Mercy squelched a threatening glow of pleasure at his words. His discombobulation seemed genuine, but he was a notorious charmer.
She refused to fall for it.
“It’s not one thing,” she explained, suddenly feeling itchy and defensive. Irate that she had to spell it out for him. “It’s everything. It’s me. I’m incapable of feeding the ego of a man with the insincere laughter or empty compliments they seem to require. I do not easily suffer fools, which means I have not ingratiated myself to many other debutantes or mothers of single noblemen. I read too much. I talk too much, which subsequently reveals that I am possessed of too many opinions.” She began to count the reasons on the fingers of her hand. “I am political. Willful. Argumentative. Self-indulgent. All the things men abhor in a woman.”
“Weak men,” he murmured, a spark igniting in his gaze. “Perhaps you need someone other than the dandies of your class to tame you.”
“Tame me?” His wicked suggestion aroused her, which irritated her in the extreme. “Don’t make me laugh. I cannot abide the whims of any man, be he dandy or dominant. I do not desire to keep a household. I do not want to be known as Lady So-and-so, this man’s wife. I want to be me. My own person.” She paused in her passionate speech, amending it without hesitation. “Except for Felicity, of course. I couldn’t live a life apart from her. We shared a womb. She’s the other half of me. She possesses all the fragility and gentility I do not...and she suffers—”
Suddenly she froze. Realizing she’d revealed more to this man than any other. That she’d been on a tirade that must have dried up any interest he might have had.
And why should that matter?
“Suffers what?” he asked.
“Nothing. You needn’t worry about her.”
“Tell me,” he prodded, and when she looked up into his arrested expression, she could believe that he really wanted to know.
That she hadn’t frightened him away.
“Felicity...she has these conniptions. Spells, you might call them.”
“Like Mathilde?” he queried.
She shook her head. “No. She is easily startled. Constantly trepidatious and worried. She has a hard time breathing, but not in the way of asthmatics. Her heart races and she will sometimes be sick or faint. She does faint an alarming amount. It’s as if she stole all my fear for herself so I could be as I am. Brash and bold. We are a mirror of each other. And her reflection is so fragile. So gentle...” Mercy blinked at a stinging in her eyes. “Well, anyway, I would never leave her alone, and a husband would invariably ask me to. He wouldn’t want for competition of my affections.”
She looked up to find Raphael regarding her with infinite tenderness. His eyes were not opaque or full of secrets. They were open. Challenging.
Burning.
No. He was not mysterious, this man. He wore his darkness. Advertised his sins. Pinned his emotions to his suit like a badge of honor.
“I don’t want to go without ravishing you at least once.”
Comprehension of his words didn’t quite land at first. “Go where? Wait... What?”
He stepped closer, his expression intent. “I desire you like I have no other woman. I would take as many nights as you would offer, but I’ll settle for just one.”
Mercy blinked at him, certain she misunderstood his meaning. He was casual but serious. Relaxed, but intense. Surely, he wasn’t asking if she would—
“Would you let me fuck you, Mercy Goode?”
Her mouth went slack, and she lost whatever substance held her bones together. She wished for a chair, a couch, a bench. Anything upon which to sink.
She looked around at the people. The families. This place that was so bustling and wholesome. Where propositions like his simply didn’t belong.
Oh my. Mercy wanted to check her burning face for fever, but she didn’t dare.
What was she right now? Upset? Insulted?
Enticed?
His eyes were searingly tender as he searched her face for an answer. “You are not slapping me. Or screaming at me. So, am I to imagine you are considering it?”
“You—were Mathilde’s lover.” And she was only deceased for a day’s time.
At that, his features became impossibly kinder, his gaze containing admiration. “I have touched no other woman since the night I gifted your sister with my gold.”
“But that was...months ago,” she marveled, doing her best to remember that she could not believe a word from his mouth.
He shrugged. “So it was.”
“Mathilde made it seem as though she’d been with you not so long ago.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Did she say that? That she and I had been lovers recently?”
“Come to think of it... no.” She examined her reaction to that.
Her heart felt one thing.
Her body another.
His muscles remained lax, even though he allowed her to witness the uncontested hope radiating from him. “I assure you, Miss Goode, Mathilde and I did not share an understanding of any kind. Not in that way. There was nothing like romance between us, do you understand? I am doing her memory no disservice by propositioning you. I will be working harder to find her killer than the police. She will be avenged; you have my word. But I will be too distracted by my obsession with your lips to be of much use, unless you yield to me.”
Swallowing around a sandpaper tongue, Mercy could only blink up at him.
For once in her life, she had nothing to say.
Because she was captured in the culmination of her eternal struggle.
The one between what she should do.
And what she wanted to do.
She might die an old maid, but she certainly didn’t plan on being a virgin.
Suddenly, everything Mathilde told her about him spun through her mind, sped through her blood, and landed in her loins.
The rapture he was capable of imparting. The pleasure. The desire. The stamina.
The sin.
