A tense moment passed, him awaiting her response with bated breath, her making him. She batted his thigh with her fan. “I fear you’re the naughtiest man I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet, duke.”
His gaze turned imploring. “Come to my masquerade.”
Ah.Now, they were getting somewhere. “Your masquerade?”
“Tomorrow night at my manse.” He threw Jamie a hostile glare. “Clare knows the address.”
Hortense drew back, breaking the intimacy of their littletête-a-tête. It wouldn’t do to have the man thinking her eager to accept his offer. After all, the opportunity she’d been shamelessly flirting her way toward had landed in her lap. She modulated her response to utter indifference. “Send an invitation to Asquith Court tomorrow, and I shall consider it.”
A comically dumbfounded expression spread across Rothesbury’s face. What sort of woman refused a duke’s masquerade? He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes, and she knew. He was eating out of the palm of her hand. This duke very much wanted to find out what sort of woman.
Tomorrow night, she and Jamie would be able to pull off the switch for the tiara currently gracing the head of Lady Selborne. How incredibly fast and easily this job was nearing its conclusion.
And when it was done, they would be out of each other’s lives.
A part of her that she kept trying to suppress—and mostly failing—didn’t like that last bit, but she’d known it all along.
Lady Selborne leaned forward. “Are you speaking of the masquerade, Rothesbury?”
“We are.”
The lady swiveled toward Jamie. “Oh, do come!”
He gave a noncommittal grunt. The man was decidedly grumpy, which annoyed Hortense. Didn’t he understand how to play a role? Did he have to be so decidedly himself?
Yet at the same time, she rather liked this about him. He built up no artifice.
It was damned attractive.
But, mayhap, the time had arrived to put him out of his suffering. The night’s objective had been achieved. “Husband, shall we go for a stroll about the grounds? Mayhap you could use some air.”
“Ah, a splendid idea,” said Rothesbury. “Shall we all go—”
Jamie’s eyes narrowed to angry slits. “Not you.”
The duke gave an indulgent laugh and held up hands in surrender. “Don’t stray too long.”
Two minutes later, Hortense and Jamie were again strolling the Grand Walk, arm in arm. Well,stridingwas more accurate.
“Rothesbury isn’t chasing us,” she said, her steps two to his one.
He took the hint and slowed his pace, his mouth pressed into a firm, silent line.
She wasn’t having it. “If you have something to say to me, then out with it. Petty resentments can’t lie between partners on a job.”
Incredulous eyes rounded on her. “Petty?”
“Is this about thatlittlebit?”
He snorted. “Did you have to be so…so—”
“Flirtatious?” she finished for him.
“Provocative,” he finished for himself.
“Yes.” Let that sit and simmer inside him a few steps. Sometimes bluntness was the only way. “I am seducing the man, after all.”
A strangled noise emerged from Jamie.
