Proof by Seduction (4 page)

But this woman was trying to make an idiot of Gareth and a dupe of his cousin. There was nothing pure or simple about her. And so he stuffed his physical response as best he could behind the safety of a cold, businesslike demeanor.

“Madame Esmerelda,” Gareth said, “you win. There will be no tasks. No elephants.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Get out.”

“One hundred guineas, if you tell Ned you’re a fraud and disappear from our lives.”

She inhaled and her chest expanded. She pointed to the door. “Get out
now.
”

“Think it through. I doubt you’ll be able to milk that much from him in your entire acquaintance. He’ll outgrow your advice soon enough. And you could live for years on the money.”

She took a deep breath, and those remarkable breasts shivered underneath the thin chemise. “I wouldn’t do it for a hundred—” she began.

Gareth covered his rising lust with a nonchalant shrug. “Two hundred.”

Her lip curled, and she shook her head in outrage. “Not for two
thousand.
Not for
ten.
”

“Oh?” He flicked an insultingly familiar glance down her chemise. “You’d do it for ten. But you’ll do it for two hundred.”

She started toward him, her fingers curved like claws. He deserved to be slapped, and more, for the insult his look had implied. If he was right, and the woman was gently bred, she’d not appreciate the aspersions he’d just cast on her character. But he couldn’t let her near him. He feared his own response if she came within arm’s length.

“Really, Madame. Once you dispose of your fabricated outrage, you’ll realize this is the best solution for everyone.”

Gareth inclined his head, all sardonic politesse, and stepped back through the opening. He eased the door into place behind him, and let the insolent sneer slide off his face.

He leaned against the wall, his breath ragged. The challenge between them had become more than a territorial war over Ned’s future. Now it was sensual.

Madame Esmerelda was extremely intelligent. She was devious. And if she had any idea how she affected him, she’d take advantage, unscrupulous creature that she was. And how idiotic that he wanted her to take that advantage. He wanted her to befuddle his wits until he lost all control and took
her.

Gareth gripped his hands into fists. In his time in the jungles of Brazil, he’d cataloged close to a thousand insects. Now he let them march through his mind. Cockroaches. Poisonous, furry caterpillars. Maggots. He thought of every creeping thing ever to mar the face of the planet. He imagined them crawling about on his skin. And he didn’t stop until his ardor subsided and the memory of her body dissolved from his mind.

It took a lot of millipedes.

J
ENNY HADN’T REGAINED HER COMPOSURE
by the time she fastened, with shaking hands, the final layer of Madame Esmerelda’s outrageous costume. Bad enough that this whole experiment had extended the lie of Madame Esmerelda far outside Jenny’s usual sphere of business. Worse still, she’d been made to endure the pricks and pokes of the contemptuous seamstress who’d assumed the worst of Jenny’s relationship with Lord Blakely.

But the crowning glory had been when the marquess had marched in on her as if he owned her body. He hadn’t even bothered to avert his eyes. She wasn’t sure which had been more insulting—the look he gave her, or his assumption that she’d be willing to abandon Ned if only he offered a high enough price.

Not since that first day, that first
hour,
had she been tempted by Ned’s money. She wouldn’t leave the poor boy to suffer under his cousin’s unemotional auspices.

Jenny stormed out into the front room, her loose hair tangled around her shoulders.

Lord Blakely leaned against a wall next to an unclothed dress form. His eyes snapped open as she slammed the door behind her. But she didn’t let him move. She jammed a finger into his chest and glared up at him.

“Just because you ignore everything around you except facts does not mean everyone else can be reduced to a number.”

He looked down at her, astonishment in his eyes. “What the devil?”

She poked his chest again. “There are some things in life for which there are no figures. You don’t comprehend what your cousin really needs or why he finds it necessary to speak with me. No matter what number you choose, you will never, ever be able to describe him. Not with a hundred guineas. Not with a thousand.”

“Very well.” He swallowed, focused on some spot on the ceiling. He didn’t even bother to meet her gaze. “I shan’t offer you bribes again.”

“That’s not enough. If it’s not money you enumerate, you’ll latch on to some other figure. The number of times I make an accurate prediction. The degree to which I specify what is to happen. Attach as many numbers as you like to my relationship with Ned, but they will not help you understand.”

