The Art of Ruining a Rake (36 page)

Perfect. She was off to an excellent start.

Exciting,
she wrote below it.
Frightening. Fullness. Completion. Messy. Torrid. Tender. Delightful. Soaring. Lov—

“What are you doing?”

She slammed her pen down and covered the page with her hand as best she could, given the wet ink. Even she knew her expression was full of guilt.

Roman rested against the head of her bed. He watched her with one brow arched in idle amusement. “It’s
my
job to compose sonnets to your beauty.”

She laughed in spite of herself. “I wasn’t,” she assured him.

“No?” He bent an arm to support the back of his head. His muscles bunched as he shifted his hips under the covers. “Then allow me to achieve a better pose.”

Her mouth went dry. She couldn’t take eyes from the very virile picture he made, dominating her bed like that. “Pardon?”

“If you’re going to draw me, I want to look rakish.” He ran his hand through his hair, sending curls askew so he appeared to have just woken up, or just been thoroughly ravished. “How is this? Better?”

She closed her mouth. It must have fallen open. If she’d noticed the cold air earlier, she didn’t now. “I’m not sketching you,” she managed, though her mouth was so parched she was surprised the words managed to escape.

“That’s a pity.” His handsome face crested in feigned disappointment. Then he tilted his head back against the headboard and pretended to make a study of the ceiling. “What could it be, I wonder?” He glanced at her. “Are you keeping a diary?” Then he slanted a wolfish grin at her. “Can I read it?”

She vigorously shook her head no.

“But what could you be doing…?” A thought seemed to come to him. He sat up so suddenly, the coverlet fell into his lap.

She couldn’t
not
stare at the pool of material barely covering his hips—or the tantalizing trail of blond hair kissing his navel.

“Are you working on your novel?” He gestured as though he held his walking stick, but he was in fact entirely nude. “You must read it to me!”

“Oh, no. No. I couldn’t.” She physically shied away from the idea.

One of his feet poked from beneath the coverlet to hang over the edge of the mattress. He leaned forward as if in anticipation. “I won’t leave until you do.”

“I’ll rip it into tiny shreds,” she warned, taking up a few sheets as if to do just that.

“That
seems disadvantageous to you, somehow.” He shrugged as if it were no concern to him what she chose to do with her manuscript. “But by all means, have your way.”

“Tease me all you want.” She looked forlornly at the stack of sheets perched on the edge of her desk. The mere thought of sharing it with him filled her with such dread, she would gladly toss it into the fire rather than read it aloud. “I
can’t
read it to you. I’ve barely written a page that doesn’t need to be burnt.”

She felt his warm chuckle all the way across the room.

Not that the room was large; perhaps two meters separated her from the man in her bed. Two very short meters.

“It’s not easy, is it?” he asked. “I tried once.”

Her mouth dropped open again. “You didn’t!”

He laughed. “It’s not my cup of tea. I prefer poetry. If one can be very vague or very specific, the highest sticklers will fill in what they wish to read. The unwashed masses will always assume you’ve written prose too deep for their feeble minds to grasp.”

She still couldn’t credit what he was telling her.
“Poetry?”

He laughed again. At her surprise? Or was it nervous laughter, a bit self-conscious? “Oh, gobs of it. Nothing anyone will ever see, of course. But it’s hard to play the broken-hearted poet if one doesn’t actually put pen to paper. One must truly
feel
to write. But all the anguish in the world will not make one a poet if one never takes down a word.”

In spite of her surprise—and her many questions—she considered this. “I suppose I always thought you were just pretending to be an artiste.”

“No, no, I write because I must.” That nervous laughter again. “I wrote
books
of bad poetry this year.”

Her gaze flew to his face. Did he mean because of her?

He held her hopeful look, until she was almost sure he meant her.

“Your novel?” he prodded. “Poor James and his intimidating, lovely Caro?”

She grimaced again. “Poor me.”

He seemed to study her for too long. Then he winked. “The only thing worse than staring at a blank page is trying to explain your ideas to a man naked in your bed.”

She arched a brow. “Do you have a great deal of experience with that, my lord?”

His answering chuckle reminded her that he very much
was
a man naked in her bed. She could join him…

He threw his right leg over the edge, then simultaneously tossed the coverlet away and reached for his shirtsleeves where they were wadded on the floor. His broad back, buttocks and long legs were clearly visible in the early light as he shrugged into the white linen. He collected his breeches and drew those on, too.
 

She admired the strong yet vulnerable curve of his Achilles tendon. A sinking feeling betrayed her when she wished he wouldn’t leave. Even if he very much should. “I suppose Trestin must know you’re still here,” she started to say, but Roman came toward her instead, with his shirtsleeves gaping at the neck and his calves bared to the chill of the room.

He whisked the basket of logs from off its stool by the fire, set it on the floor, then hooked his foot under the lowest ladder rung. With his toe he flung the stool across the floor. It clattered up to her escritoire where he came and sat wide-legged upon it. “Now, tell me exactly where you’ve left off.”

His hands draped between them. His nearness loomed ten times larger than the man himself. And yet, he was a gentle giant. When he reached for the pink sash of her wrap and toyed idly with it, she felt as if he were tugging directly at her heart.
 

