It was the sort of compliment Lucy loathed—as though the most interesting, praise-worthy thing about her was her supposed virgin purity.Ugh.
A fleeting smile flashed across his features, animating them with wickedness as he said, “Why no, Lady Lucy.Because any man in search of a good time would flee the area the instant he saw you coming.”
Lucy’s jaw dropped open.Entirely against her will, a laugh barked out of her.
He grinned back, enjoying her reaction, and for a strange moment Lucy felt as though she’d just met the real Duke of Thornecliff for the first time.As though the cynical, moody, too-charming aristocrat was merely a façade, a mask he put on.And in this moment of shared humor, the mask had dropped.
Lucy experienced a sudden frisson of misgiving.
It might be harder to hold on to her animosity for this man if he kept dropping that mask.
ChapterFive
Fortunately, the odd sensation of having finally trulyseenthe Duke of Thornecliff only lasted for a moment or two before the expression of condescending boredom overtook his face once more.
Annoyed at how disappointed she found herself at the sight of it, Lucy squared her shoulders and said, “I should like to see Sharpe’s.Take me there instead.”
“I can’t.”
She curled her lip.“Because it’s a gambling hell and my brother wouldn’t approve?”
“Because it’s a gambling hell, and as you so astutely observed, that means it doesn’t open until much later in the evening.Why do you want to see it?”
“The places young ladies are barred from are always the most interesting.Not that you will agree, I suppose, since everything bores you to distraction.”
He shrugged, as elegant a gesture as she’d seen on any Frenchman.“I won’t argue that the places young ladies are expected to delight in are a degree more boring than most.I haven’t been to Almack’s in years, but my memories of the place are suffused with dread.Dread and ratafia punch.Awful.”
Lucy refused to smile at his delicate shudder.“I can’t believe you’re invited to Almack’s.I never was—too tainted by my mother’s low birth and lack of breeding.Or possibly by my sister’s scandalous carousing about London with…well, with you and your friends.So how is ityouare welcome to attend the assemblies presided over by London’s highest sticklers for propriety?”
“My dear girl, I’m an unmarried duke.I’m welcome everywhere.”
The truth of his statement struck Lucy in a bruised spot, the corner of her heart where she shoved all her feelings of inadequacy and embarrassment at her family’s unconventional antics.
Out of pure spite, she said, “Well, dread or not, one day I suppose you will have to return to Almack’s to remedy that very state.You will have to wed.And what better place to find an unsuspecting girl to make your duchess than the foremost auction block of the Marriage Mart?”
Thank God Lucy would never have to submit to the indignities of the Marriage Mart herself.Between the portion settled on her by her brother and what she made from her own writing, Lucy was financially independent.
“You said something very like that to me the first night we met,” he recalled.“Do you remember?”
It was Lucy’s turn to shiver, though she only wished she could put her physical response down to disgust.She had been quite young, still eighteen and grieving her father and the London debut she would’ve had if he’d not gotten himself killed in a stupid carriage racing accident.
She and Gemma had cleaned up their only inheritance, a ramshackle coaching inn called Five Mile House, in hopes of attracting eligible suitors to it for Gemma to ensnare into matrimony.
But the first aristocratic traveler who’d wandered into Five Mile House, purely by chance, had been the Duke of Thornecliff.
Along with a couple of ladies, one of them his sister and the other a friend of hers, though Lucy could not recall either of their names or faces, because she’d been utterly and humiliatingly entranced by Thornecliff.
Yes, she remembered every word they’d exchanged that night.It was the first time she’d begun to see that the life they’d left behind in London, the one Gemma was working so hard to return them to, might not be the sort of life Lucy wanted.
“You called me a mouse,” she said now, smiling coolly to show that she didn’t care.“And told me I ought to go find my nursemaid and let her tuck me into bed.”
Not unlike The Gentle Rogue and his insistence on her being too young, she realized.What was it about her that made the men in her life want to send her off to bed?
“I’d forgotten that part,” Thornecliff mused.“Did I invite myself along to your bedchamber?”
Despite her determination to remain unshocked by anything he said, Lucy felt her cheeks color.“You certainly did not!”
“Strange,” he said softly, studying her.“Most unlike me.What I could have been thinking?”
