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“It’s a great deal to me.”
She rose abruptly in a rustle of silk. Surprised—again—he was slow coming to his feet.
“I need air,” she said. “It grows warm in here.”
He opened the door to the corridor and she swept past him. He followed her out, his pulse racing.
Marcelline had seen him countless times, from as little as a few yards away. She’d observed a handsome, expensively elegant English aristocrat.
At close quarters…
She was still reeling.
The body first. She’d surreptitiously studied that while he made polite chitchat with Sylvie. The splendid physique was not, as she’d assumed, created or even assisted by fine tailoring, though the tailoring was exquisite. His broad shoulders were not padded, and his tapering torso wasn’t cinched in by anything but muscle.
Muscle everywhere—the arms, the long legs. And no tailor could create the lithe power emanating from that tall frame.
It’s hot in here, was her first coherent thought.
Then he was standing in front of her, bending over her hand, and the place grew hotter still.
She was aware of his hair, black curls gleaming like silk and artfully tousled.
He lifted his head.
She saw a mouth that should have been a woman’s, so full and sensuous it was. But it was pure male, purely carnal.
An instant later she was looking up into eyes of a rare color—a green like jade—while a low masculine voice caressed her ear and seemed to be caressing parts of her not publicly visible.
Good grief.
She walked quickly as they left the box, thinking quickly, too, as she went. She was aware of the clusters of opera-goers in the corridor making way for her. That amused her, even while she pondered the unexpected problem walking alongside.
She’d known the Duke of Clevedon was a handful.
She’d vastly underestimated.
Still, she was a Noirot, and the risks only excited her.
She came to rest at last in a quieter part of the corridor, near a window. For a time, she gazed out of the window. It showed her only her own reflection: a magnificently dressed, alluring woman, a walking advertisement for what would one day—soon, with a little help from him—be London’s foremost dressmaking establishment. Once they had the Duchess of Clevedon, royal patronage was sure to follow: the moon and the stars, almost within her grasp.
“I hope you’re not unwell, madame,” he said in his English-accented French.
“No, but it occurs to me that I’ve been absurd,” she said. “What a ridiculous wager it is!”
He smiled. “You’re not backing down? Is riding with me in the Bois de Boulogne so dreadful a fate?”
It was a boyish smile, and he spoke with a self-deprecating charm that must have slain the morals of hundreds of women.
She said, “As I see it, either way I win. No matter how I look at it, this wager is silly. Only think, when I tell you whether you’re right or wrong, how will you know I’m telling the truth?”
“Did you think I’d demand your passport?” he said.
“Were you planning to take my word for it?” she said.
“Of course.”
“That may be gallant or it may be naïve,” she said. “I can’t decide which.”
“You won’t lie to me,” he said.
Had her sisters been present, they would have fallen down laughing.
“That’s an exceptionally fine diamond,” she said. “If you think a woman wouldn’t lie to have it, you’re catastrophically innocent.”
The arresting green gaze searched her face. In English he said, “I was wrong, completely wrong. I see it now. You’re English.”
She smiled. “What gave me away? The plain speaking?”
“More or less,” he said. “If you were French, we should be debating what truth is. They can’t let anything alone. They must always put it under the microscope of philosophy. It’s rather endearing, but they’re so predictable in that regard. Everything must be anatomized and sorted. Rules. They need rules. They make so many.”
“That wouldn’t be a wise speech, were I a French-woman,” she said.
“But you’re not. We’ve settled it.”
“Have we?”
He nodded.
“You wagered in haste,” she said. “Are you always so rash?”
“Sometimes, yes,” he said. “But you had me at a disadvantage. You’re like no one I’ve ever met before.”
“Yet in some ways I am,” she said. “My parents were English.”
“And a little French?” he said. Humor danced in his green eyes, and her cold, calculating heart gave a little skip in response.
Damn, but he was good.
“A very little,” she said. “One purely French great-grandfather. But he and his sons fancied Englishwomen.”
“One great-grandfather is too little to count,” he said. “I’m stuck all over with French names, but I’m hopelessly English—and typically slow, except to jump to wrong conclusions. Ah, well. Farewell, my little pin.” He brought his hands up to remove it.
He wore gloves, but she knew they didn’t hide calluses or broken nails. His hands would be typical of his class: smooth and neatly manicured. They were larger than was fashionable, though, the fingers long and graceful.
Well, not so graceful at the moment. His valet had placed the pin firmly and precisely among the folds of his neckcloth, and he was struggling with it.
Or seeming to.
“You’d better let me,” she said. “You can’t see what you’re doing.”
She moved his hands away, hers lightly brushing his. Glove against glove, that was all. Yet she felt the shock of contact as though skin had touched skin, and the sensation traveled the length of her body.
