Wicked in Your Arms (22 page)

Epilogue

Eight months later . . .

S
unlight filtered through the mullioned windows lining the lavish bedchamber. Grier crossed her arms and stared at the beams of light enviously. “When can I get out of bed? This is absurd, you know.”

“Not until the physician declares it safe,” her husband announced beside her where he reclined upon the bed. Unlike her he was dressed for the day and had already enjoyed a morning ride. She could smell the crisp autumn air on him.

She punched the bed between them in a display of pique. “Holy hellfire—I'm having a baby. Women do it every day. I'm not dying.”

He set down his paper and gave her his full attention. “Be that as it may, you're not just
any
woman. Not to Grandfather and especially not to me.”

“Don't tell me you agree with all this cosseting. Truly. I'm fine. A little nauseated in the mornings. Nothing more. I'm fit and hale. The physician will say whatever your grandfather wants him to say. He's terrified of the old goat.”

Sev's lips twitched. “Most people are.”

She lifted her chin. “I'm not.” At least not anymore. As apprehensive as she'd been upon first arriving at the palace, she quickly realized the king was more bark than bite. He was not about to tell the grandson he so obviously loved that he'd disappointed him or made a mistake in marrying her. Although the king looked at her through narrowed eyes at first, he'd held his tongue. And even that had changed in recent months as he observed Grier and Sev together. His narrow-eyed gaze had vanished altogether when she announced that she was increasing. Now she could do no wrong. Newfound life danced in his eyes.

“Your lack of fear is a fact which impresses him endlessly. Oh, and the fact that you've so quickly managed to find yourself with child.”

This time Grier grinned. She stroked Sev's arm. “I cannot take credit for that alone. You see, I happen to be married to this very virile man who bothers me to no end with his insatiable appetites.”

He chuckled. “And you've been unwilling, have you?”

Sev kissed her until they both grew heated and anxious, writhing against each other, she in her nightgown, he in his jacket and trousers. She slid her hands beneath his jacket, palming his firm chest through his shirt. “I know the perfect cure for me.”

“Do you now?” he asked huskily against her mouth.

She cupped his hardness beneath his breeches. “You can call it an early present, too.”

“Present,” he murmured against her throat. “For what?”

“Oh, for tomorrow.”

He pulled back to gaze at her with a strange expression on his face. “What's tomorrow?

She smiled coyly. “I suppose I can tell you.” She slid a hand over his hard belly, loving how the taut muscles rippled beneath her fingers. “Tomorrow's my birthday. And now you know that you've married an older woman.”

A wide smile stretched his lips. “Not quite.”

She cocked her head.

He continued, “You see . . . tomorrow's my birthday, too.”

She stilled. “You jest.”

He laughed and the sound vibrated through her. “This is rich! We have the same birthday.”

“We're the same age?” She shook her head, marveling.

Chuckling, he kissed her again, nibbling at her bottom lip. “Which begs the question . . .”

“Hmm?” she murmured, then gasped with pleasure as his hand found her sensitive breast.

“What time of day were you born?”

She didn't answer. Instead she pushed him back on the bed and straddled him. Lowering her head, she whispered against his lips, “You'll have to work very hard to earn that information.”

And he did.

They may argue the precise

shade and design, but London's

finest dressmakers all know . . .

Silk Is For Seduction

By
New York Times
bestselling author

Loretta Chase

On Sale Now

Turn the page for a sneak peek!

Brilliant and ambitious dressmaker Marcelline Noirot is London's rising star, and she's determined to gain the patronage of the most talked about lady of the ton: the Duke of Clevedon's intended bride. To get to her, though, Marcelline must win over Clevedon, whose standards are as high as his morals are . . . not. The prize seems worth the risk—but this time Marcelline's met her match. Clevedon can design a seduction as irresistible as her dresses; and what begins as a flicker of desire soon ignites into a delicious inferno . . . and a blazing scandal.

T
he instant the interval began—and before the other audience members had risen from their seats—Clevedon entered Mademoiselle Fontenay's opera box with the Comte d'Orefeur.

The first thing he saw was the rear view of the brunette: smooth shoulders and back exposed a fraction of an inch beyond what most Parisian women dared, and the skin, pure cream. Disorderly dark curls dangled enticingly against the nape of her neck.

He looked at her neck and forgot about Clara and Madame St. Pierre and every other woman in the world.

A lifetime seemed to pass before he was standing in front of her, looking down into brilliant dark eyes, where laughter glinted . . . looking down at the ripe curve of her mouth, laughter, again, lurking at its corners. Then she moved a little, and it was only a little—the slightest shift of her shoulders—but she did it in the way of a lover turning in bed, or so his body believed, his groin tightening.

