He cleared his throat, but found no available words. He nodded once, curtly.
“Besides,” she began, the mean hint of a smile playing about her lips, “the Comte de Villefranche certainly is handsome.”
The suggestion embedded within those words cut Nick to his core. But he deserved it, for it had been he who had set the idea of seduction into motion. She’d simply been the one to vocalize it. The matter was moot now.
Mariana was going to seduce another man. And he had no one to blame except himself. His blood boiled at the thought.
“I do have a request, though.”
“Yes?” he asked, the monosyllable hesitant and wary. He wouldn’t like whatever words next emerged from her mouth.
“You lose the voice.”
He didn’t need to ask. He knew the voice she spoke of. He’d long been aware of how his popinjay persona grated on her nerves. Now she was stripping his already meager arsenal of one of his most effective defenses against her. “As you like,” he granted. Surely, he could devise other defenses.
Her smile brightened, dispelling the impenetrable fog of their ticklish past. “It will be a lark.”
A prickle of foreboding raised the hairs on Nick’s neck. “Alark?” The word rang false to his ears. He took a step back, hoping to gain a little perspective. “You’re not the larking sort.”
“No?” A daring glint lit her eyes. “For England. How is that?”
“I’m not certain,” he said, the words emerging syllable by slow syllable in a weak effort to buy time.
What was happening? She’d turned the tables on him.
Of course, she had.
Arrayed before him in a state of partial undress, both impossibly sensual and impossible to ignore, stood the Mariana of his dreams and his nightmares: denuded of jewels; dress falling off her luscious form; gold locket temptingly nestled between her breasts; her face infused with a youthful eagerness he’d believed a memory. She looked so open . . . so Mariana . . .
A problem with his plan hit Nick with the force of a lightning strike: Mariana’s open face. How could he have overlooked the trait that defined Mariana as . . . Mariana? Spies didn’t possess open faces. At least, successful spies didn’t. And definitely not the ones who lived.
A shot of regret tore through him. What had he begun?
“When do I begin?” she asked as if privy to his thoughts.
“Tomorrow you accept Villefranche’s invitation to shop in the Palais-Royal.” Was that panic in his voice?
“I suppose yourpeoplereported that conversation back to you?”
Nick nodded. “I shall be in touch.” With that, he pivoted on a heel and fled the room.
Perhaps he fled her keen face.
Perhaps he fled his budding desire to tell her the truth about ten years ago. He definitely fled desire. Except, this desire had naught to do with the past. This desire lived squarely in the present, base and implacable.
And it wasn’t the truth either of them needed.
~ ~ ~
Mariana lay atop the bed’s soft damask coverlet, watching flickering shadows dance about her ceiling. As a child, she would imagine they were the shadows of fairies come to protect her as she slept. This twilight stage between waking and sleep had been her favorite part of bedtime. She hadn’t been the dreamy sort of girl who frolicked about vast imagined landscapes. She’d been too grounded in the present. Except for this one bit of whimsy that came to her every night as she relaxed and sank into slumber.
She understood this would be her last stretch of stillness for some time. Once before, she’d experienced this singular feeling: the night before her wedding. She’d sensed then, as now, that she was about to step over an edge, and there would be no turning back. Gravity didn’t work that way. It pulled one toward an inevitable conclusion, and she never was one to hesitate on the brink of a precipice. She simply went right over.
Tonight, she’d hesitated. She and Nick created a gravity of their own. And they’d reached their inevitable conclusion once before.Ten years. It was so very long ago, and, yet, it felt like yesterday.
When her eyes had held his and his fingers brushed the space between her shoulder blades as his breath caressed the nape of her neck, she’d longed, yearned, ached for the press of his body against hers. Not because she didn’t remember, but because shedid.
Her eyelids fluttered shut. As the fairies eased her into sleep, a hopeful note sounded. The grim past didn’t have to push its way into the present. It was true that a gravitational thread linked them, one with no connection to their shared name or children. Nick had always been able to ignore it. Why not she, too?
