Seductive Starts

by Courtney Milan

  The boy looked up attentively.

  “Do you think Madame Esmerelda will need a shawl?”

  “I suppose—”

  “Go buy her one.” Gareth fumbled for a bank note and held it out.

  Ned frowned, his fingers closing on the paper. “Why can’t the modiste just choose one? What I know about ladies’ shawls, I could fit—”

  Gareth fixed Ned with his coldest look. “I think it would mean more to her if you chose it yourself. Don’t you?”

  Ned offered a few more halfhearted protests. Easy enough to dismantle those; soon his cousin scurried out the front door.

  The workroom door swung open, and one of the seamstresses popped out, her arms flowing with colored silks.

  Gareth took a deep breath. This charade had gone on long enough. “Is Madame in a condition to receive me?”

  She sniffed primly. “My lord. As you wish, my lord.”

  But as soon as he ducked through the doorway the servant indicated, he halted. A half-mirror stood on the otherwise empty wall, and Gareth’s lungs contracted at the profile reflected in it. Rounded hip, and a swell of breast.

  Madame Esmerelda wasn’t wearing a fashionable dress. She wasn’t wearing much of anything at all—nothing but a thin, worn chemise. The seamstress must have assumed he was the fortune-teller’s lover, or she’d never have sent him back here. His body moved of its own accord, turning toward her, like a plant tracking the path of the sun.

  Christ. Underneath the colorful skirts, now lying in a discarded heap, Madame Esmerelda had a waist. She had a bosom. She had a damned remarkable bosom. From five yards away, he could see the hazy outline of her legs through worn muslin. He could even make out the dark nubs of her nipples. The curling ends of her hair fell all the way to the small of her back.

  She wasn’t anything like the slender sylphs society favored. She was a Grecian fertility goddess, round and soft all over. And with her rosy lips frozen, half-open, she looked almost inviting.

  Not that her invitation extended to him.

  Gareth’s brain tumbled to a halt. What remained in his head was no rational thought, but simple greed. His mouth dried, and every muscle contracted in anticipation of the feast on display before him.

  She stood, rooted in place, her eyes wide in horror. If she were a lady, he would have apologized profusely and left the room. Not that he could help his own reaction. It was more than just the sight of a beautiful, nearly naked woman that set his heart hammering. It was the way she’d challenged him, the way she’d undermined him. It had been years since anyone had out-thought him. And so what he felt was a sharp desire to possess her. To obtain her surrender in every way a woman could surrender to a man. It was lust, pure and simple.

  But this woman was trying to make an idiot of Gareth and a dupe of his cousin. There was nothing pure or simple about her. And so he stuffed his physical response as best he could behind the safety of a cold, businesslike demeanor.

  “Madame Esmerelda,” Gareth said, “you win. There will be no tasks. No elephants.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Get out.”

  “One hundred guineas, if you tell Ned you’re a fraud and disappear from our lives.”

  She inhaled and her chest expanded. She pointed to the door. “Get out now.”

  “Think it through. I doubt you’ll be able to milk that much from him in your entire acquaintance. He’ll outgrow your advice soon enough. And you could live for years on the money.”

  She took a deep breath, and those remarkable breasts shivered underneath the thin chemise. “I wouldn’t do it for a hundred—” she began.

  Gareth covered his rising lust with a nonchalant shrug. “Two hundred.”

  Her lip curled, and she shook her head in outrage. “Not for two thousand. Not for ten.”

  “Oh?” He flicked an insultingly familiar glance down her chemise. “You’d do it for ten. But you’ll do it for two hundred.”

  She started toward him, her fingers curved like claws. He deserved to be slapped, and more, for the insult his look had implied. If he was right, and the woman was gently bred, she’d not appreciate the aspersions he’d just cast on her character. But he couldn’t let her near him. He feared his own response if she came within arm’s length.

  “Really, Madame. Once you dispose of your fabricated outrage, you’ll realize this is the best solution for everyone.”

  Gareth inclined his head, all sardonic politesse, and stepped back through the opening. He eased the door into place behind him, and let the insolent sneer slide off his face.

