He wore gloves, but she knew they didn’t hide calluses or broken nails. His hands would be typical of his class: smooth and neatly manicured. They were larger than was fashionable, though, the fingers long and graceful.
Well, not so graceful at the moment. His valet had placed the pin firmly and precisely among the folds of his neck cloth, and he was struggling with it.
Or seeming to.
“You’d better let me,” she said. “You can’t see what you’re doing.”
She moved his hands away, hers lightly brushing his. Glove against glove, that was all. Yet she felt the shock of contact as though skin had touched skin, and the sensation traveled the length of her body.
She was acutely aware of the broad chest under the expensive layers of neck cloth and waistcoat and shirt. All the same, her hands neither faltered nor trembled. She’d had years of practice. Years of holding cards steady while her heart pounded. Years of bluffing, never letting so much as a flicker of an eye, a twitch of a facial muscle, betray her.
The pin came free, winking in the light. She regarded the snowy linen she’d wrinkled.
“How naked it looks,” she said. “Your neck cloth.”
“What is this?” he said. “Remorse?”
“Never,” she said, and that was pristine truth. “But the empty place offends my aesthetic sensibilities.”
“In that case, I shall hasten to my hotel and have my valet replace it.”
“You’re strangely eager to please,” she said.
“There’s nothing strange about it.”
“Be calm, Your Grace,” she said. “I have an exquisite solution.”
She took a pin from her bodice and set his in its place. She set her pin into the neck cloth. Hers was nothing so magnificent as his, merely a smallish pearl. But it was a pretty one, of a fine luster. Softly it glowed in its snug place among the folds of his linen.
She was aware of his gaze, so intent, and of the utter stillness with which he waited.
She lightly smoothed the surrounding fabric, then stepped back and eyed her work critically. “That will do very well,” she said.
“Will it?” He was looking at her, not the pearl.
“Let the window be your looking glass,” she said.
He was still watching her.
“The glass, Your Grace. You might at least admire my handiwork.”
“I do,” he said. “Very much.”
But he turned away, wearing the faintest smile, and studied himself in the glass.
“I see,” he said. “Your eye is as good as my valet’s—and that’s a compliment I don’t give lightly.”
“My eye ought to be good,” she said. “I am the greatest modiste in all the world.”
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author SOPHIE JORDAN is a former high school English teacher who resides in Houston with her family. When she’s not writing, she divides her time between inventing culinary masterpieces—her husband won’t always agree—and visiting her family’s pecan ranch in the Texas Hill Country. Sophie also writes young adult novels for HarperTeen and paranormal romances under the name Sharie Kohler (www.shariekohler.net).
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By Sophie Jordan
Wicked in Your Arms
Wicked Nights with a Lover
In Scandal They Wed
Sins of a Wicked Duke
Surrender to Me
One Night with You
Too Wicked to Tame
Once upon a Wedding Night
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
WICKED IN YOUR ARMS. Copyright © 2011 by Sharie Kohler
Excerpt from Silk Is For Seduction copyright © 2011 by Loretta Chekani. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 9780062033024
FIRST EDITION
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