Then she remembered what she’d been working on. She looked at the list of emotions he made her feel and could have burned with mortification. Before he could follow her eyes or wonder at her cheeks turning scarlet, she flipped the page over.

“You’ve made me very curious now.” His voice was a caress even though a foot or so separated them. “Maybe I’ll just start guessing. Is he down on bended knee? Have they had a row—a messy one—from which their love may never recover? Or perhaps they’re engaging in a bit of,” he waggled his eyebrows, “romance?”

“I would like them to be doing all of those things,” she said honestly, “but I can’t think how to make it go. I’ve got them introduced, and they’ve had some sparkling conversation, but I’m not quite certain how to show how they feel for one another. And I’m a little soft on the middle.”

“Oh, but the end is
magical,
” he supplied with a wicked smile.

She shook her head slowly, feeling entirely serious. “I fear it’s
all
a haze. No matter how much I devote myself to it, how desperately I wish to be successful, I can’t seem to move forward. ’Tis a foolish dream I have, to be an authoress. I haven’t the slightest notion how to write a story.”

He shrugged as though she’d said a very true thing, but he didn’t necessarily agree with her. “Why don’t you tell me a bit about your hero, and see if we can’t unstick you? We know his name is James.”

She didn’t need his opinion if he was just going to make light of things. “Yes.”

“A good start. What else do you know about him? What does he like? What does he do?”

“Well,” she said slowly, “he’s a marquis.”

Roman’s lopsided smile devastated her. “All the best men are. What else?”

“Well,” she said, trying to recall the few details she knew about James, given Roman was projecting the full force of his attention on her. “He has a horse,” she said lamely.

“A horse! Surely he has more than that for excitement!”

“Don’t tease!”

He instantly sobered. “It was bad of me. Go on. I won’t interrupt again, I promise.”

She wouldn’t hold him to that. But she
did
want to talk to him, if only to organize her own thoughts.

With a few more probing questions, he had it all out of her. She told him everything she knew about James, the marquis of Somewhere. Then she told him about Caroline, and soon she had a short list of thoughts scribbled in a margin of the page.

“It
must end in disaster,” he advised her after a bout of introspection. “I think James’s heart must be entirely broken before he can ever realize what a gem he has in Caro.”

He’d said something similar before, but it was one thing to know her characters must suffer and another to know how that suffering should go. “But if she agrees to marry Lord Preston,” Lucy reasoned, “and our James suffers public humiliation for it, why on earth would he ever return? He can have his pick of ladies. He doesn’t need Caro. Especially not if she is seemingly indifferent to him.”

Roman reached for her sash again, but at the last moment he drew back. His finger traced across the silky fabric of her wrap draping her chair. Not touching her thigh, but promising to. If she but asked him.

She forgot to inhale as he silently stroked the pale peach fabric.
Let me touch you,
he seemed to be saying.
Make me yours again.

His brilliant blue eyes raised to hers. “He has no choice. He is hers.”

Lucy jerked away. But his touch remained, a rhythmic slide of his finger against her defenses. “I-I think I have enough to start,” she said. “Thank you.”

He set one hand on the escritoire and the other on the back of her chair. The wooden furniture creaked as he leaned forward. Her heart thumped so loudly, surely he could hear it. She forced herself not to look anywhere but straight ahead. What was he doing? Why must he be so
understanding
?

He brushed his lips across the curve of her cheek. She closed her eyes. She wouldn’t kiss him. Not again.

There was a rustle, and then an emptiness. The
swish
of his coat being drawn on spoiled the silence. She opened her eyes, but she couldn’t look for him. The pages on her desk blurred together as she stared blindly at them. Men had intercourse with women all the time and it meant nothing. Why must it mean something to her?

His boot steps sounded behind her. The door made a little squeaking sound as it opened. “The story
doesn’t
end,” he said in a voice that sent shivers down her arms, “until James has Caro. But only you can decide when that happens. When it’s right.”

She spun around. The door closed behind Roman. Feeling suddenly hollow, she turned back toward her desk. The page she’d been staring at came into focus. It wasn’t the one she’d been working on with him, but the first page, her half scene with the list. Roman must have turned it over.

Her heart raced as she read the words she’d written in her own hand.
Messy. Torrid. Tender. Delightful. Soaring. Lov

Dear Zeus.

ROMAN CONTEMPLATED THE list of his expenses in his hand. It had been delivered this morning from his solicitor, crisply folded in three sections, and its contents weighed heavily on his mind.

In the last week he’d become familiar with the outflow of cash required for the construction of the quarry. Those costs were covered by the moneys invested in the project, moneys supplied by men like Mr. Barton-Wright. But those funds couldn’t be diverted to cover the ordinary costs of his estate or London home, nor could they be spent on personal expenditures such as cravats, coats, brandy and the like. If he was to extricate himself from his insolvency, leaving him free to marry Lucy, he must pay these daily costs and his existing debts some other way.

Trouble was, he knew no other way.

He looked again at the ledger page. Two thousand and eighteen pounds. Not a crippling debt. Not like Dare’s. With a little self-restraint and a moderate influx of cash, he could eliminate his liabilities and pay his bills. If only he could think of a way to raise the ready.

“I’m impressed to see you’ve laid it all bare,” Tony said as he ambled into the library. “The first good look in the mirror I’ve seen you take.”

Roman laid the letter facedown. “I couldn’t desire your opinion less.”