To Wed a Rake(24)

Her corset was feeling far too tight, so she took a moment and collected her thoughts while she untied the bow on top. He was watching her as closely as a man could, so she took her time unlacing, massaging her poor breasts while she did it. No one could know how hard it was for them to stay jutting up in the air like that for hours, made into an exhibit for every goggle-eyed man for miles around. Finally she tightened the sighwed, suddestrings on her mask, which made her breasts rise into the air in a pleasing fashion.

Then when she thought he’d had enough punishment—and she did notice that he seemed to be breathing quite hard—she turned away from him and bent down to scoop up her pelisse. She heard the scrape of his foot on the boards and straightened, saying imperiously, “Don’t move!”

He stopped, his eyes sending little sparks in her direction.

Emma was a lady born and bred, and so she took her time lying down and arranging her limbs on her bronze pelisse, making sure that her hair showed to its best advantage.

“Now,” she said, looking back up at the man who stood above her. “Allow me to point out that I am a Frenchwoman.”

There was a twitch at the corner of his mouth.

“We are slow to anger but fierce when indignant,” she told him. “In fact, we may be the fiercest race of people alive on the earth. And since everyone knows that females are fiercer by far than males, it stands to reason that I, as a woman and representative of my nationality, am someone to be feared.”

He had his arms folded over his chest, and he was grinning, but she wasn’t stupid. He was vibrating like a string of a violin.

“I’ll thank you to extinguish all these lights,” she said. “I believe I shall remove my mask.”

He did so. The only light he left was the very dim glow of Jeremy’s lantern, set far off in the corner and certainly not lending enough illumination so that Gil would recognize her, if indeed, he remembered his fiancée’s features at all. Emma pulled off the heavy, jeweled mask and put it to the side. She could hardly see Gil; he was just a tall, shadowy form, but she could feel him: feel his desire reaching toward her, with all the inevitability of a spark hitting dry leaves.

“I’ll grant that you are slow to learn, given your nationality,” she told that dark gypsy shape of her future husband severely, “but the time has come for you to mend your ways.”

“Hmmm,” was all he said, but he seemed to be moving toward her right on course and as if he couldn’t help himself, so she let him take his time.

It didn’t take him more than a second to bring her back to that all-important moment, which just goes to show that the man did indeed learn something over in Paris.

And this time, he didn’t stop.

Her body danced to the tune of his fingers, as if she were a puppet on his strings. She gasped, cried out, reached for him….

When she pulled herself back together, she was still lying on her own velvet pelisse, staring up at the dusty rafters far above them. Gil was on his knees over her. And every inch of her body was quivering, as if a forest fire had rushed over her, left her scorched and yet unconsumed, burned and yet desirous.

She took a deep breath and focused on his face. There had to be more to this. In fact, she knew there was more to it. He’d taken off his shirt, but he was still mostly clothed. And even if he was looking at her with naked longing in his eyes, and his hand was shaping her breast in a way that made her press up, in his palm—even so, there was something about him that signaled that he thought he’d won.

Won?

She hadn’t even started to fight.

Slowly, so she didn’t startle him and make him dash back for his shirt and the security of all his vows about not sleeping with women, especially, she was beginning to think, Frenchwomen, she reached out her toes and her arms, and stretched. His strethed eyes were liquid black, watching the arch of her body.

“I gather,” she said, “you are still determined to pay me no favors.”

“Those favors should be reserved for the man you marry.” But his hand was on her breast again, shaping it.

She curled into his palm, making that sound in her throat, the one he liked and the one that seemed to come naturally every time he touched her. Then she nodded, quite as if she understood and didn’t think he was feebleminded which, frankly, she was starting to take as a serious possibility.

“In that case, I would suggest that a gentlemen must allow a lady to reciprocate. Not the favor, since you are disinclined to grant my wishes. But…” She caught his eye and held it, “a reciprocation.”

He frowned. “What—”