“Well, you know, they do on other days,” she protested. “Some of them, at least. It’s just that it’s a Friday. There are always parties on Friday night.”
“For you, as well,” he pointed out.
“But I’m not looking for a husband, as the others are.”
His thumb stroked the place on her wrist where his mouth had just been, and little thrills of awareness ran over her skin. “And why is that? You can’t tell me that you lack interest in the less fair sex.”
“It is the less fair sex that lacks interest in a fiancée who wishes to finish her college degree,” she said. “To them, university is a trifle for a girl to amuse herself with until she finds her match.”
“And for you?” he challenged.
“My dear Mr. Morel, if I must choose between a husband and the laboratory, I believe that I will manage without a man.”
“And what if you could have both?” he asked.
Her heart raced, and she could hear it in her ears. “Children and Bunsen burners? Reagents and dinner parties? Morning visits and test tubes? Do you really think such things are compatible?”
“Damn morning visits and dinner parties,” he said easily. “And damn Bunsen burners and test tubes, as well. I have no particular attachment to any of them, but if one interests a woman more than another.…”
“Why, Mr. Morel, I believe you really are making love to me,” she said. “Though you go about it an utterly backwards way. First you kiss me, then you press your suit. What will happen next? Will you then dance with me and finally be introduced?”
“Come to my boat. The Gloriana. I shall be waiting for you,” he said.
“Shall you?” she asked. The idea intrigued her. That was what she felt—intrigue. For she certainly had no wish to give it any other name. “When?”
“Tomorrow. Morning, evening, I don’t care. Arrive before midnight.”
“And if I don’t?”
He gave a slow, predatory smile, and her stomach did a small, tingly kind of flip. “You will. I would take a bet on that.”
He kissed her once more, on the back of the hand, his lips actually making contact with her skin instead of only meeting air as was polite. Then he turned about on his heel and stalked straight out the front door and into the night.
And Hattie stood under the glittering chandelier, and she knew he was right. She would come.
She didn’t know why, but she would most certainly come.
Chapter Five
The hours of the next day stretched by in a fog of impossible tedium. Hattie found Leticia’s needling more frustrating than usual, but she schooled her face into an expression of passivity as she obediently allowed herself to be trussed like a game bird in her morning clothes for the hours at the breakfast table and in the drawing room.
The event of the morning meal at the summer house was usually a quiet one because Leticia habitually took a tray of hot chocolate and toast in their bedroom, while Mrs. Buchanan’s morning flutterings before the mirror lasted for hours. So the dining room was customarily the domain of Mr. Buchanan and Hattie, or rather Hattie and a stiff white newspaper, from behind which emerged the occasional harrumph and the clink of a coffee cup in its saucer.
But Mr. Buchannan had invited Ralph Farrow, a young man of good family and impeccable repute, down from New York for the weekend, and that had set the entire household on its ear. Because the decision to bring him had occurred too late to secure him an invitation to the Henleys’ party, Mrs. Buchannan was determined to make up for abandoning her guest the night before by playing the doting hostess this morning, which meant that her flutterings were transferred to purposeless motions around and about the coffee pot and the English buffet. And Leticia, never one to miss a chance at having an audience, had turned the wattage of her sparkles and smiles up until Mr. Thomas Edison might have powered a city from her.
Unfortunately, Leticia’s wit that morning had a biting edge, and there was no nearer nor better target than her sister. And so pale Mr. Farrow, who would normally merit no more than the merest glance from this season’s toast, was subjected to the full force of her attention and charm at the expense of Hattie, which left him looking like he wished that the stiff white collar of his shirt, which rode rather too high on his short neck, would grow to swallow him whole.
Hattie let the chatter wash over her as she picked at her croissant. Ralph would occasionally shoot her glances, whether edged with desperation or with some attempt at the kind of barbed amusement that Leticia was wielding, Hattie neither knew nor cared. She expressed neither camaraderie nor defensiveness in her pleasant and blank nods in return.
She knew full well why her father had invited the young Mr. Farrow up to the Hamptons for the weekend, and it was not to give her younger sister yet another outlet for her considerable charms. The more frequent harrumphs and the more forceful clattering of porcelain told her that her father was discomfited with the outcome of his scheme, which had almost certainly originally come from some cracked notion of her mother’s.
Having determined that the most dashing men of New York’s elite could not sway Hattie from her stated course, Mrs. Buchannan had decided that her eldest daughter must be more suited to a cerebral match. But lacking any measure by which to determine who might qualify for such a distinction, her mother ascribed a superior intellect to every young man she found unappealing but did not wish to disparage. And so instead of parading Hattie in front of charming and insipid young men, she now pushed her toward repellent and insipid ones.
Hattie had even less desire than usual to exert herself to entertain a young man—youngish man, she corrected as she stared at his shiny pate through his thinning hair as he briefly dipped his head to drink his coffee. She still felt the ghost of Mr. Morel’s hand on her cheek, his lips on the back of her hand—and, above all, on her mouth. From the moment that he had kissed her, she’d had the guilty sensation that her swollen lips would bear silent testimony to every observer of what had passed between them. She felt marked by him, changed in a way that no man’s kiss had ever changed her before.
