by Evie Dunmore
A dam in her, long cracked, had broken; the toxic words were pouring out of her like a waterfall.
The ensuing silence was deafening. There was only the sound of her breathing, shaky and erratic.
Tristan stood as still as if shot.
Eerily still.
There was no mistaking the angry color slowly tinging his cheekbones.
An uneasy sensation stirred in her stomach. A line had been crossed she hadn’t known they had heeded until now.
He took a deep breath. “Useless,” he said. The word dripped from his lips in cold contempt.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “Well, yes,” she muttered. “And I cannot share a business with you.”
“I see.” His tone was controlled, but in the depths of his eyes simmered something sinister. The deliberate slowness of his gaze traveling over her, from her face down to her toes, raised all the fine hairs on her body. She had terribly provoked him.
He turned to the fireplace and stared into the glowing embers on the grate. In his flowing robe, with one hand on the mantelpiece and his profile hard and brooding, he looked like a vengeful young god contemplating the firelight.
“Tell me, Lucie.” His voice was silky-smooth. “How badly do you want it?”
The question slipped like a satin rope around her neck. She could feel her throat tightening.
This was a trap.
She raised her chin. “Name a price. And I shall see whether I can pay it.”
“Oh, but you can.”
The fingers of his left hand had begun an idle exploration of the objects on the mantelpiece, trailing over the smooth curve of the ceramic clock, an oblong box, the heavy candlestick turned from oak wood. They lingered on the candlestick, slid around it, tested its girth.
Heat poured over her like liquid fire.
“You can,” he repeated, and turned to look at her. His eyes were fathomless pools in the flickering shadows. “The question is whether you are willing.”
His hand circling the candleholder languidly slid up over polished wood, then down again, a lewd gesture if she’d ever seen one. Terribly mesmerizing, too, because the firelight was playing over his bare chest and he had well-formed fingers that knew every shameless caress under the sun.
That he should dare it left her breathless.
“Your price,” she whispered. “Name it.”
A glint of canine teeth. “You’re an intelligent woman,” he said. “Take a guess.”
“You are leering at me whilst fondling a phallic object,” she said. “It does not take great intelligence to assume you are propositioning me.”
“Mmh,” he hummed. “Assume that I am.”
“Lecherous, shameless creature.”
“Are you speaking of me, or yourself?”
She could only stare and loathe him.
He took his hand off the candlestick. “Darling, you forget who I am. I know lust from twenty paces, and despite your outburst of virtuous severity earlier, you are roiling with it. It’s in the shine of your eyes and the charming flush of your cheeks. If I were to lay my fingers against your throat now, I would feel your pulse beat unnaturally fast and hard.”
Her body was suddenly too heavy for her legs. The heated cheeks, the quickened pulse, were all true.
“You are ridiculous,” she said, and it came out husky.
His smile was pure vindication. “And yet neither one of us is laughing,” he said. “One night. One night in your bed for one percent of company shares. And you shall give it to me in writing that you look after my books. That is the price.”
She was breathing too fast, she was dizzy from it. “So you lied,” she said. “You said you never force your attentions.”
His brows rose. “I don’t. I doubt anyone else in my position would even contemplate the potential ruin of their business by making any kind of offer. Decline it, and things shall rightfully remain as they are. Take it, and London Print shall be yours.” His attention moved past her, to the bed. “We could begin now. You would wake up tomorrow morning well-pleasured and the owner of a publishing house. I’m a fool to offer you such a bargain.”
The bed was close, a step or two to the right. His tone, for all its derisiveness, was matter-of-fact. Her hands clenched; for a fleeting second, she had almost felt the softness of the counterpane beneath her palms, had seen his bare throat and shoulders move over her. His seduction was already at work, naturally—he must have honed it by years of practice. . . .
The perverted entrancement he had spun around her with his silken voice and sliding hand shattered.
“If you think I’d trade a company share for the pox, you are deluded,” she said coolly.
He made a face. “There are ways of preventing such things.”
