It occurred to her, quite belatedly, how close they stood, touching each other. But she was not going to be the first to retreat and acknowledge the effect he had upon her.
She tipped her chin up. “Yes, I did. He was telling me all about his sisters, his dog, and his poor mother. Did you know she suffers from gout?”
He stared at her as if she were an escaped Bedlamite. “Gout?”
“An affliction which affects the joints.” She smiled brightly, hoping it would improve his mood.
However, her attempt at good cheer only appeared to have the opposite effect. His countenance was darker than a thunder cloud before it erupted with rain.
“I know what bleeding gout is,” he growled. “What I don’t know is why you would be charming bleeding ’ugh and learning about ’is bleeding mother. Or why that blockhead thought it would be a good idea to defy my orders.”
Oh dear.It would seem she had truly infuriated him now. But then, Hart Sutton enraged was rather handsome. He quite took her breath in his intensity.
“As I said, this was not Hugh’s fault,” she added, not wishing for her escape from the room and ability to freely roam the gaming hell’s halls to be blamed upon the poor guard.
He had an ailing mother, sisters, and Lucy the dog to support. Her current predicament was not his problem, and nor should he be made to pay for it.
“I fail to see how it ain’t his bleeding fault you’re wandering about, looking like an angel masquerading as a damned temptress.” He scowled. “He’ll be answering for it, too.”
Guilt made her belly tighten. “Do not take his livelihood away from him, I beg you. He has a great many responsibilities.”
“Aye, and the most important one of them was seeing that you kept your pretty little arse where it belonged.”
Perhaps she had misjudged him when she had decided to put her plan into motion. And now, it seemed that both she and Hugh were the targets of Hart’s ire. He was a stranger to her, after all, even if they had shared shocking intimacies mere hours before. The tenderness he had shown her was clearly no indication of how he would react to her defying his edicts. But what did he expect her to do? Stare at the four walls of his chamber for the next six days?
She crossed her arms over her chest, refusing to back down despite his fury. “Are you meaning to keep me locked in your room for the remainder of the days in our agreement?”
His nostrils flared. “If that’s what I wish.”
“And what would the purpose of that be? You paid for my innocence, and yet it remains firmly intact.”
She ought not to goad him further, she knew, and yet she could not seem to help herself. She was mired in an interminable purgatory, trapped between her old life and the new role she was being expected to inhabit. She was neither the diamond of the first water, society jewel, and nor was she the fallen woman. Not yet.
“You should thank me for it,” he ground out, rubbing his jaw. “What if you’d found yourself in the public rooms, milady? What would you have done then?”
Milady.
There it was again, and oh, how it galled her, the way he used the form of address as a verbal sword to parry her every thrust.
“Perhaps one of the lords in your public rooms would have finished what you have begun,” she countered coolly. “And why not? You hardly seem inclined to finish it yourself.”
His stare hardened, as did the muscle in his jaw. “As I told you, I don’t fuck the unwilling.”
His vulgarity should have astounded her. Horrified her. The girl who had once been the darling of polite society, adored in every ballroom and salon, would have been shocked. But the woman she had been forced to become felt strangely inured to such language. Equally so to the forbidden acts which they described.
“Then why did you buy a week with me, Mr. Sutton?” she dared to ask.
Because nothing that had happened from the moment he had entered the rose-bedecked room at The Garden of Flora until now made one whit of sense. What man would pay a hefty fortune to bed her and then refuse to bed her?
This one, it would seem.
But why?
“That is enough,” he ground out, taking her elbow in a firm-but-gentle grip. “Come with me.”
Emma had no intention of capitulating with such ease. He was going to have to face a fight, because the very notion of being relegated to his room, and her kindly guard replaced with a far more ferocious fellow who would not be easily swayed by her smile…well, it was perfectly dreadful. And yes, perhaps she had grown accustomed to always getting what she wanted. Perhaps she was terribly spoiled. But she had done what she was supposed to all her life, and she was weary of listening to others and obeying, of following rules and always adhering to whatever was expected of her. Look at where doing so had landed her—here, in this moment, a veritable harlot in a gaming hell.
All to protect Abigail and Cassandra, she reminded herself.
I am doing this for their sakes.
Except, was that true? Was she pressing Hart Sutton to bed her and put an end to her innocence because it was a reviled duty? Or was it the far more alarming prospect that she wanted him to?
“No,” she said, digging her heels into the hall and refusing to allow him to cart her away in haste. “I have spent my life doing everything I was told to do. I am unbearably tired of it.”
Her outburst must have shocked him. He stilled, his grip on her elbow loosening. Heavens, it even shocked her. She had never dared such boldness before. Not even when her father had revealed to her the news that he had lost a massive sum of money at the tables, that their only hope was selling off her very virtue. And she had done it, had she not? She had been a good daughter, a good sister. She had sacrificed herself for everyone else.
Only to land here, in a gaming hell, with a man who had paid to take her innocence, only to…not take her innocence.
“Curse you,” he said, his eyes blazing.