“And then this girl popped up,” Robert said. “And suddenly you were awake again. Perplexing, I would imagine.”
“Quite.”
“So you came here for advice on how one circumvents all deeper feeling in the pursuit of pleasure?” Robert asked. “I am the expert.”
“No.” Matthew chuckled. “I’m here because last night, when it was all over, she saw my face. And she ran.”
Robert leaned back in the settee with a shake of his head. “My God, it’s like a novel. Or a children’s story with a very naughty twist. You think she recognized you?”
“It’s the best explanation. She knows me somehow and it terrified her. So she ran. And I…want to find out who she is. Will you help me?”
Robert arched a brow. “Me? Why would you ask me? I’m the one who would sigh in relief if a lady ran away after making love. Makes the set down a bit easier.”
“Somehow I doubt your ego would love a woman running, practically screaming from your bed,” Matthew said. “And I’m asking you because Hugh is distracted, Kit is…dealing with his father’s illness and everyone else is—”
“Pushy,” Robert finished. “Very pushy since they married.”
Matthew nodded. “That’s one word for it. If I mentioned an interest in a woman, no matter how unsavory the beginning, they would start falling over each other encouraging me to marry for love like they have. One of us four must be the next, in their eyes.”
Robert recoiled. “Well, it won’t be me. You and I already discussed this.”
“Itcan’tbe me,” Matthew said. “I barely allowed myself to take a little pleasure last night. I’m not thinking about forever.”
“And yet you want to find her,” Robert said.
Matthew rolled his eyes. “Don’t you start. I want to find her because her reaction troubled me. I need to know why she was so frightened when she saw my face.”
“No other reason,” Robert drawled.
Matthew felt heat in his cheeks. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. It was one night of pleasure—I had no expectation of anything more. You of all people should know that feeling.”
Robert held up his hands, almost in surrender. Then he smiled. “It is good to see you driven by something other than grief. I’ll help you. Only it won’t be easy. Rivers guards his membership roster jealously.”
“It’s in his best interest to do so, of course,” Matthew said. “But does that mean there’s no hope in discovering who she is?”
“I can check around, ask some questions, grease some wheels with a little blunt,” Robert said.
“I don’t need you to—”
“Don’t you dare take away my pleasure in this little game,” his friend interrupted. “I have more than enough to play. Your best bet, however, might simply be to keep going to the Donville Masquerade. She was going there before, we know at least twice.”
“You think she would return after such an abrupt exit?” Matthew asked, and his heart leapt at the thought.
Robert shrugged. “I have no idea what goes on in the minds of women. But if this encounter between you was powerful enough to inspire you to chase, inspired her to run…it follows that she might return to the scene of the…crimemight be too strong a word.”
“Yes, thank you,” Matthew said. “Very well. I can do that. I’ll go back to the Donville and continue looking for her. And if you can find out her identity before I see her again, then all the better.”
“What do you intend to do when you find her?” Robert asked.
Matthew opened and shut his mouth a few times. There was a question he’d been trying very hard not to answer, even to himself. Check on her was the first answer that rushed to his lips, but he knew that his desire went far deeper than that. Deep enough that it was not something he wished to ponder overly much.
He’d find her. And what to do would become clear then.
Isabel watched as her uncle paced in front of the portrait of Angelica. The fact that he had insisted they take their tea in this parlor, in front of the shrine he had built there to the daughter he’d lost, was not helping Isabel’s nerves whatsoever.
Every time she looked at Angelica’s beautiful face, she thought of Tyndale, poised between her own thighs, his wonderful tongue doing wildly pleasurable things.
She thought of that, and the moment when his mask had slipped and she’d realized that the man who had given her such pleasure was the very one Uncle Fenton had been railing on about for years. The one he believed had killed her cousin.
