Regency Rogues and Rakes. Anna Campbell

tongue, and the thrumming need he’d awakened with the simple motion of his hand sliding down her back.

      Kissing him had not been the wisest move a woman could make, but really, what was the alternative? Slap him? A cliché. Punch him? That hard body? That stubborn jaw? She’d only hurt her hand—and make him laugh.

      She doubted he was laughing now.

      He was thinking, and he would need to be thinking very hard. Harder, probably, than he’d done before in all his life.

      She felt certain he wouldn’t back down from the challenge. He was too proud and too determined to have the upper hand—of her, certainly, and probably the world.

      It would be entertaining, indeed, to see how he managed her entrée into the comtesse’s party. If it ended in humiliation for him, maybe he’d learn from the experience. On the other hand, he might come to hate Marcel-line instead, and forbid his wife to darken the door of Maison Noirot.

      But Marcelline’s instincts told her otherwise. What-ever his faults—and they were not few—this was not a mean-spirited man or the sort who held grudges.

      “Go to bed,” she told Jeffreys. “We’ve a busy time ahead of us, preparing for the party. Everything must be perfect.”

      And it would be. She’d make sure of it, one way or another.

      Awaiting her was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, nearly as important as stealing the about-to-be Duchess of Clevedon from Dowdy’s.

      Clevedon had complicated what ought to have been a straightforward business. On her own, getting in would have merely demanded expert camouflage, evasive maneuvers, and, of course, thorough self-assurance. But no matter. Life had a way of wrecking her careful plans, again and again. Roulette was more predictable than life. Small wonder she was so lucky at it.

      Life was not a wheel going round and round. It never, ever, returned to the same place. It didn’t stick to simple red and black and a certain array of numbers. It laughed at logic.

      Beneath its pretty overdress of man-imposed order, life was anarchy.

      All the same, every time life had knocked her plans awry, she’d made a new plan and salvaged something. Sometimes she even triumphed. She was nothing if not resilient.

      Whatever happened this night, she’d make the most of it.

       That night

      It would have served the insolent dressmaker right had Clevedon made her wait. He was not accustomed to taking orders from anybody, let alone a conceited little shopkeeper. Nine o’clock sharp, she’d said, as though he was her lackey.

      But that was a childish reaction, and he preferred she not add childishness to the list of character flaws she seemed to be compiling. She was sure to ascribe any delays to cowardly heel-dragging. She’d already as much as called him a coward, in offering to release him from the wager.

      He arrived promptly at nine o’clock. When the carriage door opened, he saw her outside at one of the tables under the portico. A gentleman, whose manner and dress proclaimed him English, was bent over her, talking.

      Clevedon had planned so carefully: what to wear to the ball and what to say to his hostess and what expression to wear when he said it. He had taken up and discarded half a dozen waistcoats and left his valet, Saunders, a heap of crumpled neckcloths to tend to. He had composed and rejected scores of clever speeches. He was, in short, wound up exceedingly tight.

      She, on the other hand, could not have appeared more at ease, lounging under the portico, flirting with any fellow who happened along. One would think she’d no more on her mind than an idle conversation with yet another potential payer of dressmakers’ bills.

      And why should she consider anything else? It wasn’t her friends who’d be whispering behind her back and shaking their heads in pity.

      He could easily imagine what his friends would whisper: Cupid’s arrow had at last struck the Duke of Clevedon—and not on account of Paris’s greatest beauty, not on account of its most irresistible courtesan, not on account of its most fashionable, sought-after titled lady.

      No, it was a nobody of an English shopkeeper who’d slain his grace.

      He silently cursed his friends and his own stupidity, stepped down from the carriage, and strolled to her table.

      As he approached, her dark glance slanted his way. She said something to the talkative fellow. He nodded at her and, without taking any notice of Clevedon, bowed and went into the hotel.

      When Clevedon came to the table, she looked up at him. To his very great surprise, she smiled: a warm, luscious upturn of the mouth that had nearly brought him to his knees.

      But he was not slain, not by half.

      “You’re prompt,” she said.

      “I never keep a lady waiting,” he said.

      “But I’m not a lady,” she said.

      “Are you not? Well, then, you’re a conundrum. Are you ready? Or would you prefer a glass of something first, to fortify yourself for the ordeal?”

      “I’m as fortified as I need to be,” she said. She rose and made a sweeping arc with her hand, drawing his attention to her attire.

      He supposed a woman would have a name for it. To him it was a dress. He knew that the sleeves would have their own special name—à la Taglioni or à la Clotilde or some equally nonsensical epithet, comprehensible only to women. Their dresses were all the same to him: swelling in the sleeves, billowing out in the skirts, and tight in the middle. It was the style women had been wearing throughout his adulthood.

      Her dress was made of silk, in an odd, sandy color he would have thought bland had he seen the cloth in a shop. But it was trimmed with puffy red bows, and they seemed like flowers blooming in a desert. Then there was black lace, yards of it, dripping like a waterfall over her smooth shoulders and down the front, under a sash, down over her belly.

      He made a twirling gesture with his finger. Obligingly she turned in a complete circle. She moved as effortlessly and gracefully as water, and the lace about her shoulders floated in the air with the movement.

      When she finished the turn, though, she didn’t pause but walked on toward the carriage. He walked on with her.

      “What is that dreadful color?” he said.

      “Poussière,” she said.

      “Dust,” he said. “I congratulate you, madame. You’ve made dust alluring.”

      “It’s not an easy color to wear,” she said. “Especially for one of my complexion. True poussière would make me appear to be suffering from a liver disease. But this silk has a pink undertone, you see.”

      “How can I make you understand?” he said. “I don’t see these things.”

      “You do,” she said. “What you lack is the vocabulary. You said it’s alluring. That is the pink undertone, which flatters my complexion, and the magnificent blond lace, close to my face, is even more flattering as well as adding drama.”

      “It’s black,” he said. “Noir, not blond.”

      “Blond lace is a superior silk lace,” she said. “It doesn’t mean the color.”

      This exchange took them to the carriage. He had braced himself for a continuation of last night’s battle, but she behaved as though they were old friends, which disarmed and bothered him at the same time. Too, he was so preoccupied with the nonsense of blond referring to every color under the sun that he almost forgot to look at her ankles.

      But instinct saved him, and he came to his senses in the nick of time. As she went up the steps and took her seat, she gave him a fine view of some six inches of stockinged, elegantly curving limb, from the lower part of her calf down.

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