Page 31 of The Luckiest Lady in London

“I…I fret about my nakedness. So you fashion a blindfold from your necktie and tell me that if I cannot see out, then I will not worry about those who might be peering in.”

“Impeccable logic, that. What happens next?”

“Once I’m blindfolded, you touch me with something. You say it’s your walking stick, but I’m not sure I believe you.”

“Why the doubt?”

“Because…it is hot.” Her face scalded. “And please don’t ask me what happens next. There is no next.”

In her dreams, she simply carried on in that state of horrified arousal.

He smiled slightly. “Do you like it when I touch you with my not–walking stick?”

She could see her hand reaching up, but she could not quite believe what she was doing, even when she had a lock of his hair between her fingers. “In my dreams, there is nothing you do that I do not like.”

“It’s worth abducting you from Lady Balfour’s drawing room, before a full crowd of onlookers, just to hear that.”

Dear God, Lady Balfour and all her friends. “Please tell me that wasn’t what you came for.”

“Of course not. I came to tell you that I have decided to rescind my offer. The idea has run its course—and expired.”

The contents of her skull imploded. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t breathe.

He wasn’t a good man and she hadn’t cared. She was willing to overlook any number of staggering faults, as long as he felt at least something of what she felt for him.

When he had been toying with her all along.

As if from a great distance away, she heard herself say, “You might as well, I suppose. I never would have cheapened myself by accepting that particular offer.”

It was a lie. She would have hated to become his mistress—because it would mark the beginning of the end—but she had never, at any point, eliminated the choice from consideration.

“You don’t look as righteously vindicated as you ought to,” he pointed out, his voice insidiously soft, insidiously close.

“Rest assured my immortal soul is pleased. It’s only my vanity that is crushed.”

And her pathetic heart.

“My poor, darling Louisa,” he murmured, the evil, evil man.

“It is still very ill done of you to come here and single me out, just to tell me you’ve thought better of your nefarious plans. What am I supposed to tell Lady Balfour in”—she glanced at the clock—“precisely forty-five seconds?”

And once those forty-five seconds flew by, once he walked out Lady Balfour’s door, she might not ever see him again. Who else would like her for her scheming ways? Who else would applaud her for thinking of herself? And who else would ask her about the telescope she had loved and lost?

He touched her face—but to her horror, she realized he was only wiping away her tears.

“You may tell Lady Balfour that in exactly three weeks, you will be married.”

She stared at him through the blur of her tears. “To whom?”

He only looked at her as if she were a very slow child who couldn’t grasp that one plus one equaled two.

“I don’t understand,” she said, though understanding was beginning to penetrate her woolly brain.

“What is there to understand? I have made you an offer of marriage. Will you take it, or must I rescind that offer, too?”

Suddenly she felt as if she’d drunk an entire gallon of coffee. Her fingertips shook. “Of course I will take it—I came to London to marry the largest fortune I could find, and there is none available larger than yours. But why would you marry me?”

“Because young ladies who confess to pornographic reveries ought to be rewarded with riches beyond their dreams?”