As they stepped around the corner, he grabbed her wrist and yanked her into a curtained alcove where broken plasters and a ladder leaned against one wall. Then his mouth met hers in a hard, hungry kiss. He pressed her back against the wall with the length of his lean body, and his hands swept up her hips to brush breathlessly across her breasts.
Alexandra gasped, sweeping her arms around his shoulders and pulling herself closer against him. Her heart thudded so hard she thought he must be able to feel it in his own chest. Oh, God, she wanted what he kept offering her—to be the focus of his attention, his desire, to be touched and held and loved. It would be so easy to give in. Everyone thought she’d already done it anyway. Everyone but her—and Lucien Balfour.
Slowly he lifted his head. “You want me, don’t you?” he whispered, his gray eyes dark and deceptively lazy.
With every bit of remaining willpower, she shook her head. “No. I don’t.”
He kissed her again, his tongue teasing at her teeth. “Liar.”
Alexandra clung to him, trying to regain her breath and her sanity, and at the same time wanting him to continue kissing her. “I am not anyone’s mistress,” she gasped, reluctantly letting her hands slide from his shoulders.
“Those are only words, Alexandra,” he murmured, but released her.
“So are ‘food’ and ‘clothing,’” she said, feeling cold as he backed off to allow her to pass. “They’re also real things that I need to survive. I won’t rely on your continuing desire for me to keep me fed. I stand on my own.”
Lucien looked at her for a long moment. “I will find out who has made you so determined to survive with no help from anyone,” he said quietly.
Shakily she straightened her hair. “You might ask yourself the same question, while you’re at it.” She left the alcove.
“No, cross her off, too, damn it.”
Mr. Mullins looked up from the list spread across the office desk. “As you wish, my lord. Might I ask why, though? Her family is quite wealthy, and there are no siblings, and—”
Lucien plunked his chin into his hand. “She squints.”
“Ah. Perhaps you might suggest…eyeglasses?”
“If she had any intelligence, she would have taken care of that herself.” The murmur of female voices drifted to him from the sitting room, and he caught his breath, listening. They’d bloody well better not be talking about him.
“Well, with the elimination of Miss Barrett, who you say is…” He flipped through several pages of notes.
“A mouth breather,” Lucien finished, rising. Now the chits down the hall seemed to be laughing. Ballroom etiquette lessons did not involve laughter, as far as he knew.
“Yes, that’s right. With her elimination, then, only five prospects remain for your perusal.”
“What?” Lucien shook himself. “Yes. Five. That hardly seems enough from which to choose. Find me some more.”
The solicitor made a choking sound. “More?”
“More. Do you have some difficulty with that?”
“No, my lord. It’s just that…well, I thought the idea was to eliminate all prospects but one—that one being the lady you would then—”
“Excuse me,” Lucien said, and left the room.
“Marry,” Mr. Mullins finished, sighing.
As Lucien strode down the hallway toward the sitting room, the muted voices of his houseguests became clearer. He slowed, listening to the unlikely sound of Rose reading Rosalind’s part inAs You Like It, her voice halting and slow, and pausing in all the wrong places. “‘But are you so much in love as your rhymes speak?’”
Alexandra’s voice, much more confident with the words of the hero, Orlando, followed. “‘Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much.’”
Her musical tone stirred his pulse, and he stopped outside the half-open door to listen. How long he might have stood there mesmerized, he didn’t know, because just then Aunt Fiona’s grating voice broke in. Lucien shook himself and pushed open the door the rest of the way.
“Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear earlier,” he said darkly, taking in the three of them as they sat on his couch, Alexandra and an open book in the middle. “This afternoon cousin Rose is to be tutored in preparation for the grand ball tomorrow evening.”
“But Rose adores Shakespeare,” Aunt Fiona protested, pulling the book onto her lap with far less care than it deserved. “I see no harm in indulging the dear child for one afternoon.”
“You see no harm in pink taffeta, either. Miss Gallant, a word with you?”