It seemed incredible that even her family could be oblivious to the alterations in her. But they went about their morning as if nothing at all was different when Hattie felt that the entire world had shifted under her feet. Mr. Buchannan still hid behind his newspaper, Leticia chattered away, and Mrs. Buchannan added an occasional interjection to Leticia’s flow of words, attempting to draw Hattie out to engage with the rising Junior Branch Manager.
Hattie fended off her attempts with the minimum of words required for politeness and rubbed the back of her hand, where Mr. Morel’s lips seemed to have permanently imprinted a memory of his caress.
“You are going to be escorting us to call on Mrs. Henley, aren’t you?” Leticia was saying. “It would be a most excellent chance for you to meet her and her lovely daughters.” She gave the word the emphasis of a young woman who was confident in her own greater charms.
Mr. Farrow nervously cleared his throat. “Should I be coming with you and Mrs. Buchannan and the charming Miss Buchannan as well?”
Ah. That response might have piqued Hattie’s interest some other day, for no one thought her attractions equal to her sister’s. That could only mean that Mr. Farrow knew full well that Leticia was as far beyond his reach as the sun and that reaching for her would only send him plunging into the waves.
Of course, the reality was that he had no better chance with Hattie. But he could hardly know that, could he? Hattie would have pitied him if his estimation of her hadn’t been so insulting.
Giving up on her meal, she murmured, “Excuse me,” and stood from the table.
Mr. Farrow stood instantly in a display of respect. Mr. Buchannan, who never stood for his own daughters, simply harrumphed yet again from behind his Times.
“I need to get ready for our afternoon visits,” Hattie lied blatantly and without remorse.
“Why, it’s hours yet,” her mother proteste
d faintly.
Hattie allowed herself a smile and unleashed one of her favorite retorts: “Nevertheless.”
She nodded to her family, especially Leticia, who was frowning because the attention of the assembly had, however briefly, been diverted from her, and then she left the room.
Hattie shut the door behind her and leaned against it, closing her eyes and raising a hand to her lips, where the shade of Mr. Morton’s kiss still lingered. When could she go to him?
Why did she want to, when she had a very clear idea that his plans for her were anything but honorable?
She caught the brooch watch she wore, tilting it up to see the time. Her mother disliked the timepiece, saying that it made Hattie look like someone’s nurse. She didn’t care. It made her feel rooted in the world, in the day, to be able to know precisely how many minutes had passed and how many were left—it reminded her where she was going and where she had gone and even, in some small way, of who she was in the midst of it all.
It was ten o’clock. There would be countless tedious hours with her family around her before she dared to slip away to find Jean’s pleasure boat. And for the first time in her memory, she wondered what she would do with the day.
Chapter Six
The night had drawn tightly around the ketch by the time Jean’s sharp ears heard a young woman’s footfall on the wooden pier. He listened indolently from the salon. There was no reason to hurry to her. She had come this far; therefore, she would find him, given enough time.
He heard her muted conversation with his valet, and a moment later, the footfalls were on the deck, and then he saw her feet on the top step of the ladder, neat little black boots with high heels and lovely narrow ankles that disappeared under the white ruffles of her muslin skirt.
“Ah, my dear, you came,” Jean said, nursing his brandy in one hand.
“You said that I would,” the girl—Henrietta—returned as she stepped into the salon. She wore a walking dress, a cuirass bodice with a sheer shirtwaist beneath that buttoned all the way up her throat. “Did you doubt me, after all?”
“It’s not you that I have confidence in,” he said, leaning back in his chair. She was even lovelier than he remembered her, a fire in her spirit that seemed to warm the coldness in his heart even from across the salon cabin.
“You have quite the opinion of yourself,” she said scathingly even as her attraction to him practically crackled off her body. “And you don’t even rise at the entrance of a lady.”
“You are quite right. I don’t,” he agreed.
She frowned down at him, bristling. “I should turn back around right now and go home.”
“But you won’t,” he said, letting a small sliver of his power stroke her mind. It was an indulgence, this tickling manipulation of his, but it was one of the only things that gave him pleasure any longer, drawing out the play between himself and his victim until the moment he sank his teeth into her throat.
And he could even pretend to himself, for the length of their dalliance, that this one might be different, that this one might live.…
He had never taken the blood-gift from one who had survived before. He knew better than to hope. But the pretense was enough. It had to be.
“Won’t I?” Henrietta arched her eyebrows, taking his words as a challenge despite his touch on her mind.
“No. You won’t, for two very good reasons. First, your interest was piqued enough that you wrangled an escape from your papa’s roof. That’s fair amount of effort that you have already invested in this little jaunt. ‘Twould be a pity to waste it for nothing. Second, I can tell how interested you still are. Your breath is coming faster, your eyes are dilated, and I daresay that your pulse is racing just a little, too. And third and most importantly, the sailors have already cast away, and we are adrift in the Atlantic. I understand that you are a strong swimmer, but are you really that strong?”
