“Why ask me about Marianne?” Delacourt asked at last. He adored Ramsbury, but he’d always warned him about playing his games with Marianne.
“She’s my friend, just as you have been, so I’m always curious about her welfare,” Ramsbury said with a dismissive shrug.
“Hmmm. Just don’t take advantage.”
“Yes, I know your rule about that,” Ramsbury said, his tone tinged with annoyance. “About her. I assure you I would never go too far.”
Finn looked out into the crowd before he responded and as he scanned over the tables close to them, his heart thudded. There was the Hellion, his Miss X, sitting not ten feet from him. And she was watching him, tracing the edge of her wineglass with one fingertip in a way that made his entire body heat.
Their eyes locked, held for what felt like an eternity, and the hunger Finn had felt from the first moment he encountered this woman came to life.
He glanced at Ramsbury, who looked irritated, and forced himself back to the subject at hand. “Excellent. But I don’t wish to talk about Marianne anymore, not here.” He looked again at Miss X and she worried her lip in the most appealing fashion that drew him like a moth to a flame. “We came here to get our cocks wet. I intend to do so and I suggest you do the same.”
He didn’t wait for his friend’s response. God knew Ramsbury could take care of himself when it came to the ladies. He just patted his arm and then moved off into the crowd toward her. Toward what he hoped would finally be a slaking of the odd, intense need she seemed to create in him.
When Esme had seen Delacourt standing across the room from her, what she should have done was depart the Donville Masquerade before he noticed her. In fact, she never should have come here at all. She’d told herself it was for fun, a reward after a hard fight earlier in the day.
But that wasn’t true. She knew it was because she wanted to see the very man who was now striding across the room toward her, all powerful elegance and repressed strength. The man who looked at her like he would devour her whole.
He stopped at her table, standing over her with a long look that almost melted her from the inside, and then motioned to a chair. “May I join you?”
She swallowed hard. This was a dangerous game and yet she kept playing. Foolishly, inexplicably. “Yes.”
He sat and smiled at her. “A new mask.”
She lifted a hand and touched the blue leather, stitched with tiny paste pearls. “I have a great many of them.”
“I imagine so,” he drawled.
She shifted, for he had no idea, in truth. “Is there something I can do for you, my lord?”
His gaze lit up at the double entendre she hadn’t meant to make. Or perhaps she had. Nothing seemed in her control anymore. “I thought we could finish the conversation we began earlier today. The one that was interrupted at the boxing club.”
Her heart was beating so hard she feared he could hear it even from across the table. “Was there more to say?”
“I think so.” He held her gaze steadily.
Lord, but his eyes were beautiful. Soulful, even, betraying a deeper truth beneath the bored, rakish aristocrat he seemed to be. Perhaps she wasn’t the only one who wore masks.
She stiffened. It wasn’t her place to know that, to care about that. And the deeper she went into this, the more danger she placed herself in.
“I don’t know what you could mean,” she said. “Like you, I come here to relieve the tension of the realities of my life. That you know I’m truly the Hellion isn’t so shocking a thing, is it?”
“But who is the Hellion?” he asked, and leaned closer. He smelled good. Like sandalwood soap. She felt a strange longing to rub her nose along the angle of his jaw and breathe him into her body.
“I thought the purpose of this place was anonymity,” she said, and was pleased her voice didn’t shake.
“You’re still anonymous. You wear a mask, you have no name.”
She laughed at that idea. It wasn’t so far from the truth. “I have a name.”
He leaned even closer. “And may I guess it?”
That should have made her tense, but there was a sparkle in his eyes that made her laugh even more at his teasing. “Why do you need it so desperately?”
“Because I want to know what to call the woman who has somehow haunted my dreams since I first met her.”
Her smile fell at the seductive tone of his voice and the way he reached out to take her hand. His fingers stroked across hers and she shivered without meaning to. “How often does a line like that work, my lord?”
