“Indeed,” she said finally, “Your hair is gratifyingly dark. In fact, I took you for a Frenchman until I heard of your success with the women of France.”
“Ouch!” Gil said, laughing. After all, he was to marry, too. Perhaps this French lady would be his last fling before he settled into a dutiful matrimony. He helped her into the carriage and then seated himself opposite her. “I am entirely . . . at your service, madam.”
“In that case,” she said with perfect aplomb, “I am staying at Grillon’s and I would be very grateful if you would accompany me to the hotel.”
His eyebrows rose. Little Emelie was remarkably accomplished at the business of making an assignation. For a moment he had a flash of sympathy for her worthy burgher. Her eyes were shining with excitement above her mask. She had lovely eyes, with a wicked fringe of lash that curled at the corners of her eyes, giving her an entrancing coquettishness. Truly, how could he have forgotten this woman?
He pushed away the thought. Two bottles of brandy a night have a way of doing that to a person; and when one is trying above all to forget that one’s little brother just died, other things tend to get forgotten at the same time. “Would you care to remove your mask?” he asked.
“Oh, I think not,” she said. Her voice sounded like sin, joyous sin. She leaned forward and put a small, gloved hand on his knee. A bolt of pure lust shot to his groin. “I think it would be most amusing this way, if you’ll forgive me, Kerr. After all, you don’t remember my face from our last encounter, and I should hate to cause either of us embarrassment should we meet again. I am marrying an Englishman, after all.”
“You called me Gil at the masquerade. And I am quite certain that I shall forget your face once more, if you ask me to do so.”
“You will forgive my lack of confidence,” she said, and the rich glow of laughter in her voice was more tantalizing than her hand, which still rested on his knee. “I should like to wear my mask.”
“There is more than one way to befog my memory,” he said. And then, eyes fixed on hers, he reached up and turned down the small oil lamp that hung at his side. His side of the carriage was instantly cast into shadow, leaving only the light from the small lamp on her side burning. Its glow cast gold on the deep red of her hair, caught brilliance from the diamonds at her ears, turned the deep velvet of her pelisse to shining bronze.
She glanced at her own lamp. Then slowly, carefully, she began to pull off her right glove, finger by finger. “May I attend to your lamp?” he asked, rather horrified to find that his voice had darkened to a growl. There was something unbearably erotic about watching her slowly, so slowly, remove one glove.
She chuckled. She was not the sort of woman who giggled, he noted to himself. Finally, she curled back her glove to reveal a hand as beautifully shaped as her mouth. “One should never tend to oil lamps while wearing gloves,” she said, turning down the wick. “It presents a hazard.”
The light flickered, cast one last ray of light over the cream of her neck, and went out. Now the carriage was lit only by the flickers of light that came from below the tied-down curtains as they rumbled through London.
He sat for a moment in the dark, every sense aware of her movements. She was taking off her left glove unless he was mistaken.
“I shall not make love to you in this carriage,” he said suddenly.
Her laughter was so suggestive that it almost destroyed his control and sent him leaping to her seat. “Mon dieu, what a respectable man you are sober,” she said. “In Paris, you were sans cérémonie.”
“I can only regret my loss of memory,” he said, meaning it. “May I hold your gloves for you?” he asked, leaning forward.
“Of course,” she said, dropping the gloves unerringly into his hand.
“Do you see in the dark, like a cat?”
“No. But I am accustomed to it, since I have spent some time in the wings of a theater. Theaters don’t light the rear, or it will be visible to the audience.”
“You’re a professional actress?”
Actresses had a reputation for being nothing more than prostitutes, although Emma could have argued the point. Five years of painting sets for Mr. Tey had taught her, if from a distance, that actors and actresses arrived at their ethical lapses in as many ways as other people.
“No, I am not,” she said, undoing the clasp at her throat and allowing the thick velvet of her pelisse to fall from her shoulders.
“May I?” His voice had darkened to a husky rasp that made her heart beat faster in her chest. She handed her pelisse to him.
“Then why on earth have you spent time in a theater?”
“I paint drop scenes, the scenes that mark the changing of an act.”
“You paint drop scenes,” he said, sounding utterly stunned.
“Exactly. I painted one for an amateur performance, a few years ago, and fell into doing more as a favor to the local theater. That’s how I met my devoted fiancé,” she added, remembering his supposed existence.
“Ah yes,” he said, “the worthy burgher, the man whom you marry next week.”
“Precisely.” Wasn’t he going to kiss her? They passed a house with torches burning all the way to the roadway, and the carriage flashed with light for a moment, just long enough so that she caught sight of his brooding eyes.
“How long did you stay drunk in Paris?” she asked impulsively.
He stared across at her, but there was no light in the carriage now, and she couldn’t read his face. He must have taken off his gloves, because he picked up her right hand and began caressing it, large fingers slipping around hers. Her stomach felt a liquid jolt of heat.
“Six months,” he said, just when the silence had stretched so long that she had to babble of something. “I was drunk for six months. And I gather it was on one of my most oblivious evenings that I met you, ma chère.”
But Emma didn’t want to talk of that nonexistent meeting. “And the drinking was due to your brother’s death?”
