They both knew why.
She’d become superfluous to needs.
The countess was all but his.
Beatrix hadn’t needed to stay to see it play out.
Dev watched her, closely, as if he saw all this behind her eyes. At last, he spoke, “Do you know what I like about charades?”
She shook her head. She was about to take another bite of cake, but found only crumbs. Another slice would be necessary—and perhaps another after that—even as she suspected there wasn’t enough chocolate cake in the world to see her through the next few minutes…the next few days…the next eternity of years.
“When you play charades, you can be anyone.”
That rasp in his voice…
She knew it.
But more importantly—more urgently—her body knew it, as it slipped beneath skin and slid through veins with every beat of her heart.
Before her no longer sat a friend—but temptation personified.
“Anyone?” she asked. “Like us playing at being friends?”
His head cocked. “Aren’t we friends?”
“I think you know what we are.”
And there it was.
The telling rasp in her own voice.
Dev detected opportunity.
An opportunity to turn this conversation into one more to his liking…
Intosomething more.
And, simply, he wasn’t above it.
“We could be anyone.”
Her tongue swiped across her bottom lip. “Anyone?”
“We could even be…” He let the incomplete thought tease through the air. Unconsciously, she swayed forward, as if afraid to miss a single syllable of its resolve. “We could even be two lovers who want nothing more than to ravish one another.” He allowed that to sink in before he asked, “Lady Godiva Gallop, I presume?”
Her right eyebrow lifted a questioning increment. He supposed the eyebrow of the daughter of a marquess would. Yet…interest flickered within her eyes.
He managed as good a bow as one could while seated. “Lord Devil, at your service.”
Surely, she saw it, too—freedom.
Tonight, they didn’t have to be themselves, but rather these fictions of themselves.
But that was the thing about fiction.
Sometimes, it could speak the truth with more eloquence than reality.
“Your reputation precedes you, my lord.” Her voice had gone low and throaty.
