by Candace Camp
The woman began to dance again. Leona walked over to her and, as the girl slowly undulated, she slid her hand over the other girl’s chest, now slick with perspiration, and unfastened another of the scarves. Leona looked up at Devin, her face challenging, her eyes lit sensually. “Come, Dev, my love, you know what I am. I have never pretended to be anything else.”
As she talked, she caressed the other woman’s body, setting scarf after scarf adrift, until the woman was clothed only in the sheer pants, brief top and delicate gold chains. “I am wicked,” Leona went on. “And so are you. You enjoy this, just as I do. Just as you enjoy all the things we do—things no decent person enjoys.”
He watched her, no more able to look away from the erotic scene than he was to suppress the hot pulsation in his manhood. His eyes were glued to Leona’s nimble fingers as they unfastened the top and pulled it away, leaving only the gold chains draped over the woman’s small tanned breasts. She caressed the woman’s breasts delicately, circling each nipple with her forefinger.
“Don’t you want to take her now, Dev?” Leona purred. “Don’t you want to drive yourself into her? I’d like to see it. You’d like me to watch, wouldn’t you? Do you think that’s normal? It’s wicked. Wicked, the way you and I are.”
With an abrupt, fierce movement, she jerked at the waistband of the sheer harem trousers, opening them, and let them fall down to the dancer’s feet. “What do you think, Dev? Will you take her?” She stepped away from the woman. “Or would you rather take me?”
She unbuttoned the front of her dress and peeled it back, revealing her breasts, firm and full, centered by large dark nipples, pointed with desire. She pushed the dress back off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor, revealing her naked body beneath. Running her hands provocatively down her body, she looked at him, arching one brow.
“Well, Dev, do you want me? Or maybe you want both of us. Or are you too pious, like your father?”
“Damn you,” he growled, reaching out and pulling her to him. “You know I want you.”
Leona smiled and rubbed her body against his. “Then admit it. Admit that you are wicked. You don’t give a damn about that silly American chit or whether she enjoys living at Darkwater. You don’t give a damn about the Aincourt name. Not as long as you can have plenty of money. And this.” She looped one leg around his, rubbing herself suggestively against him. “Well, Dev, do you?”
“You know I don’t,” he replied thickly, swinging her up into his arms and dropping her none too gently on the bed. “You’re right. We’re steeped in sin,” he said as he unbuttoned his trousers and peeled them off. “And I will marry the damned heiress, if that is what you want.”
4
Miranda settled her spectacles on her nose and suppressed her sigh. For once, the accounts in front of her bored her past speaking. She had been feeling faintly blue all day. She knew that the feeling had to do with the stranger she had met last night. The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that the man who had been attacked was the very man whom her father had wanted her to meet. It should have been a fortuitous thing that that man had turned out to be the first man who had sparked her interest since she had been in England. Instead, it was rather depressing, since it was clear that he obviously was so set against her that he had not even been willing to attend his mother’s party to meet her. Of course, she had felt pretty much the same, so she could hardly hold it against the man. In fact, it showed that he was not the weak, shallow sort that she had assumed him to be. However, she could not help but feel a trifle miffed, no matter how silly she told herself that was.
She would never admit such a thing to anyone, of course. Indeed, she had not even told her father that she thought she had actually met the elusive Earl of Ravenscar the night before. If he knew that she had found his candidate for a husband in any way intriguing, he would never let up his campaign to get her to marry the man. And, of course, she had no intention of doing anything like that, no matter how attractive she had found the earl. She still felt the same way. She could never marry a man whom she did not love. She wanted the kind of marriage her father and Elizabeth had—they had been devoted to one another from the day they met. And while she certainly was not the sort of dependent, clinging female that her stepmother was, she wanted to experience that same sort of firm, long-standing feeling.
She wanted her eyes to shine every time she saw her husband the way that her father’s did whenever Elizabeth came into the room. She wanted to miss him when he was away and greet him with unfeigned delight when he returned, the way she had seen Elizabeth do with her father. Otherwise, what use was marriage? She could do very well on her own without a husband. She was used to taking care of things herself, and she had an ample fortune. She did not need to marry the way most women did, and she certainly did not feel, as Lady Westhampton had said about herself, that she must marry out of duty to her family. She might want to please her father, but it would not harm him or the Upshaw name if she did not.
She had told herself that she was being uncharacteristically foolish about the matter of the man she had rescued last night, and so, after picking her way through her breakfast, she had decided to spend the remainder of the day doing something useful—as well as something that usually kept her thoroughly engrossed. So she had pulled her hair back into a plain, no-nonsense bun and slipped into one of the older, much washed sacque dresses that she was accustomed to wearing when she did the accounts or wrote business letters. She was far too likely to get splotches and smudges of ink on her clothes when she worked to wear one of her nicer dresses. Then she had gone downstairs to the study, put on the small round spectacles that she wore when she did close work, and settled down to work with her father’s assistant, Hiram Baldwin.