He leaned forward and put her hand against his lips. The touch of his kiss to her fingertips made the warmth in her belly burst into flame. She suppressed a gasp. She had to appear experienced, not cast astray by as simple a thing as his touch.
“Walter died in October over a year ago,” he said, sitting back again and winding her fingers between his large ones. “He died in a carriage, while up at Oxford. Forgive me if I already told you the details when I saw you last. He was in his third year, and they were larking about—”
He stopped, and his fingers tightened on hers.
“What happened?” she asked, although she knew well enough. She’d been at the funeral, of course. She had pressed his mourning glove with her mourning glove, and murmured something through her black veil, put on for the brother-in-law who would never be her brother-in-law. At the funeral Gil’s eyes had been dead, black, expressionless; she could remember the look in them to this day. And the next thing they’d heard, he’d gone to Paris.
“He was drinking,” Gil said flatly. “There’s nothing unusual about drinking, of course. In some ways, the course of a university career is synonymous with a soak in a brandy bottle. But a man who’s been drinking doesn’t have good control of the reins. Nor yet of his balance. And Walter fell from the carriage, that’s all. Dropped the ribbons, fell out as his carriage swept around a corner.”
“I’m sorry,” she said softly.
“They say that he didn’t suffer.”
“I suppose . . . Does that help?”
“Not much.”
She leaned forward then and took his hands, both of them, in hers. The carriage was trundling down a long, dark lane, and so she couldn’t see anything at all. She let her fingers wander over his hands, over the calluses on his fingers, probably from holding reins.
“So I gather you were trying to get drunk enough to fall out of a carriage?”
There was a moment of silence, and she felt a drop of fear. Had she gone too far? But he gave a bark of lau
ghter. “Something like that, I suppose.”
She lengthened her fingers, stretched them over the broad backs of his hands. “And did you succeed?”
“Obviously not.”
She waited. The carriage lurched, rounding a corner.
“I fell out of a number of beds,” he said finally. “Drunk, blind, trying to find my way to a chamber pot. A kind of death. But one always wakes up, more’s the pity.”
“So I’ve heard,” she said. She turned his hands over and began caressing his palms, trying to ignore the fact that her fingers were trembling. “I fell out of a carriage once.”
He went still; she more sensed than saw it. “What happened?”
“I was eight years old, and trundling along to the village in the old pony cart, driven by an ancient—but quite sober—groom. He didn’t know that I was leaning over the side, trying to pull sprays of wild roses into the carriage. He went around the corner just as I grasped a particularly beautiful spray.”
There was a little chuckle in his voice. “I believe I hear the echo of pain in your voice.”
“Straight into the rosebush,” she said mournfully. “I have a scar across my right eyebrow that is still visible.”
One hand slipped from hers and traced the shape of her eyebrow. “Beautiful,” he said, and the husky roll in his voice made her bite her lip. “Your brows fly above your eyes in a particularly fetching fashion. I saw no break, and I feel nothing now.”
“I color them,” Emma said briskly, trying to quell the butterflies in her stomach.
His hands slipped to her shoulders and her waist and then, all of a sudden, he gathered her up, and a moment later she was seated on his lap.
“I gather you grew up in England.”
“Actually, we have pony carts in France,” she said, hastening to put her French accent back in place.
His face was so close to hers. Perhaps he would kiss her. Emma felt a wave of excitement so acute that she felt almost faint.
“What made you stop trying to fall out of carriages?” she asked quickly, just as his mouth was moving toward hers. He didn’t stop though, just brushed her lips with his. Involuntarily, one of her hands came up and curled around his neck. It was a strong neck, muscled and firm.
“I couldn’t do it.” He said it almost into her mouth. “I could never let the reins go and simply fly into space. Walter had an exuberance that I never had. He drank with enthusiasm and rode with abandon. I’m conservative. I tried to teach him to be less reckless—” He shrugged.
Emma was hoping that he couldn’t feel her heart beating against her ribs. He had a beautiful mouth: curved, a little sad, delicious, firm. . . . Holding her breath, she took a finger and rubbed it over his lips.
“Will you take off your mask now?” he asked, his voice velvet dark in her ear.
She reached up to untie it and instantly realized the advantage of having her arms at the back of her head. The motion pushed her breasts against his chest. It felt delicious, dangerous. She stilled, untying the laces of her mask slowly, hardly breathing. She could just see his eyes, shadow pools of black in the darkness, sliding over her skin like a hot lick of brandy.
A second later, his hand slid down her throat to the curve of her breast. She gasped. She’d noticed his fingers were calloused but hadn’t imagined that they would weave a spell on her skin. They swept over the top of her bosom and slipped beneath the ornate gold cloth of her bodice.
His eyes held hers, not letting her look down and see what he was doing, where he was rubbing with his thumb, because he—he—
“What costume are you wearing?” he asked silkily.
“What?” she gasped.
“Are you Cleopatra, all in gold?” he asked. “But no, this is no Roman tunic.” Her eyes widened. His hand was clasping her breast now, pushing her bodice down, almost—almost touching—
“Perhaps you were Venus?” he whispered, his lips tracing a line down her cheek.