She was Ned’s confidante. She’d be damned if she sold that role for mere money. She wouldn’t let Lord Blakely reduce her to that level.

The man drew himself up. “You can disparage figures all day long, but that’s what proof means. It means one has a factual basis for one’s assertions.”

“You call what you’re doing proof,” Jenny snapped. “But you prod and poke and pick. You have no interest in
proving
anything.”

“What do you know of scientific proof?”

“Oh, you’re the sort to pin insects to cards in order to study them. After several months spent perusing their desiccated carcasses, you’ll announce your triumphant discovery: all insects are dead! And you’ll delight in the ascendancy of scientific thought over human emotion.”

Lord Blakely cocked his head and looked at her, as if searching for some hidden meaning in her face. “I study animal behavior. It’s imperative I not kill the subjects of my inquiry. Dead macaws rarely flock.”

“There’s no need to murder the analogy by overextending it, atop your other crimes.”

His gaze slid down her body. “The only question in my mind was whether you believed your own lies or were actively attempting to defraud Ned. I suppose it is a compliment to you that I have decided you are too clever for the former.”

“Naturally. You don’t believe anything you cannot taste or touch.”

“I believe in Pythagoras’s theorem, and I can’t taste that. I believe there may be some truth to Lamarck’s theories on inheritance of traits. But no, I do not believe in fate or fortune-tellers.”

“Fate, fortune-telling—or feelings.” Jenny snapped her fingers in his face. “The important things in life cannot be bound like so much paper to form a monograph.”

The insouciant look on his face faded into cold steel. “A monograph?”

She inhaled, sharply. “Listen to yourself. You cite Lamarck instead of talking of your cousin’s future. I have never seen you laugh. I’ve never even seen you smile. No wonder Ned would rather listen to me. You’re a cold, unemotional automaton.”

“An automaton?” His shoulders jerked and he stiffened.

Jenny wasn’t done with him. “Just because you’re as dispassionate as sawdust and as brittle as old bone doesn’t mean everyone around you must ossify.”

“Ossify.” His nose flared and his chin lifted, as if parroting her syllables constituted some kind of brilliant argument. He looked down at his right hand, clenched into a fist in front of him. The muscles in his neck tensed. Jenny took a step back and wondered if she’d gone too far. Madame Esmerelda would never have let anger carry her away.

Then he looked up, and her doubts froze like so much lake water in winter. His eyes reflected some boreal wasteland, inhabited only by wind and a cold sweep of snow. Jenny felt the chill through every layer of Madame Esmerelda’s costume, and she shivered.

When he spoke, there was no emotion in his voice at all. “You should have taken the two hundred guineas. After that outburst, I shall enjoy proving you a fraud.”

B
Y THE TIME
the carriage rumbled back to the Blakely home in the heart of Mayfair divested of all inhabitants but Gareth, it had begun to rain. It wasn’t the warm tropical downpour he’d enjoyed in Brazil; instead, it was the frigid, anemic drizzle that typically plagued London. Drop after sullen drop sank to the earth.

So he was a cold, emotionless automaton? Strange, then, that he felt so damned furious. Gareth gritted his teeth as he stepped outside the carriage. Servants swarmed around him, attempting to rush him inside, out of the wet.

He brushed away their hands. “Leave me. I’m going for a walk,” he snapped. They exchanged glances—his servants often exchanged glances—but they let him go.

Walking was an eccentricity he had developed in Brazil. It was, after all, the only way to make his daily rounds of observations. He’d brought the activity home with him. In London, the habit was inconvenient at best. The streets were all muck, and there was no overhead cover—neither wide-leafed jungle trees nor thick canopies—to speak of. But at a time like this—with his thoughts disordered, his mind awhirl and his body as ready to ignite as tinder—he needed this solitary exercise more than ever.

He set off into the dark. Cold rain ran down Gareth’s spine in rivulets, but it did nothing to dampen the fury raging inside him. Dispassionate as sawdust?