She was acutely aware of the broad chest under the expensive layers of neckcloth and waistcoat and shirt. All the same, her hands neither faltered nor trembled. She’d had years of practice. Years of holding cards steady while her heart pounded. Years of bluffing, never letting so much as a flicker of an eye, a twitch of a facial muscle, betray her.
The pin came free, winking in the light. She regarded the snowy linen she’d wrinkled.
“How naked it looks,” she said. “Your neckcloth.”
“What is this?” he said. “Remorse?”
“Never,” she said, and that was pristine truth. “But the empty place offends my aesthetic sensibilities.”
“In that case, I shall hasten to my hotel and have my valet replace it.”
“You’re strangely eager to please,” she said.
“There’s nothing strange about it.”
“Be calm, your grace,” she said. “I have an exquisite solution.”
She took a pin from her bodice and set his in its place. She set her pin into the neckcloth. Hers was nothing so magnificent as his, merely a smallish pearl. But it was a pretty one, of a fine luster. Softly it glowed in its snug place among the folds of his linen.
She was aware of his gaze, so intent, and of the utter stillness with which he waited.
She lightly smoothed the surrounding fabric, then stepped back and eyed her work critically. “That will do very well,” she said.
“Will it?” He was looking at her, not the pearl.
“Let the window be your looking glass,” she said.
He was still watching her.
“The glass, your grace. You might at least admire my handiwork.”
“I do,” he said. “Very much.”
But he turned away, wearing the faintest smile, and studied himself in the glass.
“I see,” he said. “Your eye is as good as my valet’s—and that’s a compliment I don’t give lightly.”
“My eye ought to be good,” she said. “I’m the greatest modiste in all the world.”
His heart beat erratically.
With excitement, what else? And why not?
Truly, she was like no one he’d ever met before.
Paris was another world from London, and French women were another species from English. Even so, he’d grown accustomed to the sophistication of Parisian women, sufficiently accustomed to predict the turn of a wrist, the movement of a fan, the angle of the head in almost any situation. Rules, as he’d told her. The French lived by rules.
This woman made her own rules.
“And so modest a modiste she is,” he said.
She laughed, but hers was not the silvery laughter he was accustomed to. It was low and intimate, not meant for others to hear. She was not trying to make heads turn her way, as other women did. Only his head was required.
And he did turn away from the window to look at her.
“Perhaps, unlike everyone else in the opera house, you failed to notice,” she said. She swept her closed fan over her dress.
He let his gaze travel from the slightly disheveled coiffure down. Before, he’d taken only the most superficial notice of what she wore. His awareness was mainly of her physicality: the lushly curved body, the clarity of her skin, the brilliance of her eyes, the soft disorder of her hair.
Now he took in the way that enticing body was adorned: the black lace cloak or tunic or whatever it was meant to be, over rich pink silk—the dashing arrangement of color and trim and jewelry, the—the—
“Style,” she said.
Within him was a pause, a doubt, a moment’s uneasiness. His mind, it seemed, was a book to her, and she’d already gone beyond the table of contents and the introduction, straight to the first chapter.
But what did it matter? She, clearly no innocent, knew what he wanted.
“No, madame. I didn’t notice,” he said. “All I saw was you.”
“That is exactly the right thing to say to a woman,” she said. “And exactly the wrong thing to say to a dressmaker.”
“I beg you to be a woman for the present,” he said. “As a dressmaker, you waste your talents on me.”
“Not at all,” she said. “Had I been badly dressed, you would not have entered Mademoiselle Fontenay’s box. Even had you been so rash as to disregard the dictates of taste, the Comte d’Orefeur would have saved you from a suicidal error, and declined to make the introduction.”
“Suicidal? I detect a tendency to exaggerate.”
“Regarding taste? May I remind you, we’re in Paris.”
“At the moment, I don’t care where I am,” he said.
Again, the low laughter. He felt the sound, as though her breath touched the back of his neck.
“I’d better watch out,” she said. “You’re determined to sweep me off my feet.”
“You started it,” he said. “You swept me off mine.”
“If you’re trying to turn me up sweet, to get back your diamond, it won’t work,” she said.
“If you think I’ll give back your pearl, I recommend you think again,” he said.
“Don’t be absurd,” she said. “You may be too romantic to care that your diamond is worth fifty such pearls, but I’m not. You may keep the pearl, with my blessing. But I must return to Mademoiselle Fontenay—and here is your friend monsieur le comte, who has come to prevent your committing the faux pas of returning with me. I know you are enchanted, devastated, your grace, and yes, I am desolée to lose your company—it is so refreshing to meet a man with a brain—but it won’t do. I cannot be seen to favor a gentleman. It’s bad for business. I shall simply hope to see you at another time. Perhaps tomorrow at Longchamp where, naturally, I shall display my wares.”
Orefeur joined them as the signal came for the end of the interval. A young woman waved to her, and Madame Noirot took her leave, with a quick, graceful curtsey and—for Clevedon’s eyes only—a teasing look over her fan.