Emma couldn’t answer; she was simply, absolutely silenced for the first time in her life.
“I believe you must have been Queen Elizabeth.” His lips were on hers now. He asked silently, and she parted her lips, having heard of such a thing but never imagined having the inclination herself. Besides, hadn’t her governess said that husbands don’t kiss in such a manner? Of course! He thought she was a French hussy, and so he dared to kiss her in this fashion.
Emma opened her mouth a little wider, and he came to her. Something like that should have been disgusting, but it just—wasn’t. He tasted like . . . like . . . She didn’t know. Like a man, one could only think. He was tasting her, too, now, and then his hand stilled on her breast.
Her heart was thudding against her ribs. She felt as if she were a bird, caught between the warmth of his hands and the seduction of his mouth, unable to move or to speak. Gil had a hand behind her head now, angling her so that he could ravage her mouth, take her as he would, and all she could do was—
Her mind was racing. She should do something, or he might get bored and stop. And she didn’t want him to stop, did she?
He pulled away. His hand left an unwelcome coolness in its wake, and a small sound broke from her lips. Disappointment? Passion?
“I cannot fulfill your request,” he said.
“What?” Emma said, scarcely hearing him through the pounding of her heart in her ears.
He picked her up and, with gentle precision, put her back on the opposite seat. “I cannot make love to you in this carriage, or elsewhere, madame. You must forgive me.”
Chapter Ten
Emma opened her mouth, but no words emerged.
“Your request,” he said, watching her. “Your one request before you marry the wealthy burgher.”
For a moment she stared at him blankly and then the truth—or lack of it—seeped back into her mind. “Why not?”
“It wouldn’t be right,” he said.
Emma felt a shot of pure rage. This man, who by all accounts had slept with so many Frenchwomen that he likely murmured je t’aime in his sleep, was daring to become moralistic at this late date?
“After what we shared?” she said, and there was a generous dollop of warning in her tone, just in case he thought she was a pretty little French miss to be bedded and forgotten. Now she thought of it, he had treated Emelie in a horrendous fashion.
If Emelie had really existed, of course.
He was staring at her lips and seemed to have lost track of the conversation, so Emma drew in her lower lip and then slowly pushed it out again, just to remind him how soft that lip felt against his.
“Think of Paris,” she said, her voice softer and as close to sirenlike as possible.
“Thinking of Paris has never done me the least bit of good,” he said. “Since I can’t remember the half of it.”
“How could you have forgotten me?” There was genuine indignation in her tone. After all, he had forgotten her, off in St. Albans. Just because he’d never seen as much of her as he supposedly saw of Emelie, it was still a desertion.
“I waited for you,” she said, pitching her voice low and shaky, and lowering her eyelashes the way Bethany did when she was squabbling with her husband.
“You did?” he asked, unhelpfully. “That’s very flattering.”
“Foolish, more like,” she snapped.
“Well, but you must have married quickly thereafter. . . . Or was I helping you commit adultery?”
“My Pierre was decrepit by the time we met,” she said. “The poor, poor man was good for nothing but lying in bed.”
“By all accounts, Pierre and I had a lot in common,” he observed.
“Not in the most important aspects,” she said. She leaned toward him and as boldly as any bird of paradise, slid her tongue along the plumpness of his lower lip. After all, didn’t he say that Frenchwomen learned quickly? She had a half claim to French nationality.
She heard his breathing hitch, but he didn’t say anything.
So s
he leaned even closer and put her hand on his knees. She could feel muscles there, strong and sleek under her hand, begging her to run her hand higher, to—
He pulled away so fast that she nearly lost her balance and fell into the well of the carriage.
“I debased myself too many times in Paris, ma petite,” he said, and there was something implacable in his tone that told her that she had just lost the battle. “No matter how tempting you are, I will not do so again.”
“Who could have known that you had turned into a saint?” she asked, an edge to her voice. “By all accounts, you have been universally kind to women of my nationality.”
“My kindness is exhausted,” he said.
She believed him, that was the worst of it.
“I haven’t slept with a woman since I took my drunken self onto a boat coming across the Channel,” he said, lifting her chin so that their eyes met in the near darkness. “If I were to sleep with another Frenchwoman, Emelie, it would be you.”
She opened her mouth, and he stopped it with a fierce kiss.
“But I don’t do that anymore,” he said one swooning moment later. “I don’t drink, either, in case you’re thinking of getting me drunk.”
“Do you intend to give up the pleasures of the bed forever?” Emma asked with some curiosity.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, let’s see. You sound like a monk. . . .” She paused and let the silence dangle for a moment. “Or a eunuch.”
“Emelie! You’re shocking me. And you a young lady of good breeding.”
“Oh no,” she said. “If I was a young lady of good breeding, how would Paris have ever happened?”
“I wonder about that myself,” he said a little grimly.
“And it did,” she continued blithely. “So you needn’t worry about sullying my reputation.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I’m worried about my reputation.”
“That’s not fair!” Emma cried, with all the strength of her disappointment. If she went home without winning the challenge—even if he didn’t know it was a challenge—then she would have to cancel their betrothal. There was no way about it other than that. And she didn’t—