  He leaned against the wall, his breath ragged. The challenge between them had become more than a territorial war over Ned’s future. Now it was sensual.

  Madame Esmerelda was extremely intelligent. She was devious. And if she had any idea how she affected him, she’d take advantage, unscrupulous creature that she was. And how idiotic that he wanted her to take that advantage. He wanted her to befuddle his wits until he lost all control and took her.

  Gareth gripped his hands into fists. In his time in the jungles of Brazil, he’d cataloged close to a thousand insects. Now he let them march through his mind. Cockroaches. Poisonous, furry caterpillars. Maggots. He thought of every creeping thing ever to mar the face of the planet. He imagined them crawling about on his skin. And he didn’t stop until his ardor subsided and the memory of her body dissolved from his mind.

  It took a lot of millipedes.

  JENNY HADN’T REGAINED her composure by the time she fastened, with shaking hands, the final layer of Madame Esmerelda’s outrageous costume. Bad enough that this whole experiment had extended the lie of Madame Esmerelda far outside Jenny’s usual sphere of business. Worse still, she’d been made to endure the pricks and pokes of the contemptuous seamstress who’d assumed the worst of Jenny’s relationship with Lord Blakely.

  But the crowning glory had been when the marquess had marched in on her as if he owned her body. He hadn’t even bothered to avert his eyes. She wasn’t sure which had been more insulting—the look he gave her, or his assumption that she’d be willing to abandon Ned if only he offered a high enough price.

  Not since that first day, that first hour, had she been tempted by Ned’s money. She wouldn’t leave the poor boy to suffer under his cousin’s unemotional auspices.

  Jenny stormed out into the front room, her loose hair tangled around her shoulders.

  Lord Blakely leaned against a wall next to an unclothed dress form. His eyes snapped open as she slammed the door behind her. But she didn’t let him move. She jammed a finger into his chest and glared up at him.

  “Just because you ignore everything around you except facts does not mean everyone else can be reduced to a number.”

  He looked down at her, astonishment in his eyes. “What the devil?”

  She poked his chest again. “There are some things in life for which there are no figures. You don’t comprehend what your cousin really needs or why he finds it necessary to speak with me. No matter what number you choose, you will never, ever be able to describe him. Not with a hundred guineas. Not with a thousand.”

  “Very well.” He swallowed, focused on some spot on the ceiling. He didn’t even bother to meet her gaze. “I shan’t offer you bribes again.”

  “That’s not enough. If it’s not money you enumerate, you’ll latch on to some other figure. The number of times I make an accurate prediction. The degree to which I specify what is to happen. Attach as many numbers as you like to my relationship with Ned, but they will not help you understand.”

  She was Ned’s confidante. She’d be damned if she sold that role for mere money. She wouldn’t let Lord Blakely reduce her to that level.

  The man drew himself up. “You can disparage figures all day long, but that’s what proof means. It means one has a factual basis for one’s assertions.”

  “You call what you’re doing proof,” Jenny snapped. “But you prod and poke and pick. You have no interest in proving anything.”
/>   “What do you know of scientific proof?”

  “Oh, you’re the sort to pin insects to cards in order to study them. After several months spent perusing their desiccated carcasses, you’ll announce your triumphant discovery: all insects are dead! And you’ll delight in the ascendancy of scientific thought over human emotion.”

  Lord Blakely cocked his head and looked at her, as if searching for some hidden meaning in her face. “I study animal behavior. It’s imperative I not kill the subjects of my inquiry. Dead macaws rarely flock.”

  “There’s no need to murder the analogy by overextending it, atop your other crimes.”

  His gaze slid down her body. “The only question in my mind was whether you believed your own lies or were actively attempting to defraud Ned. I suppose it is a compliment to you that I have decided you are too clever for the former.”

  “Naturally. You don’t believe anything you cannot taste or touch.”

  “I believe in Pythagoras’s theorem, and I can’t taste that. I believe there may be some truth to Lamarck’s theories on inheritance of traits. But no, I do not believe in fate or fortune-tellers.”