The light caught her hair and gilded her skin and danced in those laughing eyes. His gaze drifted lower, to the silken swell of her breasts . . . the sleek curve to her waist . . .

He was vaguely aware of the people about him talking, but he couldn't concentrate on anyone else. Her voice was low, a contralto shaded with a slight huskiness.

Her name, he learned, was Noirot.

Fitting.

Having done the pretty by Mademoiselle Fontenay, he turned to the woman who'd disrupted the opera house. Heart racing, he bent over her gloved hand.

“Madame Noirot,” he said. “
Enchanté
.” He touched his lips to the soft kid. A light but exotic scent swam into his nostrils. Jasmine?

He lifted his head and met a gaze as deep as midnight. For a long, pulsing moment, their gazes held.

Then she waved her fan at the empty seat nearby. “It's uncomfortable to converse with my head tipped back, Your Grace,” she said.

“Forgive me.” He sat. “How rude of me to loom over you in that way. But the view from above was . . .”

He trailed off as it belatedly dawned on him: She'd spoken in English, in the accents of his own class, no less. He'd answered automatically, taught from childhood to show his conversational partner the courtesy of responding in the latter's language.

“But this is diabolical,” he said. “I should have wagered anything that you were French.” French, and a commoner. She had to be. He'd heard her speak to Orefeur in flawless Parisian French, superior to Clevedon's, certainly. The accent was refined, but her friend—forty if she was a day—was an actress. Ladies of the upper ranks did not consort with actresses. He'd assumed she was an actress or courtesan.

Yet if he closed his eyes, he'd swear he conversed at present with an English aristocrat.

“You'd wager
anything
?” she said. Her dark gaze lifted to his head and slid down slowly, leaving a heat trail in its wake, and coming to rest at his neck cloth. “That pretty pin, for instance?”

The scent and the voice and the body were slowing his brain. “A wager?” he said blankly.

“Or we could discuss the merits of the present Figaro, or debate whether Rosina ought properly to be a contralto or a mezzo-soprano,” she said. “But I think you were not paying attention to the opera.” She plied her fan slowly. “Why should I think that, I wonder?”

He collected his wits. “What I don't understand,” he said, “is how anyone could pay attention to the opera when you were in the place.”

“They're French,” she said. “They take art seriously.”

“And you're not French?”

She smiled. “That's the question, it seems.”

“French,” he said. “You're a brilliant mimic, but you're French.”

“You're so sure,” she said.

“I'm merely a thickheaded Englishman, I know,” he said. “But even I can tell French and English women apart. One might dress an Englishwoman in French fashion from head to toe and she'll still look English. You . . .”

He trailed off, letting his gaze skim over her. Only consider her hair. It was as stylish as the precise coifs of other Frenchwomen . . . yet, no, not the same. Hers was more . . . something. It was as though she'd flung out of bed and thrown herself together in a hurry. Yet she wasn't disheveled. She was . . . different.

“You're French, through and through,” he said. “If I'm wrong, the stickpin is yours.”

“And if you're right?” she said.

He thought quickly. “If I'm right, you'll do me the honor of riding with me in the Bois de Boulogne tomorrow,” he said.

“That's all?” she said, in French this time.

“It's a great deal to me.”

She rose abruptly in a rustle of silk. Surprised—
again
—he was slow coming to his feet.

“I need air,” she said. “It grows warm in here.”

He opened the door to the corridor and she swept past him. He followed her out, his pulse racing.

M
arcelline had seen him countless times, from as little as a few yards away. She'd observed a handsome, expensively elegant English aristocrat.

At close quarters . . .

She was still reeling.

The body first. She'd surreptitiously studied that while he made polite chitchat with Sylvie. The splendid physique was not, as she'd assumed, created or even assisted by fine tailoring, though the tailoring was exquisite. His broad shoulders were not padded, and his tapering torso wasn't cinched in by anything but muscle.

Muscle everywhere—the arms, the long legs. And no tailor could create the lithe power emanating from that tall frame.

It's hot in here
, was her first coherent thought
.

Then he was standing in front of her, bending over her hand, and the place grew hotter still.

She was aware of his hair, black curls gleaming like silk and artfully tousled.

He lifted his head.

She saw a mouth that should have been a woman's, so full and sensuous it was. But it was pure male, purely carnal.

An instant later she was looking up into eyes of a rare color—a green like jade—while a low masculine voice caressed her ear and seemed to be caressing parts of her not publicly visible.

Good grief.

She walked quickly as they left the box, thinking quickly, too, as she went. She was aware of the clusters of opera goers in the corridor making way for her. That amused her, even while she pondered the unexpected problem walking alongside.

She'd known the Duke of Clevedon was a handful.

She'd vastly underestimated.

Still, she was a Noirot, and the risks only excited her.

