Duchess of Seduction (Hearts in Hiding 3)

“Wait,” he ground out as he gently but firmly pushed her hand away and rose to his feet, his eyes scanning the mantelpiece. To his horror, the book in which he’d secreted the French letter he’d initially doubted he’d need tonight wasn’t there. He cast around the gloom, but could not see where it had fallen. It must have happened when Cressida had been gripping the mantelpiece just seconds before.

Cressida froze, her fingers still beneath his hand as his protest reverberated round her fevered brain.

Uncertainty replaced desire like an arctic wind through an open doorway .

She’d come here in disguise, fully believing Justin knew exactly who she was. She had the Queen Anne’s Lace seeds and had douched herself with vinegar to afford her some protection against conception. It was by no means as effective in preventing conception as a French letter, but she was prepared to take the chance, intending this moment to be the greatest gift she could give her darling husband after ten months of silent resistance to his loving overtures.

Now his words tore asunder her confident assumptions.

Justin’s reluctance to consummate their sexual congress suggested he really did not recognize her or that he was in the habit of receiving strange women in Mrs. Plumb’s private sitting room.

She shrank back from him. He did not want her? No, it could not be that. In which case, it could only mean that he did not know it was her. But Justin would never involve himself so wantonly with a stranger. She was too confused and uncertain to know what to say. Could he really kiss and fondle and suckle a desirable, unknown woman as long as he virtuously refrained from penetrating her so he could still guiltlessly smile at his wife over breakfast the next morning?

She could not see his face beneath his mask in the dim light, but she sensed he knew something was amiss.

“Please! Just wait a moment. I...I’m looking for something. We mustn’t get carried away .”

Carried away? Not wanting her reaction to strike a discordant note, she smoothed her skirts and rose with dignity while she re- buttoned the front of her dress, saying in a strained attempt at sounding jaunty, “We did get carried away but...it’s late and time I left.”

“Don’t leave. Wait. I must find something and then we can—”

But Cressida wasn’t waiting to hear more. The roar in her ears drowned out his protests as she hurried to the door, fumbling with the key in an attempt to put this, her greatest humiliation, behind her.

It was a humiliation, wasn’t it? She wasn’t overreacting? Overreacting at the fact her husband baulked at the final moment of consummation suggesting that tonight’s frenzied prelude to sex was just that?

“Please, stop... We need to talk about this.”

She ignored him, still too confused to know what to say. She’d exposed herself in a way she’d never believed possible, and he’d egged her on all the way, only to reject her at the end. Revenge? Tit for tat? He really didn’t know it was her?

Oh God, she should remove her mask this minute. Reveal her identity and uncover the truth, except that Justin’s reaction had been so unexpected she couldn’t help but think she’d missed something gravely important and had just made herself the biggest fool ever.

“Please wait!”

Still she ignored him, blinded by hot, mortified tears as she finally turned the key .

His hand grazed her arm but she knocked it aside as he cried out, “Why come here if not to torment me? I have precautions, but we cannot proceed without them.”

Dear God, so he was prepared to make love to a stranger, she thought wildly, pulling open the door then slamming it upon his hand so that the last sound she heard was his cry of pain.

At least that might act as a dampener in case the next available widow was only five minutes away, she thought bitterly, as she ran down the passage.

“Cressida!”

The sound of her name stopped her mid-flight, and she sagged against the wall. Squeezing shut her eyes, she dragged in a deep breath and forced reason to the fore. She looked down at her hands, balled fists, and tried to control her trembling. Justin had just called her by name. What a fool she was. Her brain had been trying to assimilate the worst-case scenario, when of course she should have known that Justin had everything under control.

He knew exactly who she was and why she was here. Somehow he’d cleverly guessed, without her telling him, that her greatest fear of intimacy was conceiving again. He’d merely wanted to halt proceedings to protect her.

Joy surged through her. She nearly wept with relief.

Of course Justin knew who she was, just as he’d known last Wednesday. He’d allowed her to proceed with her outrageous seduction at her own pace, hinting though never alluding directly to it in his loving letters of this past week to her in Bath.

Still mortified but quickly filling with hope and excitement, she waited for him to come to her, reflecting with shame upon her cool response to her darling husband’s flood of correspondence while she’d been tending impossible Great-Aunt Jane. She’d been too blinded by her own fears and lack of self-confidence to read between the lines and properly interpret his letters as an attempt to reason out her confusion.

Raising her head, she smiled at him, happiness radiating through her like treacle through her veins.

“Oh, Justin, I’m so sorry—” she began as her wonderful, beloved husband strode up the passage toward her, his masquerade mask now discarded, raking his hands through his disheveled brown hair.

She put her hands up to untie her own mask, excitement mounting at