She doubted he used any of them.
She turned on her heels.
“I shall make it a standing offer, until the end of summer,” she heard him say, and there was a smirk in his voice.
She spun back round to face him. “You sound rather desperate for me to take your offer.”
His smile left his eyes stone cold. “I’m always desperate, princess. Take your time to consider it—as it is, I’m not all that useless in the bedchamber.”
She knew. Women talked.
“Go to Hades,” she said, and stomped out of his room.
* * *
The window’s bull’s-eye pane grotesquely distorted Lucie’s cloaked shape as she disappeared into the shadows of Logic Lane. Tristan continued to stare down into the dusky emptiness of the street. The heat wave engulfing him minutes ago was abating only slowly. He realized he was fingering his cheekbone, quite as though he were twelve again and felt the sting of her slap.
He dropped his hand and gave a puzzled laugh.
Useless. Of all the insults she could have chosen, the little witch. She might as well have flown at him brandishing a scimitar. In fact, he would have preferred a knife attack, as he would have dealt with it rather more smoothly.
He turned to the room and sprawled back down onto the divan, and the piece of furniture shrieked in protest. To hell with it. Nothing in this provincial hovel was built for his size. Except the bed. The bed was built for two.
His gaze lingered on the silken counterpane as he reached for his brandy flask. What a sobering chain of events. He had not expected her to hold him in such contempt, nor that it would grate on him so to learn that she did. Apparently, his youthful preoccupation with her ran deeper than he’d known; so deep, it had become invisible beneath the years piling up upon it. But there it was, a furrow carved across a forgotten part of his soul, and it had filled up with want like a wadi in a flash flood when he had seen her stand next to the bed. He must have still thought of her as a fairy, had held an idea of her frozen in time. In truth, she was a red-blooded woman and he did not know her much at all. And she desired his body, which changed everything. Pleasure spread through him as he imagined her under him, on top of him, wanting, needing . . .
By the time the brandy had burned down his throat, he had decided to seduce her. And he would have to seduce her until she would consider it worth it regardless of the company shares, because he’d have to lose his mind before he ever let those go.
Chapter 11
She had crossed the Oxford town center and walked the length of Parks Road at a brisk pace, but when she arrived at her house on Norham Gardens she was still shaking with emotions.
She nearly stumbled over a bag of mail Mrs. Heath had deposited in the dark corridor. On her way to the kitchen, she snatched an unsuspecting Boudicca up into her arms and the bemused cat sank five claws into her left palm. She dropped the animal with a hiss. At least the stinging pain diluted the urge to go back to Logic Lane to shoot Tristan in the knee.
There was a pot of cold stew in the kitchen, and she ate two spoonsf
ul before her stomach became tied up in knots and she admitted defeat. There were days when one had to just retire to bed early and wait for a new morning.
Her room was overwarm, here under the roof in midsummer, and the standing collar of her dress jacket was constricting like a noose. She unhooked the skirt and let it fall to the floor, then discarded the jacket with equal carelessness, followed by her underskirt, her corset, and the chemise. A chill touched her bare torso.
The ceramic basin in her wash corner had been filled with fresh water. She grabbed the clump of soap and rigorously lathered up the flannel. She scrubbed the scratches Boudicca had inflicted and it stung, however, there was no need to end a tedious day with an infection. She rubbed the flannel over her face, her neck, her arms, as though Tristan’s lewd proposition could be washed clean off.
Unfortunately, the matter went beyond skin-deep. Images kept flashing: rippling back muscles beneath fire-tinged skin. The up-and-down motion of a well-formed hand.
She dropped the flannel into the basin and started at her reflection in the mirror.
Tonight, he had treated her with utmost disrespect.
You were not exactly kind to him, either. . . .
She leaned in, blinking away the soap in her eyes. A tension around her mouth and between her brows had her looking a hundred years old.
Her pupils narrowed to small black dots as she studied herself.
Her face, presumably, was still a fine enough face.
