He visibly reeled. “What on— No. Dear God.”
“You think Iaspireto be a harlot, then? Hence the offer of money, to fund my aspiration,” she countered. She could hear the increasingly dangerous brightness in her own voice.
Her lungs felt like a furnace. She suddenly could not pull in full breaths.
He was watching her warily. “I feel,” he said carefully, “that the word ‘harlot’ as you’re using it is a pejorative, that you’re putting the word in my mouth, and that you’re furious, but I’m not entirely certain why. And no to all of it.”
Every astonishingly reasonable word he uttered was like kindling heaped upon her temper. And she didn’t know what the bloody hell “pejorative” meant, but she couldsurmise.
Damn all reasonable men to hell. Damn all carefulness, all strategy, all heroes. Damn society.Damn his ignorance of the cruelty that was his offer.
Damn her bloody heart, which he might as well have plucked out of her chest on aspada.
“I suppose I should consider it a compliment to myservicesthat you wish to pay me for them. YourGrace.”
And even as she said this, she saw herself hovering outside his door with a candle. All but quivering with desire. She had come to him. Who did that but someone determined to be a whore?
Someone in love, of course.
An idiot, madly, helplessly, hopefully in love.
An idiot who seemed destined to always, always learn things the hard way. If only she’d had abookon the subject ahead of time.
She could feel her heart coming apart into shards, jangling about in her chest.
“Please listen.” His voice was infuriatingly steady. But she knew, because she knew the bastard now, that inwardly he was roiling. The tension around his eyes, his jaw. His hoarse breathing. He was upset, and good. She wanted everyone in the room to be upset. “What I want is to take care of you, Mariana. What I want is to take your worries away.”
“I know what you want, Your Grace.Mi vuoi scopare.When it’s convenient for you. And you’re generously willing to pay me for that.”
“Yes. I want to fuck you when it’s convenient for me. That will never not be true,” he said coldly. “On my deathbed, that will no doubt be true. It is perhaps... the truest thing I’ve ever known.”
God help her, even now that bald statement just made her want to lie back and let him have his way with her.
Oh, but nowhewas angry. It was both delicious and frightening.
And he was suffering.
She was furious that it mattered to her. That she was such a fool that even now, she wanted to do something to ease his suffering.
“It wouldnotbe convenient for you if I was in Paris. It also would not be convenient for you if I were a famous diva, known to all, with my own money, because then you would not be able to keep it a secret. Because that’s what you really want, isn’t it?”
He didn’t answer. She suspected that this was the first time in his life he had no idea what to say.
She knew she wasn’t being entirely rational. Why didn’t he know how this would destroy her?
And if she was brutally honest with herself, it wasn’t the implication that she would happily take money for sex. She was fortunate life had not tested her to that extent yet.
It was hearing, definitively, that she wasn’t the sort of woman he would ever marry.
And suspicions and realizations began cascading, one upon another. The momentum was such that she could not stop them, could not filter them through sense, and for a change didn’t stop to consider whether it was wise to say everything she thought and felt. “You’re not an impulsive man. So you must have given it some good, quality thoughtand decided that I’m beyond respectability. And on the heels of that, you must have decided that I couldn’t possibly aspire to respectability ever again, because one just casts respectability to the wind when they’re a bought and paid mistress of a duke, don’t they? I’ll just take my place in the demimonde. Where idiot men shoot each other over women who wait about for men to appear and fuck them.”
There was a seething, fraught silence.
“It will shock you to learn,” he said very, very slowly, his voice shaking with the effort of control, “that I have, foolishly, spoken without due consideration.”
“No matter, James.” She said this with a sort of blackly amused amazement. “I suspect these sorts of transactions are going on all over England as we speak. Now, I wonder what you thought my price should be. Did you have a starting figure in mind? I like a good negotiation, you know that. Go on, tell me about the offer so I can counter it.”
“Mariana.”