  “Fate, fortune-telling—or feelings.” Jenny snapped her fingers in his face. “The important things in life cannot be bound like so much paper to form a monograph.”

  The insouciant look on his face faded into cold steel. “A monograph?”

  She inhaled, sharply. “Listen to yourself. You cite Lamarck instead of talking of your cousin’s future. I have never seen you laugh. I’ve never even seen you smile. No wonder Ned would rather listen to me. You’re a cold, unemotional automaton.”

  “An automaton?” His shoulders jerked and he stiffened.

  Jenny wasn’t done with him. “Just because you’re as dispassionate as sawdust and as brittle as old bone doesn’t mean everyone around you must ossify.”

  “Ossify.” His nose flared and his chin lifted, as if parroting her syllables constituted some kind of brilliant argument. He looked down at his right hand, clenched into a fist in front of him. The muscles in his neck tensed. Jenny took a step back and wondered if she’d gone too far. Madame Esmerelda would never have let anger carry her away.

  Then he looked up, and her doubts froze like so much lake water in winter. His eyes reflected some boreal wasteland, inhabited only by wind and a cold sweep of snow. Jenny felt the chill through every layer of Madame Esmerelda’s costume, and she shivered.

  When he spoke, there was no emotion in his voice at all. “You should have taken the two hundred guineas. After that outburst, I shall enjoy proving you a fraud.”

  BY THE TIME THE CARRIAGE rumbled back to the Blakely home in the heart of Mayfair divested of all inhabitants but Gareth, it had begun to rain. It wasn’t the warm tropical downpour he’d enjoyed in Brazil; instead, it was the frigid, anemic drizzle that typically plagued London. Drop after sullen drop sank to the earth.

  So he was a cold, emotionless automaton? Strange, then, that he felt so damned furious. Gareth gritted his teeth as he stepped outside the carriage. Servants swarmed around him, attempting to rush him inside, out of the wet.

  He brushed away their hands. “Leave me. I’m going for a walk,” he snapped. They exchanged glances—his servants often exchanged glances—but they let him go.

  Walking was an eccentricity he had developed in Brazil. It was, after all, the only way to make his daily rounds of observations. He’d brought the activity home with him. In London, the habit was inconvenient at best. The streets were all muck, and there was no overhead cover—neither wide-leafed jungle trees nor thick canopies—to speak of. But at a time like this—with his thoughts disordered, his mind awhirl and his body as ready to ignite as tinder—he needed this solitary exercise more than ever.

  He set off into the dark. Cold rain ran down Gareth’s spine in rivulets, but it did nothing to dampen the fury raging inside him. Dispassionate as sawdust?

  Madame Esmerelda was wrong. It wasn’t science that killed emotion. It was this place. These people. This title. He’d spent years in the rain forest, where life and color flourished anywhere it had the smallest chance of surviving. Here, geometric brick building followed geometric brick building, separated only by growing torrents of mud. Drawn shades clotted pallid windows; leaves like faded clay clung to half-dead grass. London was sterile. The rain had washed away all but the most persistent of the city’s fabricated smells—the stink of coal and the scent of cold, wet stone.

  If the city was desolate, its inhabitants were worse. He’d left London eleven years ago because polite society nearly suffocated him. It was the rigor of scientific thought, the clarity of observation, the control he gained over the universe as his understanding bloomed, that kept some vital part of himself in motion since his return. He had realized long ago that he would never really fit in. During these last months, the mornings he spent sorting through the naturalist’s journal he’d kept in Brazil were all that helped him hold tight to some notion of who Gareth was. Without it, he would have drowned everything real about himself in Lord Blakely’s unending responsibilities.

  Gareth shook the rain from his shoulders and, sighing, looked up. He’d been trudging through muddy puddles for nearly half an hour. He was soaked to the bone; were it not for the furious whirl in his mind and the fast pace he’d been keeping, he’d have been chilled.