She pulled back until the tops of her breasts were visible in the mirror.
Her body was useful, never sickly and reliably carrying her everywhere.
But as an object of a man’s desire?
She had overheard comments about her person, uttered just loudly enough for her to hear. There’s more meat on a butcher dog’s bone . . . bedding her would be like pulling a splinter . . . would she rattle, you think? It was enlightening, the words coming out of purported gentlemen’s mouths when they did not consider a woman a lady. Naturally, a woman’s appearance was an easy target; even the most dull-witted could hit with great effect. She knew this. The words still returned to her now as she was trying to see herself through the eyes of a man.
She laid a finger against her collarbone. It felt hard and pronounced, beneath skin that was never touched, not by sunbeams, not by glances. Never by another’s hand.
She traced a vein from the hollow of her throat, down across her chest. A tingling sensation followed in the wake of her fingertip, raising the fine hairs on her arms. The shallow curve of her left breast was petal soft and cool against the back of her knuckles. But she was hardly a fashionable size. No bubbies on this one.
She slid her arms around herself and squeezed. How would it feel, if someone were to embrace her?
Possibly equally disappointing as kissing. A young man from the Law Society had had the honors of her first kiss. She had thought him shy and guileless, but soon after the event, rumors had reached her through the society that he had won fifty pounds at White’s for daring to kiss the Tedbury Termagant. Fortunately, the whole affair had not been as exciting as she had hoped; it had been oddly detached and their teeth had collided—hardly a loss.
But Tristan’s lips looked soft and sensual, and he would certainly know how to kiss . . .
Angry heat sizzled through her. If it were not for his charming looks, his offer would not merit a second’s worth of consideration, which told her exactly how bad of an affront it was. Besides, he had not propositioned her because he desired her—he had done it to provoke her. And he probably liked the idea to have her surrender to him in the most primitive way possible.
Her gaze made a slow journey around the Valentine Vinegar cards flanking the mirror, the hatchet-faced suffragists and the withering rhymes about women who dared. They had been sent to her to intimidate her in her own home. She had taken them into the sanctity of her bedchamber and made them hers, until familiarity had blunted the cutting words and mellowed the ugliness. This was how she dealt with adversaries: she met them on the field. She would deal no differently with Tristan. When she locked eyes again with her reflection, her face was determined. If his lordship wanted war, he’d better batten down the hatches.
Chapter 12
The clock had just struck ten, too early in the day for a nobleman to be in the process of getting dressed, but recent events compelled Tristan to summon fast-fading military habits and rise at the hours of the working people. The desk back in his bedchamber bore evidence of his matutinal productivity: a stack of formal letters to London and India, already sealed. Now he was observing his valet as the young man did whatever he deemed necessary to his jacket sleeves with a clothing brush.
“Avi,” he said. “You are from Calcutta.”
“I am,” confirmed Avi.
“Now, knowing what you know of my person, and of Calcutta, and of the British as a whole—do you think a British lady and myself would find life more pleasant in Calcutta or in Delhi?”
For a beat, the brush continued its work as smoothly as though he hadn’t spoken at all, and then Avi’s dark lashes lifted. “The lady would certainly find life more pleasant in Calcutta. His lordship, neither. He would be best suited for Hyderabad.”
“Right. Hyderabad,” Tristan said, his tone bemused. “Write me a list of all the womanly things an English countess would require for her comforts in Calcutta, and another list of the families she should call on there. Then I require the same for Delhi. I need the lists by next Tuesday.”
“Of course.” Avi put the brush back onto the tray and picked up a cuff and the emerald cuff links.
“Not these,” Tristan said. “The plain, chained ones today.”
“Certainly. Milord, are you planning to take us back to India?”
Avi stoically ignored the rule of staff not speaking until spoken to, which made for entertaining, less lonely mornings.
“If I were, what would you say?” he said. “Be frank. Should you miss England terribly?”
This time, there was no pause. “No, milord.”
