Though it was not entirely accurate to compare herself to a harp-string, anyway, because it had not been Lord Deben’s hands that had reduced her to this state, but his mouth. And that little sound he’d made, just beneath her ear.
Oh, heavens, but just the thought of that utterly masculine growl of pleasure made her legs go all languid again.
She drifted the rest of the way to her destination where she dropped down gratefully on to the sofa next to Aunt Ledbetter. She unfurled her fan. And as she waved it languidly before her heated cheeks, her mind began to clear a little.
That growl Lord Deben had made—it had been a sound of pleasure. She had not imagined it.
A sound of pleasure. No, more than that. He’d sounded like a man about to feast on some delicious confection, after having been deprived of any sustenance at all for some considerable time.
She fanned herself more briskly as it occurred to her that though he might have appeared cool and calm and collected, he had not been completely unmoved by their encounter.
A small smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. Even if it had been for only one fleeting moment, Lord Deben, a man renowned for only deigning to take the most beautiful women as lovers, had really been enjoying himself. With her.
Take that, Miss Waverley! He never kissed you. Nor wanted to, no matter how hard you tried to entice him.
Oh dear. It was very ignoble of her, but she just couldn’t help feeling positively jubilant. It wouldn’t matter if she never became the toast of the ton, now. Just knowing that she’d made an impact on a man who looked so hard that nothing could melt him was her own, personal and very secret triumph. Something she could hug to herself and examine at leisure.
Richard might not think she had what it took to survive in sophisticated society, but she had just had an intimate encounter with a notorious rake and emerged unscathed. If you didn’t count the wobbly legs.
Not only that, but she’d also, somehow, managed to make just the tiniest impact on him. Oh, she knew she could not possibly leave a lasting impression on a man that hard and world-weary. But for one moment, that moment when he’d made that very revealing little sound, she had most definitely found a chink in the cynicism which he wore like a coat of chainmail.
* * *
When her aunt decided it was time to leave she made a valiant attempt to drift to the waiting carriage. But a girl cannot drift when she’s on the verge of a fit of the giggles. And the harder she tried to apply Lord Deben’s admonition to think about her waist, the more ridiculous it became to think of herself as a siren. She was just plain, practical, rather tomboyish Miss Gibson. The possibility of her being able to lure some poor unsuspecting man to his doom with one sway of her hips struck her as being so absurd it was all she could do not to laugh out loud.
* * *
The trouble with becoming entangled with a rake, Henrietta discovered the next night as she was getting ready to go out, was that he planted such outrageous notions in her head that she could not help dwelling on them.
All that day, while out shopping, or paying social calls with her aunt and cousin, she had found herself watching the way men watched women and discovering to her shock that Lord Deben had been quite correct. A large number of them did, indeed, study a lady’s behind if he thought he could get away with doing so.
She twisted her upper body to peer at her own behind in the mirror. She had never been all that bothered about her behind before. She relied on a maid to make sure everything was correctly fastened up and tidy back there. But now it seemed she had neglected an aspect of her appearance that not even her aunt had deemed all that important.
He’d told her it was ‘neat’. She tugged the material of her gown so that it outlined her meagre curves, trying to see why he should describe it in such terms. There was not, she reflected, all that much of it. Perhaps that was what he had meant.
When he’d said it, she’d taken it as a compliment, but now she was not so sure. The men she had surreptitiously studied today had appeared to appreciate the behinds that had wobbled rather like silk-covered blancmanges just as much as the firmer ones.
No, she sighed, letting go of the folds of silk and gauze so that they draped naturally, there was no advantage in having a neat behind. He had merely been describing it, not complimenting it.