She came to rest at last in a quieter part of the corridor, near a window. For a time, she gazed out of the window. It showed her only her own reflection: a magnificently dressed, alluring woman, a walking advertisement for what would one day—soon, with a little help from him—be London's foremost dressmaking establishment. Once they had the Duchess of Clevedon, royal patronage was sure to follow: the moon and the stars, almost within her grasp.

“I hope you're not unwell, madame,” he said in his English-accented French.

“No, but it occurs to me that I've been absurd,” she said. “What a ridiculous wager it is!”

He smiled. “You're not backing down? Is riding with me in the Bois de Boulogne so dreadful a fate?”

It was a boyish smile, and he spoke with a self-deprecating charm that must have slain the morals of hundreds of women.

She said, “As I see it, either way I win. No matter how I look at it, this wager is silly. Only think, when I tell you whether you are right or wrong, how will you know I'm telling the truth?”

“Did you think I'd demand your passport?” he said.

“Were you planning to take my word for it?” she said.

“Of course.”

“That may be gallant or it may be naïve,” she said. “I can't decide which.”

“You won't lie to me,” he said.

Had her sisters been present, they would have fallen down laughing.

“That's an exceptionally fine diamond,” she said. “If you think a woman wouldn't lie to have it, you are catastrophically innocent.”

The arresting green gaze searched her face. In English he said, “I was wrong, completely wrong. I see it now. You're English.”

She smiled. “What gave me away? The plain speaking?”

“More or less,” he said. “If you were French, we should be debating what truth is. They can't let anything alone. They must always put it under the microscope of philosophy. It's rather endearing, but they're so predictable in that regard. Everything must be anatomized and sorted. Rules. They need rules. They make so many.”

“That wouldn't be a wise speech, were I a Frenchwoman,” she said.

“But you're not. We've settled it.”

“Have we?”

He nodded.

“You wagered in haste,” she said. “Are you always so rash?”

“Sometimes, yes,” he said. “But you had me at a disadvantage. You're like no one I've ever met before.”

“Yet in some ways I am,” she said. “My parents were English.”

“And a little French?” he said. Humor danced in his green eyes, and her cold, calculating heart gave a little skip in response.

Damn but he was good.

“A very little,” she said. “One purely French great-grandfather. But he and his sons fancied Englishwomen.”

“One great-grandfather is too little to count,” he said. “I'm stuck all over with French names, but I'm hopelessly English—and typically slow—except to jump to wrong conclusions. Ah, well. Farewell, my little pin.” He brought his hands up to remove it.

He wore gloves, but she knew they didn't hide calluses or broken nails. His hands would be typical of his class: smooth and neatly manicured. They were larger than was fashionable, though, the fingers long and graceful.

Well, not so graceful at the moment. His valet had placed the pin firmly and precisely among the folds of his neck cloth, and he was struggling with it.

Or seeming to.

“You'd better let me,” she said. “You can't see what you're doing.”

She moved his hands away, hers lightly brushing his. Glove against glove, that was all. Yet she felt the shock of contact as though skin had touched skin, and the sensation traveled the length of her body.

She was acutely aware of the broad chest under the expensive layers of neck cloth and waistcoat and shirt. All the same, her hands neither faltered nor trembled. She'd had years of practice. Years of holding cards steady while her heart pounded. Years of bluffing, never letting so much as a flicker of an eye, a twitch of a facial muscle, betray her.

The pin came free, winking in the light. She regarded the snowy linen she'd wrinkled.

“How naked it looks,” she said. “Your neck cloth.”

“What is this?” he said. “Remorse?”

“Never,” she said, and that was pristine truth. “But the empty place offends my aesthetic sensibilities.”

“In that case, I shall hasten to my hotel and have my valet replace it.”

“You're strangely eager to please,” she said.

“There's nothing strange about it.”

“Be calm, Your Grace,” she said. “I have an exquisite solution.”

She took a pin from her bodice and set his in its place. She set her pin into the neck cloth. Hers was nothing so magnificent as his, merely a smallish pearl. But it was a pretty one, of a fine luster. Softly it glowed in its snug place among the folds of his linen.

She was aware of his gaze, so intent, and of the utter stillness with which he waited.

She lightly smoothed the surrounding fabric, then stepped back and eyed her work critically. “That will do very well,” she said.

“Will it?” He was looking at her, not the pearl.

“Let the window be your looking glass,” she said.

He was still watching her.

“The glass, Your Grace. You might at least admire my handiwork.”

“I do,” he said. “Very much.”

But he turned away, wearing the faintest smile, and studied himself in the glass.

“I see,” he said. “Your eye is as good as my valet's—and that's a compliment I don't give lightly.”

“My eye ought to be good,” she said. “I am the greatest modiste in all the world.”