “You see, masculine conceit requires that as you are holding me intimately, I must feel some maidenly trepidation, a fluttering within, a frisson of fear coupled with heady expectation. I suspect it would be even more necessary for your masculine pride that I feel thus if you were carrying me. Or catching me.”

“You have a point,” he conceded, lowering their arms and wresting the sword from her hand. She relinquished it without complaint, and with her newly freed hand clutched at his bicep. She needn’t have worried, he wasn’t going to drop her. This was far too interesting. Besides, he had her balanced effortlessly now, as if they usually conversed this way.

No, this is not what he had planned. Yet there was no denying it had its own tantalizing charm. He’d never discussed seduction with a woman before. At least not a woman he wanted to seduce.

She nodded again, even more sympathetically. “On the other hand, as a gentleman you despise the idea that you might cause me alarm when it is your duty, indeed, your sworn pledge to safeguard, protect, and even serve me.”

He studied the lovely, guileless face raised so earnestly to his. She had a chipped front tooth, he realized for the first time. A tiny thing, but as piquant in that perfect oval as mint in sweet tea.

“’Tis a quandary for you,” she said soberly. “But while you may not have always followed your nobler instincts, knowing that I value my virtue, I believe you will stop before…” She trailed off, took a small breath, and went on. “I know you would like to lead me astray, but please don’t.”

“Lead you astray? How charmingly you put it.”

Her gaze fell. “I don’t know how else to put it.”

“And you are quite sure that that is what I meant to do?”

“Yes.” Well, she’d been right, of course. He must grant her that. “It is what you do. You are quite notorious, you know.”

And then he noticed that his seductiveness didn’t appear to be all that, well…seductive. She looked uncomfortable, a bit repelled. And he knew why. That last bit had revealed a great deal about what she thought of him and what she thought him to be.

“And you think I have taken the seducer’s part many times before.”

She didn’t need to answer. It was there in her eyes.

“Too many times,” he said, and was proud of how bored he sounded, how unaffected.

“How could you not when you are offered what other men must actively seek? I saw how that woman at the—” she broke off, and he realized she’d been about to say something about his kissing that woman at the courtesan’s ball, but that would reveal she’d been there.

She didn’t know that the woman had been nothing more than a pathetic and unsuccessful attempt to purge her from his thoughts. And he couldn’t tell her. Because then she would know he’d discovered her secret, and for whatever reason it had become, almost without volition and certainly without reason, imperative to him that she tell him herself.

He wanted her. He wanted her trust even more. He wanted, he realized in some horror, for her to have faith in him. Dear God! He must indeed be going mad. And because he wanted her admission, he must present himself in the most disreputable of lights. It was enough to make even the most cruel gods laugh.

“The woman at the…?” he prodded, angry now because he could not refute her and angrier still that even if he could refute the trollop at the ball, he could not refute the others. Those others whom he’d bedded that first year after he’d been made to understand how little he had.

Because she was quite right. He hadn’t refused that which had been so generously offered. The fact that he had not accepted nearly as often as she presumed afforded him scant satisfaction. The fact that he had availed himself of those offers and stopped availing himself of them long before her held no meaning to anyone but himself.

“In the salle,” she muttered, her gaze shifting away from his, “I saw how a number of them watched you.”

She gave him no latitude; neither would he give her any. “You said ‘that woman.’ ”

She flushed. “There was one in particular.”

“Hm,” he said, looking at her lying there in his arms, her heart not a hand’s breadth from his, her breasts moving in gentle agitation, her eyes luminous with her lies. “You must point her out to me when you leave. Seeing as how your virtue must remain unassailable.” Damn, he’d been unable to keep the edge of bitterness from that.

“But though I am…” He could scarce choke the word out. He had never considered himself such, but if she had branded him with the title, he would wear it. “…a rake, I am not a cad.”

“I know you are not,” she said quietly, making his heart pound with the restraint he must impose on arms that wanted to snatch her roughly closer. “I am untried, but I am not naïve.”

No. It would have been better for them both if she had been. If she’d been a seventeen-year-old virgin, fresh from the protection of her father’s country manor, never having dealt with men who wanted anything other than a dance or honorable wedlock, a girl who had never been pursued or propositioned by men who desired her solely for her beauty, a girl who’d never had to learn to keep her thoughts hidden. That girl would not know about what men like him had done.

But then, that girl wouldn’t be this woman.

“So I see,” he said.