Much to her dismay, she had found that she could not seem to shake her mood. Worse, she could not get interested in the sheets of numbers that Hiram had laid out before her. Usually she and Hiram shared an abiding interest in financial dealings, but today his voice droned on unmercifully, and she found her attention wandering back to the events of the evening before. Time and again she had to pull her mind back and apply it to the business at hand.
It was something of a relief when the door opened early in the afternoon and her father bustled in, grinning from ear to ear. Miranda smiled back at him; it was difficult not to, when her father smiled like that. Besides, she was more than ready to have a legitimate reason to be distracted from her work.
“Hello, Papa,” she greeted him. “You certainly look like the cat that ate the canary.”
“Indeed?” Her father’s grin grew even broader. “Well, I have every reason to be, my girl. I’ve been talking with a gentleman, and it seems he would like to pay his addresses to you. I told him I was amenable to it, of course.”
“What?” Miranda jumped to her feet. “What are you talking about? What gentleman? Papa, what have you done? If you have found some other puffed-up nobleman to try to shackle me to, I swear I’ll—”
“No, no,” Joseph hastened to assure her. “It’s no new gentleman. It’s the same gentleman. Lord Ravenscar.”
Miranda stared. “What? Here?” Her hand flew to her hair. She must look like a fright! Her hair was not arranged becomingly at all, and the dress she wore was so old and outmoded that she was embarrassed to be seen in it. “Papa! No! I can’t—he mustn’t.”
“Pish-posh, girl,” Joseph replied cheerfully. “I’ve already told him he could speak to you. Wouldn’t be polite to send him packing now. Won’t take but a minute.” He turned and walked toward the door. “Come, Hiram, you and I had better leave the girl alone.”
Hiram, with a single puzzled glance at Miranda, who was standing as if turned to stone, stuck his pen back into the inkwell and followed his employer out the door.
“No, wait!” Miranda hurried toward the door. She couldn’t let Ravenscar see her like this! But she had not even reached the doorway when it was filled by a large, well-dressed gentlem
an.
Miranda’s first thought was that she had been right. The man standing before her, handsome and tall, was the same man whom she had helped to escape his attackers last night. Her second thought was to wonder what had happened to all that man’s charm.
This man’s face was faintly bored and settled into lines of aristocratic hauteur. He was handsome, certainly, and his figure was slim and well-muscled in his perfectly tailored clothes, but the green eyes held no laughter or excitement now as they flickered coldly around the room and settled on her briefly.
“Miss Upshaw,” he drawled as he made an elegant bow in her direction.
“Lord Ravenscar,” Miranda replied in a tone as cool and distant as his face. She wondered if the excitement of the evening before had addled her brain that she had been drawn to this man. The Earl of Ravenscar seemed to be like every other arrogant nobleman she had met—if not worse.
Devin glanced at Miranda again. He hated being here. It was humiliating, degrading. It grated at his soul to be reduced to this—for however Leona or his mother or Rachel might phrase it, it still boiled down to his selling himself for this woman’s money. It was proof, he knew, of just how low he had sunk. Well, as Leona had pointed out, he was in the mire now, had been for years; he might as well wallow in it.
Still, it was hard for him to do. He had felt shamed as he had spoken to the girl’s father; he felt even more so now, facing the girl herself. But he had enough pride left that he would not allow them to see the way the humiliation scored his soul. His family, he reminded himself, had walked and talked with kings; he was not about to let some fur trapper or his daughter see him humbled. He lifted his chin and cast another look at the homely creature before him.
She was much as he had imagined her: dowdy in an old-fashioned, rather shapeless dress, her hair skinned back into an unfashionable bun, a pair of spectacles perched on her nose. She was without mistake a spinster, a plain woman who would be married only for her money. No doubt her speech and manners would be just as bad as her looks—a grating American accent and no idea what to do or say in polite company.
His eyes skimmed away again as fast as they had settled on her. He could not bear to look at her as he did this, so he fixed his gaze on a point just over her left shoulder and began his speech. “Miss Upshaw, I have asked your father’s permission to pay my addresses to you, and he graciously gave it to me.” He drew a breath and plunged on. “It would give me great pleasure if you would do me the honor of consenting to be my wife.”
He paused, waiting. Miranda stared at him for a long moment, scarcely able to believe what she had heard. She was so furious, she could hardly make a coherent sentence.
Finally, flatly, she said, “No.”
His mouth dropped open comically, and for the first time he stared straight at her. “What?”
His look of astonishment was so great that Miranda let out a giggle. “I said, ‘No,’ Lord Ravenscar,” she repeated.
“You are refusing me?” Not only that, the silly cow had the nerve to laugh at him!
“Yes, I am.”
“Good God, woman!” he burst out. “I hope you don’t think that you are going to receive a better offer!”
“My dear sir,” Miranda said crisply, “any offer would be better than the one you just made me.”
She whipped off her spectacles and strode forward until she was standing only a foot away from him. She looked pugnaciously up into his face. “I have never heard a more graceless speech in my entire life. I can assure you that there is not a woman on earth who would marry you if you approached her like that. Who do you think you are? Do you think that any woman would just fall down in gratitude before you because you had decided to let her be your wife? You are the rudest, most arrogant man I have ever had the misfortune to meet, and I would rather live and die alone than to tie myself to the likes of you!”
