Never Trust a Rake

‘Hmmm,’ he mused. ‘That look won’t do. You ought rather to flick open your fan and cool your heated cheeks. Then look back at your prey over your shoulder as you walk away. I guarantee you will catch him watching your neat little behind.’

Dammit, but the fellow would have his tongue hanging out. Might she succumb to what she thought were real advances from some other man who would be bound to want her once he saw past the rather unprepossessing exterior?

What the hell had he started?

Hot jealousy at the thought of her responding to this faceless rival, as she’d just responded to him, scalded his guts and made them twist into a tortured knot. He should have been prepared for this. This, after all, was what had poisoned his parents’ marriage and made him so determined to avoid the unholy institution. He’d had his suspicions that he would be like his father, unable to tolerate a ‘fashionable’ marriage.

He got up and strode to the door, unlocking it with swift, impatient movements. He’d chosen Miss Gibson precisely because he did not believe she was capable of being ‘fashionable’ in the way that his mother had been. She placed too high a value on loyalty. On keeping her word. If she vowed in a church, before God, to keep only to one man so long as she lived, then that was exactly what she would do.

The fact that she’d just responded to him so sweetly, with such an intoxicating blend of passion and surprise, did not mean she was ready to experiment with another man. That display of chagrin, afterwards, was proof of it. She was such a little Puritan, she’d felt guilty.

He must concentrate on feeling flattered that he’d made such rapid progress with her seduction, rather than allowing groundless fears to spoil this marriage before he’d even embarked on it. Henrietta Gibson, he repeated to himself under his breath, would not permit any other man the same liberties he’d just taken with her.

But in any case, he wasn’t going to give any other man the chance to cut him out.

‘If you would be so good as to furnish me with a list of your engagements,’ he bit out, ‘I shall endeavour to find you, within the next day or so, and you can report your progress.’

Pride demanded that he mention their next meeting as though the timing of it was a matter of indifference to him. But in his heart he already knew he would find her tomorrow, wherever she was, and move the seduction on swiftly. Before she knew what was happening, she would be so deeply enmeshed in the sensual web he would weave around her that there would be no escape.

* * *

Once she’d told him of as many of her engagements as she could bring to mind, Henrietta peered past him into the corridor, making absolutely sure the coast was clear before leaving.

Think about her waist? How could she think about her waist, and swaying her hips, when all that filled her brain was the sudden coldness with which he’d dismissed her? One moment she could almost have imagined tenderness in his eyes. The next it was as though he couldn’t wait to be rid of her.

Yet, as she made her way back to the drawing room where she’d left her aunt and Mildred, she realised that she did not have to make any effort whatever to think about her body. It was still thrumming with the after-effects of her encounter with Lord Deben. She was drifting along the corridors in a kind of daze. She’d never drifted anywhere in her life. She was more likely to walk briskly, since she was generally so busy. There was always so much to occupy both her time, and her mind, in running Shoebury Manor for her father and seeing to the needs of all four of her brothers, that it would be a sinful waste of both to just drift.

However, it would be a useful accomplishment to cultivate while she was in town. It was probably a prerequisite to joining the ranks of the sort of women men found fascinating.

But the moment she tried to pin down exactly what it was that was making her legs incapable of proceeding in a business-like manner, they went all gangly and awkward.

Oh, bother it. She felt like a child trying to capture a bubble. The moment she touched upon the truth it disappeared in a disappointing spray of its component parts. She could classify her present state of being, by comparing herself to a harp-string, recently plucked, and still vibrating from the touch of the musician’s hand, but she could not, by effort of will, replicate the condition.