Though in every way, in every respect, her every action was already well past unwise.
“Prowess usually takes two,” he replied evenly enough. “It’s not a skill you possess that fits every instance. It’s not like shoeing a horse.”
She was starting to regret the track she’d set them both upon, because she immediately felt warm again.
“Well, that’s a relief. I’m so glad to hear it’s not like ‘shoeing a horse,’?” she said with the irony it richly deserved.
“It’s more like a dance. If one partner is graceful, but the other routinely treads on or trips over feet or prefers reels to waltzes or doesn’t move atall...”
She’d never met anyone so unafraid of not blinking. She considered it a personal challenge to hold his gaze, but it was like being handed two shillings plucked out of a fire.
A night in my bed.
He was willing to forgo thefour thousand poundshe was owed for that privilege.
And it was probably less to do with her charms than the fact that he had so much money he could do frivolous things with it.
Perhaps.
Or perhaps he knew things about her thatshehad yet to discover.
His words were smoldering inside her like little coals now, someplace where rational thought could not reach to quench them.
If Mr. Marchand decided to suddenly lunge and ravish her, replicating the scene in the drawing room, there probably wasn’t much she could do about it. The house would become an orgy house.
Although she was somewhat comforted by the notion that she’d probably already proved that she was more trouble than she was worth.
“Probably you shouldn’t be saying those sorts of things to me, either,” she said primly. Also wickedly.
He sighed heavily, as if she was exhausting.
“I haven’t yet asked them about the vase. I thought we’d go in and have a chat with them together so we could both hear what they have to say. They seem like pleasant enough people. Unless you would find it too awkward.”
“All right.” She might as well have yet another mildly excruciating conversation, the only kind she seemed to have lately.
Mr. Marchand brought in chairs from the dining room so they could sit across from Mr. Benson and Mrs. Cartwright. He’d opened up the blinds, too.
Chatting with a man whose buttocks she’d seen before she’d seen his face was unprecedented for Ginny. His face was broad and mild and friendly. His hairline began at about the middle of the top of his head; he sported jowls. He wore a neat butler’s uniform.
She could not help but steal a glance toward Mrs. Cartwright’s shoes. She seemed to have managed to pull up her stockings snugly. She wore a cap and apron, both white and tidy, and a blandly deferential expression.
Both of their faces were red, and she suspected her own was, too.
Marchand’s wasn’t.
She had never once imagined the Woodville servants making love, and now she wondered why. She would never have figured either of the two people sitting across from her forpassionate spankers, and she was doomed to wonder that about everyone she met from now on.
“I hope you’ll forgive our intrusion. It’s just that we were concerned about Mrs. Parker,” Marchand said. “And given the outward condition of the house, when no one answered the door, it struck me as ominous.”
Ginny had explained that she was a relation of the late earl’s.
“Your cousin, the earl, was a nice man, Miss Woodville. We saw him often. It’s very sad for us to lose both of them. Perhaps they wanted to be together.” Mrs. Cartwright said this.
“I’m sorry for your loss, too,” Ginny told them.
Mr. Benson reached out and squeezed Mrs. Cartwright’s hand. Perhaps theyhadbeen comforting each other, along with the spanking.
“Mrs. Parker passed away whilst she was in Italy,” Mrs. Cartwright told them. “We had the letter a week ago, and we at first didn’t know what to do or where to go. We’ve been living here, but we haven’t been paid for the past month’s work as usual.”
