Seven Secrets of Seduction

by Anne Mallory

  She nudged the paper forward with raised glimmerings that perhaps she should question his sanity.

  His brow cocked, and the flash appeared again—not a benign twinkle, such as one given to mischief or hilarity—but one that a man might wear if he was about to have his wicked way with the woman on the receiving end. “I meant that I am not ready to sign your paper. What if the books are not the items requested? What if we once again have suffered a miscommunication?”

  She nudged the package this time. His other brow joined the first.

  She raised her own brows, the pepper that seemed to run through her veins when he was near spiced the flow once more, overriding her embarrassment and any feelings of inferiority. “The only miscommunication we have suffered is your purposefully misplacing your package,” she said. “Twice, I might add.”

  “Tut, blaming the customer.” He slouched down in the chair, his hands clasped against his chest, even that action unable to mask his leaching virility. “I am completely a victim here.”

  “Completely.” She waited, then tapped her finger. “Are you going to open the package and inspect the books?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like me to open the package?”

  “No.”

  “No? Then how am I to…” She took a deep breath, then smiled as calmly as she could manage within the unspecified game he was playing. He smiled back just as pleasantly.

  And said not a word. For an entire minute.

  He seemed perfectly content to watch her. She held his gaze unflinchingly, though the narrowed glimpse of a question within his eyes unnerved her, as if he couldn’t quite discover the answer to a riddle.

  Itchy fingers of warmth crawled up her limbs. She absently caressed the package. She had the vague notion that they might continue in this stalemate all day if she remained silent.

  “How are you faring this afternoon, my lord?” she asked as gamely as she could manage over the flutters and confusion, the lingering embarrassment and anticipation.

  “Better. But those close to me call me by my first name.”

  She stared at him.

  The edges of his mouth lifted farther. “And those acquaintances with whom I plan to become better acquainted.” He waved a hand to her in some gesture of encouragement.

  She stared at him some more.

  “We might sit here all day.”

  She opened and closed her mouth, nothing emerging for a long moment. “Er, how are you this afternoon…Maximilian?”

  “It’s quite a mouthful, unfortunately. Feel free to shorten it at will. And I’m doing quite well, Miranda.”

  She continued to stare, wondering when she’d wake to find the whole situation a strange imagining.

  “I asked.” He answered her unspoken question, even white teeth pulling into an appealing curve. “That is your name, correct?”

  She looked around her, at the glitter of the gold and silver, the shadows of the dark woods. At the quite fine specimen of masculinity across from her. She nodded to herself. Dreaming.

  “Yes. Industrious of you to discover it.”

  His smile grew. “I think you will find me quite industrious.”

  Something wild and strange surged within her, making her fingers jitter. She clasped them together and nodded toward the unsigned paper. She needed that paper signed. It was something tangible and concrete. “Is there something I can do to increase your industry even more?”

  “I do find myself in dire need of assistance. Would you care to help me with something?”

  “What sort of something?” she asked cautiously, fingers twining together, all sorts of mad imaginings springing to mind.

  “Nothing too perfidious, I promise.” He smiled widely, charmingly, all white teeth showing.

  “Will you sign for the package, if I do?”

  “You don’t want to keep exchanging visits?”

  “I expect that you do want your package sometime,” she demurred, trying to corral her rampaging thoughts and the way her body responded to his very voice and presence. “You came to the store twice solely to pick it up, so it must be important.”

  “Did I?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “I saw you in the store for it just yesterday.”

  He smiled and leaned back farther in his chair, rocking it back on its heels. “So literal sometimes, and at other times with your head in the clouds.”

  “I hardly think you aware of the normal sway of my thoughts, your lordship.”

  “Mmmmm. And it’s Maximilian or some such variety, Miranda.”

  “It is purely Miss Chase, my lord.”

  “A pity. I had so been hoping to call you Miranda.”

  “I can’t possibly imagine why.”

  He rose and walked around the desk. She stood still, unwilling to bolt like a scared rabbit as he neared her position. He came within a hairbreadth of touching her before leaning back so he was sitting on the edge of the desk facing her. “It’s a lovely name. Quite Shakespearean.”

  She didn’t dare breathe because of the short distance between them. “I think you are a tease, my lord.”

  “No, a tease is someone who only promises without following through.” His fingers interlocked, and one thumb slowly traced a pattern around the edges of the other. “I guarantee you that I am a man who follows through.”

  She was worried about expiring? About breathing? She didn’t know if she had breath left. She pointed at the package at his side, grasping the last tendrils of sanity. “Then sign for your delivery.”

  Consternation and a touch of something else passed through his eyes. “Touché, Miss Chase.”

  He fiddled with the paper for a second, then let it fall back to the desk. She waited for him to pick it up and sign it, but when he failed to do so, she suddenly bent over him, gripped it herself, and held it to him.

  She could feel the internal heat coil beneath her cheekbones and flare out, but she held her hand steady.

  He slowly took it from her and paused before picking up a pen in his right hand. He dipped the tip and signed with a strange flourish. The signature was a bit sloppy. The g at the end trailed awkwardly as though he didn’t write it often. She had merely been grousing the day before when she’d said it, but possibly he rarely did pick up a pen.

  “And now your task is at an end,” he said, his voice holding a note of something she couldn’t identify.

  Relief vied with something equally unnameable inside of her. “That it is.” She carefully folded the slip and placed it in her hanging pocket. “Thank you.” Something reached out of the confusion and clawed to the surface, prompting her to say, “And the task you’d like assistance with?”