“No?” He found himself intrigued. “Whyever not?”
Avi looked him in the eye while his slim fingers expertly secured his left cuff. “Because the climate is cold, and the food is bland,” he said. “And I find that many of the ayahs of my acquaintance here are poorly paid by their English masters. I shall not miss England much at all.”
This surprised an amused huff from him. “Cold, bland, and exploitative,” he said. “There is an obvious line between frankness and insolence, Avi, and I’m impressed by how boldly you cross it.”
“Thank you, milord. May I ask you to raise your chin, please?”
While Avi fixed his cravat with a silver pin, Tristan said to the ceiling: “Many of the ayahs of your acquaintance, hm? Am I paying you enough to entertain multiple women?”
Avi stepped back and assessed his handiwork. “I’m an economical man.”
“I see. Remind me again why you agreed to follow me to this cold, bland island?”
Avi’s smile revealed perfectly straight teeth. “I wanted to study at Oxford.”
“Oxford—but I was taking you to London.”
A shrug. “Oxford, London, all the same, when you are from Calcutta.”
He supposed it would feel like that—the distances in India made the length of Britain look puny. “It is not easy to gain admission to Oxford,” he said instead.
“I hear Rabindranath Tagore studied in London, and Brighton,” Avi said. “Great poet.”
“Well, damn. To think you crossed an ocean in the hope to enroll, while I just squandered my time here.”
Avi shook his head. “There were other reasons, too. Trouble with a girl’s family in Calcutta. More importantly”—he picked up the other cuff—“it is a pleasure to dress you.”
Tristan arched a brow. “It is, is it.�
��
“Yes. You are perfectly proportioned.”
“I see.”
“Your build does justice to fine clothes. A dreadful thing, a beautiful, exquisite waistcoat which is wasted on its wearer. No garment is wasted on you.”
“Well,” Tristan drawled. “Fortunately, then, these charming proportions are attached to my person regardless of where we set up house.”
“Yes, milord. When will we leave?”
As soon as I have seduced the Lady Shrew.
What an absurd thing to first spring to mind.
He brushed it off with a shrug; after all, on the list of things presently requiring his attention, from protecting his accounts and business from Rochester to surviving travel with a melancholic woman, bedding Lucie was the only task that appealed.
“We leave no later than six weeks from today, possibly sooner,” he told Avi. It would see them leave England well before exhausting Rochester’s three-month ultimatum. Admittedly, it was ambitious timing for seducing a woman like Lucie. She would resist out of spite alone, and unless she was in the London offices often, there were few occasions to woo her.
“One way or another, she will surrender,” he murmured.
“Milord?”
“Never mind, Avi.”
* * *
Friday noon bathed Oxford in sunshine and birdsong. Stained-glass windows sparkled, swallows flitted. The breeze carried the scent of the wisteria cascading down the façade of Somerville Hall. Lucie was marching down Woodstock Road, tight-lipped, her skirts snapping around her ankles.
The night had been short, fraught with pondering how to proceed with London Print and unwelcome erotic dreams of Ballentine’s tattooed chest. By the time dawn had winked through her curtains, two things were clear: one, Ballentine had the power to make her life hellish. As much as society pretended to be shocked—shocked!—by him, he was a war hero, a peer of the realm, and next in line for a wealthy earldom. In Darwin’s words, he presided over the food chain, which had led to the second realization: she now needed every social and political ally she could muster. Her position in society had long been tenuous at best, but over the years, she had achieved a status which had allowed her to advance the Cause despite her outspokenness. Now the moment she had secretly dreaded had come—she had to try to . . . be nice. She had to pick up the weapons of a good woman: Demureness. Gracefulness. A benevolent management of contrarian males. Very well, it was too late to be credibly demure and graceful, but a more benevolent approach to males was still within reach. She had sent a missive to Annabelle, requesting an urgent meeting at the Randolph this afternoon. Now she was about to fulfill the second point on her battle plan: order a whole new set of dresses.