He stepped closer, watching the war play out on her face, and spoke to tip the scales in his favor. “If you are to never take a husband, at least let me give you the knowledge of what to expect from a lover. Though I pity the man who next attempts to follow me.”
The sheer arrogance in his claim should have turned her off of him instantly.
And yet, he said this with an odd sort of darkness. Like he pitied her next lover because he was already considering doing him violence.
“Let me have you tonight.” His whisper sizzled through her.
“T-tonight?” she gasped out.
He made a gesture both helpless and sanguine. “I am a man for whom tomorrow is never a certainty, and so I live every night as if it were my last.”
“How wondrous and terrible to not worry for tomorrow,” she murmured.
“Wonderous and terrible. That is my existence in two words.”
One of the wolves howled in the distance, a wild, mournful sound so foreign in the city.
Mercy turned toward it, needing not to look at him for a moment.
To catch her breath.
Was she truly considering this madness?
His breath was a warm caress against her ear as the clean masculine scent of him enveloped her. “Tonight, mon chaton,” he purred from behind her, his finger skimming her shoulder blades so lightly. “Let me stroke you until you are exhausted with pleasure. Demand what you want from me, I do not mind. Let me teach you what you deserve to know. What you should always expect. What your body is capable of.”
Yes.
Mercy couldn’t say the word, so she nodded.
She felt rather than saw him smile, even as he stepped back, granting her some space so she could finally breathe.
Pressing her fingers to her lips, she couldn’t stop thinking about his tongue. Inside her mouth, it’d been warm and slick and tasted like depravity.
She’d been surprised it wasn’t forked, devil that he was.
How would it be on other p
arts of her?
All her life, she’d hated the story of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. The allegory for temptation in the face of consequences.
She’d never understood why Eve bit into the apple.
Not until this very moment.
Not until this man with shining hazel eyes and a voice made of velvet and vice, tempted her beyond reason.
Trying to string her thoughts together, she stammered, “How would we...? Where will we? I mean...”
Her questions never found him she realized, as she turned back to clarify.
He’d disappeared.
Chapter 7
Mercy had often thought that for such a fair-complected man, Chief Inspector Carlton Morley was a bit of a dark horse.
Even as he paced the plush Persian carpets of her parents’ solarium, his every movement was measured and controlled.
Carefully contained.
He was more compelling than handsome, she thought. His brow stern and the set of his jaw arrogant.
No, authoritarian. That was it.
A man who expected to be obeyed without question, likely because he was in charge of the entire London Metropolitan Police.
Which was why his choice of wife was so confounding. Her elder sister Prudence was ironically impetuous. But, Mercy supposed, her habitual imprudence accompanied a beauty of demeanor only matched by that of her soul, so it was impossible not to love her.
At least, in Morley’s case.
They were ridiculously—disgustingly—happy.
For her part, Mercy couldn’t begin to imagine being in love with a fellow who rarely relaxed and was always right.
And not in the way that most men assumed they were always right based on little more than their hubris and trumped-up opinions.
Morley was unfailingly well-informed and infuriatingly correct, more often than not. When he spoke, people leaned in to mark him because he was possessed of both power and practicality.
And that, Mercy was given to understand, was a rare combination of virtues.
Objectively, she supposed she understood why Prudence found him attractive, what with his corona of elegantly styled pale hair and eyes so cold and blue they might have been chipped from a glacier.
They only melted for Pru and the twins, becoming liquid and warm.
Mercy liked to watch the transformation her sister brought about in him, how his wide shoulders peeled away from his ears and every part of him seemed to exhale.
With his family, he could be charming. Cavalier, even.
He was protective and useful, honorable to a fault, and Mercy knew that beneath the furrow of disapproval on his brow was a wrinkle of worry for her. He watched them with the passionate overprotectiveness belonging to a man who’d once lost his own sister to tragedy.
It was why Mercy would suffer his warnings and lectures.
Because she knew that behind the bluster was a brother.
One who cared.
The Goode sisters were unused to compassionate men in their lives, having a staunch, religious father who maintained two demeanors where his family was concerned.
Critical or indifferent.
His greatest disappointment was not having a son, and he used his daughters like pawns in medieval land disputes, leveraging their reputations, fortunes, and beauty to garner him more prestige and power.
It entertained Mercy to an endless degree how often he’d been thwarted.
First by Pru, whose fiancé, the Earl of Sutherland, had been murdered moments before they were to walk down the aisle. She’d been arrested for the deed by Morley himself, and then rescued from the hangman’s rope by a hasty marriage to the selfsame Chief Inspector.
Honoria—Nora—had done everything she’d been expected to, including marrying Lord William Mosby, Viscount Woodhaven.
That man was the most disastrous thing to happen to the Goode family. He abused Nora terribly, squandered all their money, and used their father’s shipping company to smuggle illegal goods for none other than the Sauvageau brothers and their Fauves. Ultimately, he stole a crate of gold from the Sauvageaus and made dangerous enemies of them. His escape was foiled when he’d taken Pru hostage and Morley put a bullet through his temple.