Madame Esmerelda was wrong. It wasn’t science that killed emotion. It was this place. These people. This
title.
He’d spent years in the rain forest, where life and color flourished anywhere it had the smallest chance of surviving. Here, geometric brick building followed geometric brick building, separated only by growing torrents of mud. Drawn shades clotted pallid windows; leaves like faded clay clung to half-dead grass. London was sterile. The rain had washed away all but the most persistent of the city’s fabricated smells—the stink of coal and the scent of cold, wet stone.

If the city was desolate, its inhabitants were worse. He’d left London eleven years ago because polite society nearly suffocated him. It was the rigor of scientific thought, the clarity of observation, the control he gained over the universe as his understanding bloomed, that kept some vital part of himself in motion since his return. He had realized long ago that he would never really fit in. During these last months, the mornings he spent sorting through the naturalist’s journal he’d kept in Brazil were all that helped him hold tight to some notion of who
Gareth
was. Without it, he would have drowned everything real about himself in Lord Blakely’s unending responsibilities.

Gareth shook the rain from his shoulders and, sighing, looked up. He’d been trudging through muddy puddles for nearly half an hour. He was soaked to the bone; were it not for the furious whirl in his mind and the fast pace he’d been keeping, he’d have been chilled.

Unconsciously, his feet had traced the steps to the neighborhood where Madame Esmerelda lived. The streets were decidedly dingier than Gareth’s own address, brown rivulets of running water skirting slushy horse dung strewn about the cobblestones. But the area was by no means dangerous. Families here hovered below respectability, but somewhat above poverty.

He found her windows. Tucked in the basement, down a flight of stairs. They glowed with an orange light that put him in mind of hot tea and a hearth. Anger, hot and irrational, welled up as he thought of her ensconced in a warm, comfortable room, while he prowled outside in the rain like some kind of bedraggled panther.

His whole response to her was as irrational as the idea of a fortune-teller consulting the spirits about the future. It was as stupid as the concept of wooing women with ebony elephants. It was, he admitted, as incomprehensible as a fraud refusing an offer of several hundred guineas in exchange for doing nothing. Perhaps that was why he drifted toward her door, his boots clomping heavily against the cold, wet stairs leading down.

He had a sudden image of confronting her, of explaining scientific thought and rigor. He wanted to knock the wind out of her with his words, as she had from him. He wanted her to feel as off balance as he did now. He wanted to
win,
to prove to her she was wrong and he was right. How idiotic of him. How unthinking. And yet—

He knocked.

And he waited.

Madame Esmerelda opened the door. She was carrying a tallow candle. It smoked and illuminated her face; he could see her pupils dilate in shock when she saw who stood on her doorstep. She didn’t say a word—didn’t invite him in, just blocked the opening and looked up at him in openmouthed surprise.

She hadn’t donned that ridiculous costume again. Instead, a simple robe of thick, dark wool covered her. The thin white line of her chemise peeked over the neckline. That hint of muslin forcibly reminded Gareth of the afternoon. Of the expanse of soft flesh separated from his hands by two cloth layers and so much dampened air. A fist-size lump lodged itself in his throat and a dark mist formed in his mind, blanketing his carefully planned diatribe.

She curled one arm around herself, as if it were somehow
she
who needed protection from
him.

“Do you know how I can tell you’re a fraud?” he croaked.

She gazed up at him.

“Because you’re wrong. You’re completely wrong.”

He fumbled in his mind for his prepared speech.
Science is about answers. It raises us above those who do not question
.

But before he could start, Gareth made a colossal mistake: He looked into Madame Esmerelda’s eyes. He’d thought she was black-eyed as a Ggypsy. But from eighteen inches away, with the candle so close to her face, he realized her eyes were in fact a very dark blue.

With that simple observation, the blood drained from his brain. Gareth’s structured defense of scientific thinking washed from his head. Instead, he took a step toward her. He let the veil drop from his eyes, let her see the inferno raging inside him.

She sucked in air. “Why do you say I’m wrong?” Her voice quavered on the last word.

“I’m not an automaton.” The words came from some vital place deep inside him—his solar plexus, perhaps, rather than his uncooperative brain.

Gareth took another step closer. She continued to hold his gaze, as incapable of looking away as he. The white vapor of her breath swirled in the cold night air. Its cadence kept time with the rise and fall of her chest. He could taste every one of her exhalations, sweetness coalescing against his mouth.