Dev looked down into the wide gray eyes, snapping with fury, and he had the second great surprise of the afternoon. “You! Why, you are the woman who—”
“Yes,” Miranda replied crisply. “I am the woman who saved your unworthy hide last night. If you were not so thoroughly arrogant and conceited, no doubt you would have realized it sooner. And I can tell you that I am rapidly regretting that I made the effort. A drubbing at the hands of those ruffians would probably have done you a world of good. Indeed, I am inclined to think that perhaps they were hired by some other woman who you insulted with a marriage proposal.”
“Insulted!” Devin exclaimed, fury surging up in him. He wasn’t sure what annoyed him more—this woman’s disdain, or the fact that his body remembered quite suddenly and vividly the desire that had stirred in his loins last night when he had looked at her. “You dare to say that I insulted you by asking you to marry me? I am the sixth Earl of Ravenscar. I can trace my bloodlines back to the twelfth century. I dare swear you would be hard put to know who your grandfather was.”
“That is a colossally foolish argument,” Miranda said dispassionately. “Everyone’s ancestors go back that far. The fact that you know the names of yours means nothing except that your family kept good records. The Lord only knows what sort of man your ancestor was—he may very well have been the most evil fellow around. And it certainly doesn’t mean anything about your character. That is something that you make yourself, and from the things I have heard, you have not done a very good job of it.”
“You dare—” Ravenscar looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Good God, if you were a man, I’d call you out for that.” He moved even closer, glaring down into her face.
“Another supremely silly thing to bring up, since I obviously am not,” Miranda pointed out, standing her ground. She was not about to let him intimidate her by looming over her this way. Her temper was up, and she was enjoying herself. This man deserved to be taken down a peg or two, and she was quite happy to be the one to do so. Lifting her chin defiantly, she glared back at him, only inches away from his face.
“You impudent little—” Ravenscar broke off his words, and suddenly his hands went around her arms like steel. He jerked her up and into him, and his mouth came down on hers.
Miranda stood stock-still for a moment, unable to move. She had never been treated like this before in her life, handled so roughly or kissed so thoroughly. No other man would have had the arrogance—or the courage. Indignation shot through her. But at the same time, every fiber in her being thrilled to the sensations that coursed through her. His mouth was hot and demanding, and the taste of it intoxicated her. His lips pressed into hers, fervent, velvety, searing. Then his tongue was in her mouth, invading her. A tremor of excitement shot through her, a vibration that sizzled down every nerve ending in her body in a way that she had never experienced—indeed, had never even imagined existed.
An ache started low in her abdomen, warm and pulsing, insistent. She sagged against him, lost in the heat and pleasure, her anger and indignation burned away by the desire that swept through her. Her breasts felt full and soft, the nipples prickling with longing, and she was aware that she wanted to feel his hands on them, to have him touch her everywhere. She shuddered, her moan swallowed by his voracious mouth.
Then, suddenly, shockingly, his mouth was gone from hers. He pulled back and looked down into her passion-softened face. His eyes glittered, green as glass.
“There,” he muttered huskily, his hands falling away from her arms. “Now you know what you could have had but were too much a fool to take.”
His caustic words cut through the haze of pleasure, and Miranda’s spine stiffened. Anger and a fierce self-dislike seized her. She lifted her hand and slapped him hard.
“Get out,” she snapped. “Get out of this house, and never show your face here again.”
“With great pleasure,” he responded sardonically and turned on his heel to stride out of the room.
Miranda’s knees were suddenly too weak to stand, and she sank down in the nearest chair. Dear God, what had just happened?
The man was arrogant and rude—no, he was beyond arrogant and rude; he was something so irritating and provoking that she could not think of a name for it. She hated him, and she hated him all the more because she had thrilled so to his kiss. She had weakly wanted to lean against him, had wantonly wished that the kiss would go on and on forever. She had enjoyed it, even though everything in her screamed not to. She had wanted him with a fierce and urgent ache that she had never felt for any other man. And it was infuriating that he had made her feel that way quite against her will.
The man was the very devil, she thought, and she hoped that she would never have to see him again. But, no, she realized immediately, that was not true. She hoped she would see him again—and soon—so that she could tell him exactly how much she despised him!
Devin strode down the street, his feet keeping pace with the rapid tumbling of his brain. The nerve of the wench! To slap him, to tell him he was not good enough to be her husband! Who did she think she was? He was an Aincourt of Darkwater, and she was a nobody, puffed up in importance just because her father had made a pile of gold selling animal skins—as if that made her anyone of consequence!
He thought of a dozen scathing things he should have said to her. He should have told her how little her refusal of his proposal had meant to him. He had not wanted to ask her to marry him in the first place—he had only done it because everyone kept hounding him to. He should have pointed out to her that she was no prize for any man, least of all an earl. But, damnation, she had felt so soft and yielding against him. And her lips had tasted of honey, and the scent of roses that clung to her had filled his nostrils in the most delightful, heady way.