She looked more amused than alarmed—as if he had played a mild prank upon her.
“You truly are a brazen man, aren’t you? What is your business here in New York, pray tell?”
Jean thought about how to answer that. He settled on a form of the truth. “Heiress hunting is quite the fashion among Continental families of more pedigree and distinction than funds.”
“Is it?” She flung herself carelessly into an over-padded chair, tore off her gloves, and raised her sweetly rounded arms to pull the pins from her hat, one after another. “And here I thought it was the fashion among the American nouveau riche to plunder the Continent for titles to increase their prominence.”
“Indeed.”
“You told me you didn’t care about money,” she said, lifting the hat off, skewering the pins back through it again, and tossing it carelessly upon the nearest table.
“Perhaps I lied,” he said. “Perhaps I’m lying now.”
She wrinkled her button nose and snorted. “Why did you invite me here tonight?”
“Why did you come?” he returned.
Her eyes raked over him. “Because you interest me. I haven’t met a man like you before.”
He took another sip of brandy. “Well, then, that is why I invited you.”
“You haven’t met a man like me?” she shot back instantly.
“Clever,” Jean said.
He took the last swallow from his lowball and set the empty glass on the table at his elbow. He stood then and walked over to her. She tipped her head back to look up at him, exposing the white length of her neck. Her hair was curling madly in the damp sea hair, fighting its combs and ribbons. It was a blonde so pale that it was almost white. Even her eyelashes were blonde, her eyebrows hardly darker. And she looked up at him with clear blue eyes that sparkled with intelligence.
“You’re wasted on society,” Jean said, winding one errant curl around his finger.
“Really, now?” She still looked amused, but there was an unmistakable heat even in her gaze now. “And on what would I not be wasted?”
“On whom,” Jean correct.
She lifted her hand, putting it lightly over his own. Her fingertips caressed the back of his hand, as if of their own accord.
“Really, Mr. Morel, you’re being terribly forward.” Her slightly breathless voice told him that she hoped he’d be more forward, still.
He dragged the back of his thumb along the line of her jaw, knowing exactly what it did to her, feeling the tension of her body in his own. “After our meeting at Mrs. Henley’s, could you expect anything less?”
Her eyes went heavy-lidded, but she seemed to rouse herself, her hand tightening over his and pulling it down, away from her face. “I will not sacrifice my studies to an evening’s diversion, however entertaining it might be.”
“No more than you’d sacrifice them to a young man of your own station?”
“Precisely.”
“I think you’ll do anything I ask,” Jean said.
At that, she gave a most unladylike snort and stood fast enough that he had to straighten to keep from being struck by her head. “Really, sir, you are behaving most contemptibly. I have ceased to be amused.”
She still held his hand in hers, and he twisted it so that the hold was reversed and used the motion to pull her body up against his own. He could feel her mind struggling weakly in his influence. He liked that she fought—so few women did.
But the outcome was already determined, and she went slack in his arms, her heart beating so hard and fast that he could see it in her throat.
“Let’s test it, then, Henrietta,” he said. “Kiss me.”
“What?” Her voice was tinged with outrage.
“Do it,” he urged. “If you want to.”
“I…I don’t,” she said, but her protest was faint, and she was already rising onto her tiptoes and leaning toward him. She made a tiny, desperate noise—and her lips met his.
With his influence tangled in her will, the shock of her reaction rippled back with such force that it almost undid him all at once. Her first kis
s was light, hardly more than a touch of her lips against his, and then she kissed him again, her lips parting, and again, hungry now, desperate, opening to him, and when he thrust his tongue inside her mouth, she gasped, her hands suddenly tightening on his coat as she tipped her head back in surrender.
Jean’s languid ennui was blasted away under that mouth, as if all those years of indifference had never existed. What mattered now was this woman, her flesh hot and ripe in his arms, so young, so tender.
And he would make her his.
When he pulled back, her eyes opened slowly and focused on him, a crease of confusion between her eyebrows. “What are you doing to me?”
“Nothing compared to what I will do,” he vowed.
She shook her head, swallowing, and he felt her mind battling its way out of the fog of his presence.
He let her fight, amused by it. She was so young, so astonishingly young. The very newness of her mind was something fresh and startling. Jean had been old for so long that he couldn’t remember any other way to be.
“Why? What do you want of me?” she managed.
“Guess,” he returned.
She looked into his eyes, and hers grew wider. “Everything,” she breathed.
“Indeed, my dear,” he said, and he lowered his mouth to her neck.
She squirmed slightly in his grasp, as if she wanted to escape, but once his mouth touched her skin, she gave a tiny groan and leaned into his chest, her body moving with his rhythm.
“No,” she said, but it came out less like a protest and more like a plea.
Nevertheless, Jean broke away. He was enjoying this game. It seemed so much like old times. But he had made promises—to himself, to others, and to their common cause. And this was not part of it.
“What do you want of me, Henrietta?” he asked.
“Hattie,” she corrected.
“Hattie.” He dropped to one knee, her hands sliding slowly, reluctantly over his body and down his arms until he held both her hands in his. “Do you have a middle name?”
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