He reached beneath her veil, cupped her cheek. The contact jolted him. Her skin was smooth and warm, soft. His thumb found her lower lip, lush and full, stroking. Her lips parted. He’d consumed too much brandy tonight, it was certain. Otherwise, why would he feel such heat, such unadulterated attraction for a faceless woman with a Virginia drawl and an atrocity of a hat?
She didn’t say a word, just held still, allowing his touch but not reacting. Her breath fanned over his skin, quick and shallow, the only sign she was affected. Was her lack of response borne of shock? He couldn’t be sure.
“You’ve heard I’ll do anything for a price, yes?” His thumb dipped ever so slightly inside her mouth before retreating. “That is why you’re here, is it not?”
She swallowed, and he absorbed the ripple in his fingertips that rested lightly beneath her jaw. Then, her drawl, steady and calm, cut into the silence. “Do you think to frighten me into fleeing, my lord?”
The lady was even more audacious than he’d supposed. Fine. How far would she take their gamble before she broke? The hand that held her waist slid with unerring precision to the buttons lining the front of her gown. He could undo buttons faster than the most skilled lady’s maid. With one hand, with his teeth, with a knife—whatever the moment and the woman required.
He watched his handiwork. Her pelisse hung open. Her bodice gaped. He could see the elegant embroidery of her corset cover, the white ribbon at the top of her chemise. Her breasts were full and high, straining against the constriction of her tight lacing. She still hadn’t moved. “Are you not frightened yet, love?”
Perhaps he would consider her offer after all, if only for the night.
“Would it please you if I were?”
Her cool question stayed him in the act of removing the final button from its moorings. Damn it, what was he about, practically ravaging some poor sod’s wife merely because she’d appeared in his study? And for what gain? To prove a point to himself? To the enigmatic lady whose face he’d yet to behold?
Part of him wanted her to run away into the night and take with her all reminders of the man he’d become. Shouldn’t she be terrified of him, of what he could do to her? Or was she not as innocent as she seemed? Did a depraved heart beat beneath her ivory breast? He had to know. “Does fear excite you?”
“No, and neither does your posturing.”
He could so easily make a lie of her words. Julian knew when a woman was attracted to him, and this one was no different than a hundred others before her. She wanted him. He trailed his hand down her throat, feeling tension in the corded muscles. Tenderly, he caressed her as if she were already his lover. Some part of him understood that she would be, that this pull between them was inevitable. If not tonight, another.
The time for playing games was at an end. “What is your offer then, love? The night grows late and I’m tired of entertaining my whims.”
Her hands remained clasped at her waist, just below the last button he’d yet to undo. The knuckles rose in stark relief from her fine-boned fingers, belying the ease with which she spoke. “I thought you were no longer interested in offers.”
She possessed a considerable amount of mettle. He smiled, for he thoroughly enjoyed himself now in a way he had not done in quite some time. “Can a man not change his mind?”
“Of course. Man is rarely constant, I’ve discovered.”
There was a reproach in her words, though whether it was aimed at him or another, he couldn’t be certain. “Your offer, madam. What is it?”
“My offer is simple.” She unclasped her hands and reached up to remove the hideous hat and veil.
Good God, the face didn’t match the voice at all.
No indeed, it surpassed the mellifluous lure by leaps and bounds. She was beautiful, more exquisite than any goddess splashed across a canvas. Her golden hair was plaited into basket weaves. Her eyes were wide, blue, unblinking. Her mouth full and lush, her cheeks pink, her cheekbones high. She was the most gorgeous creature he’d ever seen. Who was she, and how had he never set eyes upon her before? For he couldn’t have crossed her path. He would have remembered a splendor so rare.
“Marry me,” she said.
The silence almost undid Clara. She hadn’t intended to blurt her offer so artlessly. She had rehearsed this moment at least a dozen times in the privacy of her chamber, and never had she faltered. She’d planned a lengthy soliloquy cataloging the virtues of the barter she presented him—his time and name in exchange for a share of her tremendous dowry.
But when she had practiced the bloodless listing of facts and reason, she had been alone. No one had stood before her with the looks to rival a fallen angel. No one had touched her, undone her dress, or uttered the most wicked, debauched words she’d ever heard aloud.
Dear God, perhaps she had made a mistake in choosing him. This man, tall and muscled as most English lords weren’t, more handsome even than she’d recalled from the handful of times she’d seen him from across a ballroom… This man was not at all what she had imagined, what she had prepared for.
And then, he laughed. Threw back his head and laughed as though she’d just delivered the cleverest joke he’d heard in ages. Clara reached for her buttons, beginning to set them to rights. Humiliation threatened to devour her from the inside out. She was the joke. He thought her offer of marriage so ludicrous, it seemed, that he couldn’t stem the flow of laughter pouring from him.
Maybe the earl was mad. He was certainly odd. She hadn’t been able to shake the impression that he was a great cat and she a little mouse, his to toy with, to lure and then strike when she least expected it.
If only she could repair the damage he’d done as quickly as he’d accomplished it. She had four buttons back in place and he was still laughing, damn him. That irked her into saying something else when she knew she likely should keep her peace and go back from whence she came, finding a different way to return home to Virginia.
“One hundred thousand pounds is humorous to a man in your dire financial straits?” she asked.
That finally tempered his good humor. He sobered, fixing her with that penetrating stare of his. “Who are you?”
So he didn’t recognize her, then. They had never been formally introduced, of course. She ought not to be disappointed, but some small, vain sliver of her was. “I am not a woman who should be laughed at, my lord.”