My, but last year had been eventful.
Mercy wished for her sister now, wondering how much longer it would take for Pru to return from feeding Charlotte and Caroline.
Morley was like a pendulum of paternal disapproval moving back and forth in front of her as he lectured her about...well, about something or other.
The sermon had begun on the subject of her poking around murder scenes where she didn’t belong, but she’d lost him some ten minutes back when he’d moved on to her arrest.
Here’s why you shouldn’t slap detectives and all that such nonsense.
She was generally inclined to answer back, at least to defend herself, but he’d already mentioned that Detective Trout had been dismissed for his heavy-handed retaliation against her.
Or would be, after he was released from the hospital due to the beating Raphael had inflicted. Now Morley was down one detective—albeit a mediocre one—during a crime wave.
That’s where he’d lost Mercy’s attention.
Her mind drifted from how “the entire situation could have been avoided if she’d not ventured where she ought not to have been in the first place.” Et cetera and so forth.
No, drifted was the wrong word, it evoked the idea of aimlessness.
Her thoughts only ever went in one direction these days.
They were steered, propelled.
Captivated.
Would you let me fuck you, Mercy Goode?
The wicked proposition was a constant, obsessive echo in her mind.
It thrummed through her in Raphael’s velvet voice, snaking its way into her veins and coiling deep in her loins.
Those words from any other man would have repelled her. She was someone who demanded deference. Someone who expected to be treated with the respect due her station. Not only as a gentleman’s daughter, but as a woman—nay—a human being.
But, somehow, Raphael Sauvageau managed to make the profane query sound like a prayer.
A plea.
It was as though he’d asked, Would you let me worship you?
Because of the veneration in his eyes. The reverence that impossibly lived alongside the depravity in his gaze.
The pleasure in his promise.
He hadn’t asked, Would you fuck me? The unspoken question being, would you pleasure me? Would you slake my hunger and fulfill my desires?
No. He’d offered to stroke her. To pleasure her. To teach her what to expect from a lover.
As if he would relish in providing her delight.
Mercy knew enough about lust to have felt the evidence of his desire against her skirts in the alcove where they’d kissed.
He’d been hard. He could have taken her right there.
His singular paradox of wildness and restraint called forth her own undeniable passions.
She’d not relented to his proposition because he’d wanted her.
But because she’d desired to take what he offered.
He was no sort of man to be allowed within miles of her heart, but her body?
His body?
Now there was a hard, rugged terrain she yearned to explore.
Mercy had to duck her head lest Morley read the wicked turn of her thoughts. She could feel her excitement burning hot in her cheeks, the tips of her ears, and...lower. Deep within.
Tonight.
She fought a spurt of panic. She still didn’t know when. Or where. Or how. Or... when.
Would he dare come to Cresthaven? Would he send a message for a clandestine rendezvous somewhere?
What if he didn’t?
She gasped in a breath. What if he changed his mind and didn’t contact her at all?
What if she waited for him like a breathless ninny and he went off to some other strumpet, laughing at th
e thought of her pathetic virginal eagerness?
He was a degenerate, after all. A professional swindler.
She couldn’t have imagined the intensity of his need, could she? Surely, she’d have seen through any sort of artifice on his part.
Unless he was a better deceiver than she was an observer.
Perish that thought.
The sound of Raphael’s name, a foul word on Morley’s tongue, brought her surging toward the surface from the murky depths of her ponderings.
“Who? What?”
Morley’s brows, a shade darker than his hair, pulled low over his deep-set eyes. “Have you been listening to me?”
“Yes?” Mercy’s eyes moved this way and that as she searched her empty memory for evidence against her lie. What had he just said?
He frowned with his entire face. “Is that a question?”
“No?”
“Mercy.”
“You were...disparaging the leader of the Fauves, yes?”
He rolled his eyes and lifted his hands in a gesture of resignation. “I said, I do not like that you were alone with Raphael Sauvageau.”
At that, she straightened in her seat, her spine suddenly crafted from a steel rod.
“Alone?” she parroted, her voice two octaves higher than usual. “Where did you ever hear such a thing? Utter lies. There were people everywhere. We were not alone.”
Except for when he’d kissed her.
Had someone spied their moment in the alcove?
“In the police carriage, Mercy, do try to keep up.”
“Ohhh.” She relaxed back with a relieved little laugh that ended on a sigh. “Well, yes, there was that time.”
“To think you were locked up with him, right after he’d done Trout such violence...” His electric eyes bored into hers. “After he mercilessly executed Mathilde Archambeau. I promise you, Mercy, heads will roll for this. You should not have been subject to his company. You’re lucky he didn’t do you harm in his escape.”
“You don’t need to worry about that.” Mercy waved away his concern. “Mr. Sauvageau didn’t kill Mathilde.”
With an aggrieved sigh, Morley sunk to her mother’s hideous pink velvet chair, and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and letting his hands hang between them. “And just how did the blighter manage to convince you of that?”
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