  Unconsciously, his feet had traced the steps to the neighborhood where Madame Esmerelda lived. The streets were decidedly dingier than Gareth’s own address, brown rivulets of running water skirting slushy horse dung strewn about the cobblestones. But the area was by no means dangerous. Families here hovered below respectability, but somewhat above poverty.

  He found her windows. Tucked in the basement, down a flight of stairs. They glowed with an orange light that put him in mind of hot tea and a hearth. Anger, hot and irrational, welled up as he thought of her ensconced in a warm, comfortable room, while he prowled outside in the rain like some kind of bedraggled panther.

  His whole response to her was as irrational as the idea of a fortune-teller consulting the spirits about the future. It was as stupid as the concept of wooing women with ebony elephants. It was, he admitted, as incomprehensible as a fraud refusing an offer of several hundred guineas in exchange for doing nothing. Perhaps that was why he drifted toward her door, his boots clomping heavily against the cold, wet stairs leading down.

  He had a sudden image of confronting her, of explaining scientific thought and rigor. He wanted to knock the wind out of her with his words, as she had from him. He wanted her to feel as off balance as he did now. He wanted to win, to prove to her she was wrong and he was right. How idiotic of him. How unthinking. And yet—

  He knocked.

  And he waited.

  Madame Esmerelda opened the door. She was carrying a tallow candle. It smoked and illuminated her face; he could see her pupils dilate in shock when she saw who stood on her doorstep. She didn’t say a word—didn’t invite him in, just blocked the opening and looked up at him in openmouthed surprise.

  She hadn’t donned that ridiculous costume again. Instead, a simple robe of thick, dark wool covered her. The thin white line of her chemise peeked over the neckline. That hint of muslin forcibly reminded Gareth of the afternoon. Of the expanse of soft flesh separated from his hands by two cloth layers and so much dampened air. A fist-size lump lodged itself in his throat and a dark mist formed in his mind, blanketing his carefully planned diatribe.

  She curled one arm around herself, as if it were somehow she who needed protection from him.

  “Do you know how I can tell you’re a fraud?” he croaked.

  She gazed up at him.

  “Because you’re wrong. You’re completely wrong.”

  He fumbled in his mind for his prepared speech. Science is about answers. It raises us above those who do not question.

  But before he could start, Gareth made a colossal mistake: He looked into Madame Esmerelda’s eyes. He’d thought she was b
lack-eyed. But from eighteen inches away, with the candle so close to her face, he realized her eyes were in fact a very dark blue.

  With that simple observation, the blood drained from his brain. Gareth’s structured defense of scientific thinking washed from his head. Instead, he took a step toward her. He let the veil drop from his eyes, let her see the inferno raging inside him.

  She sucked in air. “Why do you say I’m wrong?” Her voice quavered on the last word.

  “I’m not an automaton.” The words came from some vital place deep inside him—his solar plexus, perhaps, rather than his uncooperative brain.

  Gareth took another step closer. She continued to hold his gaze, as incapable of looking away as he. The white vapor of her breath swirled in the cold night air. Its cadence kept time with the rise and fall of her chest. He could taste every one of her exhalations, sweetness coalescing against his mouth.

  It was an act of self-preservation to reach out and pinch the candle flame. To stop the flow of sensual images before they seared themselves permanently into his flesh. The wick sizzled and the light died between his wet fingers. Her eyes disappeared into the navy darkness of nighttime.

  It didn’t help. He could still smell her. He could taste the honey of her breath on the tip of his tongue. And the distant streetlamp cast enough illumination for him to see when she licked her lips. Heat seared him.

  “I’m not made of wood.” Gareth reached out again. This time, his hand grazed the warm flesh of her cheek. And still the silly woman didn’t jerk away. She didn’t even flinch when he tilted her chin up. Instead, her lips parted in soft, subtle invitation.

  The thought of her mouth against his snuffed what little guttering intellect remained to him. Her flesh seemed to sizzle beneath his fingertips. He lowered his head until her lips were a tantalizing inch from his.

  “Most of all,” Gareth said, his voice husky, “I’ll be damned if I let you call me dispassionate.”

  Chapter Three