She released a little breath, relieved. “So,” she said with a return to her former guilelessness, “I do appreciate the quandary you find yourself in, and I appreciate the fact that you have chosen to subordinate your baser impulses to your native decency.”

Then she batted her eyelashes.

There was no other word for it. In a performance notable for its understatedness, it was a glaring misstep.

She had handled him!

From the very moment he’d wrapped his arm around her, she had adroitly led him to this, to stepping away and leaving her virtue and dignity intact.

“Very good,” he said with terse admiration. “Excellent. If you had dispensed with the last bit, you would have finished me to a turn.”

Her eyes widened.

“But, those lashes…” He shook his head. “A disappointment, I don’t mind telling you. Such a tired old chestnut. Really. ’Twas beneath you.”

“’Tisn’t a chestnut,” she said, making no effort even to pretend not to know what he was talking about. “It is a standard. A tried-and-true method.”

More of her willful tresses had uncoiled from her coiffure, falling in long ribbons that bobbed and swayed with each insignificant movement. His gaze swept over her delicate collarbone, the first modest hint of cleavage above the discreet neckline coloring with a slight flush, spreading like rosy dawn over a snowy landscape.

“You have had much success with the technique?” he asked. If she saw the glint in his Satan-bright eyes, she did not heed it.

“Hm?” She stared up at him. Her lips had parted slightly and looked invitingly soft and accessible. What was she playing now?

“Oh, no,” he said firmly. “We are beyond pretense. Have you managed to dissuade many overfamiliar swains in a similar manner to the one with which you just so expertly managed me?”

“Hm?” She blinked. “Oh. A few. Though not many have gotten far enough along in their—” She flushed. “Well, you know.”

“I suppose I am flattered?”

She smiled, damn her, as if that was exactly what he should feel.

“And what do they do,” he went on smoothly, “after you have them tongue-tied and wretched as hell but altogether uncertain how they went from holding a woman who had inflamed their senses to one who much more resembled their spinster governesses?”

“Generally, they release me,” she suggested artlessly.

The minx stood in need of a lesson. Exasperation at her machinations, irritation at how easily he had been manipulated, and fury at her assumptions about his profligate sexual history mixed together in a potent brew.

“Far be it from me to disappoint.”

He dropped her.

It was not a very long fall, as she was already lying supine in his arm, a mere foot or two above the floor, and he didn’t release her entirely, so her fall was broken. But still, it caught her by surprise.

With a soundless “oh!” she landed in a swirl of muslin and unadorned petticoats, exposing pretty, slender calves clad in silk stockings tied with pale green satin ribbons. What little of her coiffure had remained intact tumbled over her face.

He regarded her expectantly, hands on hips, preparing himself for indignation or anger or even, though he profoundly hoped she would bypass this last, mortification. She looked up, pushing back a curtain of gleaming blonde hair, her beautiful, composed face no longer composed and self-possessed but bright with…laughter. “Touché!”

No scowls, no temper, no reproach.

And with that—a simple, gaily tossed out “touché!”—Ramsey Munro, poor sot that he knew himself to be, realized he was in love with Helena Nash.

DISENGAGE:

a small movement of the blade under the opponent’s blade with the intent to escape

RAM STOOD LOOKING DOWN at her with the oddest expression on his face. When Helena was a girl, there had been an episode when the sugarplums that their father had liked left on the sideboard to ease any midday hunger pangs had started mysteriously disappearing. So one day he had enlisted Helena to stand guard with him in the butler’s pantry, which led off the dining room. After an hour’s wait, who should saunter into the dining room but their lapdog, Milo.

Milo had taken a casual look around, leapt blithely atop the table, and begun gobbling down sweets. Whereupon her father, armed with a slingshot, had promptly pelted the little bugger in the arse with some dry peas. Milo had shot straight up in the air and spun around, looking exactly like Ram did now, somewhere between panic and astonishment, with a dollop of horror thrown in for good measure.

What was the man thinking?

She hadn’t meant to be so forward. She hadn’t meant to ask him about his inheritance. She hadn’t meant to let him see her irritation when she’d been unable to strike the requested pose. She most certainly hadn’t meant to mention his conquests. But from the moment he touched her, she knew that the attraction she had hoped desperately had been a result of moonlight, masks, and madness, was just as potent in a bright, empty room when he thought she was a beautiful cipher rather than a hedonistic romp. And that is when she realized that he could have from her anything he wanted with only the smallest of efforts. And what could the future marquis of Cottrell want from a paid companion he had just become reacquainted with except what he had had, by own admission, from countless other ladies?