  “Ah, yes. A dire matter of settling an argument as to the placement of a painting.”

  She blinked, but before she could say anything, he rose to his full height, his presence stretching forward in such a way that she couldn’t help but take a step back.

  “Come.”

  She followed him out, touching her pocket again to reassure herself that he had actually signed the slip and that it was still in her possession and not lifted by some chicanery on his part. “I am hardly a knowledgeable judge of such things.”

  “Nonsense. You are an opinionated lady. That is all I ask—your opinion.”

  She followed him through a hall, up one set of stairs, and down another hall. He stopped so abruptly that she almost careened into his solid, too-appealing back.

  “Here. What do you think? The Dutch on this side or that?”

  A quite attractive Vermeer stood patiently on the floor against a wall. She had seen two other works by the artist, not a favorite of the museums, but she loved his propensity to paint across class. A maid’s head bent to her task under the paint, and Miranda could almost feel the mundane aspect of the woman’s work, the direction of her thoughts as she daydreamed that she was doing something else. Miranda thought that she could stare at the painting and wonder about it all day if given t
he chance. A bare spot on the wall was perfectly positioned for the piece.

  “This looks like quite an excellent spot.”

  “But you haven’t seen the other location.” He pivoted and pointed behind him.

  She resolutely turned as well, determined to humor him instead of trying to figure out what he was trying to accomplish.

  “My brother Conrad thinks this the best spot, but I think he is mad.”

  A nice section of wall was cleared here as well, and she opened her mouth to say so, but as her eyes drifted from the empty wall space to his too-attractive features, she caught sight of the most glorious room. She couldn’t help but take a step toward it in reaction.

  “You can’t put a Vermeer in the south side of a corridor, I told him,” his rich voice said at her side, the ever-present huskiness underlying the timbre. “Everyone knows this. But—”

  The words started to blend together in her mind as she craned her neck just an inch trying to see farther inside.

  “Miss Chase?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Are you ogling my library?”

  She turned back to him, coloring. “Oh. Yes, I suppose I was at that.”

  “Would you care to take a look inside?”

  She nodded, her feet already taking her that way as he beckoned, moving forward. Any reluctance about her strange reaction to his prolonging her visit, or the jumpiness concerning his identity, or the wish to discover more about him, temporarily faded beneath the lure. “Yes, I’d love to.”

  Entering the grand door was like walking through a portal to another kingdom.

  The room was magnificent.

  Arching wood and spiraled staircases stretched beseechingly toward the upper stacks. Row upon row of bare shelves calmly sat, patiently waiting. And the stacks of books—they were everywhere. Towering piles. Monoliths of printed words and bound pages. Leather and parchment, ink and glue. The entire room looked as if it had been shaken by a large hand, then haphazardly tidied. But even through the mess, the potential was clear. And the fortune in books. It was absurd. There were more titles here than in all of their store and lending library—front and back.

  “I recently redid the room—or my workers did, I should say. And in the interim I was bequeathed another entire manor’s worth of titles. So I removed all of them to redistribute and reorder.” He idly shifted, his hip sending a towering pile plummeting. “Tatty things really. More trouble than they are worth.”

  She very nearly dove for the falling stack. “Are you mad? You have a king’s ransom here.” She grew more appalled as he nudged what looked like an illuminated manuscript with the toe of his boot. She did dive for it, scooping it up and hugging it to her. “What are you doing? That’s priceless.”

  He raised a brow. “If only because the currency used when it was created is long dead. Rubbish, really. Talking about moral superiority and ethics.” A hand waved, and he caught another stack with it. She leapt forward and put her free hand out to steady it, afraid that other priceless works might be contained within, only awaiting a careless gesture to send them careening to their deaths.

  She could feel him moving around her back. Brushing against the edges of her dress, her left hand frozen on the stack as his low, deep voice continued. “I think one should do as one chooses, don’t you, Miranda?”

  She clasped the manuscript to her beating chest with her right arm.

  “Or else one becomes mired in tomes and mores intent on sealing you into a tomb.”

  She swallowed around the dryness in her throat.

  “There is life here in the chaos, even as order constantly tries to reinstate itself.” He motioned toward her hand holding the stack. “If you were simply to let go…”

  “Something precious could be destroyed.”

  His eyes were hooded. “There is always that chance. That is why it is called a gamble.”

  “I—I don’t know of what you are speaking.”

  He suddenly moved away, quixotic and mad. “Of course you don’t.”

  She carefully set the illumination on the navy pad of a chair surrounded by books. She nervously lifted the top few books from the stack she had steadied. There was a lovely French primer on top.

  “You have what looks to be a wonderful collection.”

  “I have made it quite my life’s work to collect beautiful things.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that. Nor to the implication behind the words.

  “Alas that I often destroy those things in the collecting.” He casually ran a finger over the top of a stack.

  “Perhaps if you stop tossing them over—”

  “And I keep thinking that perhaps it is just the next piece that will complete it. That will satisfy the emptiness.” He picked up the volume whose title she couldn’t read.

  “Perhaps what you are searching for is already in your possession.” She gestured around. “Buried beneath the mess?”

  The edge of his mouth curved as he studied the cover of whatever book he held. “That is what I’m betting on.”

  “Very good,” she said, on edge with the conversation, his presence, everything. “With a little direction, your servants can place these volumes back on the shelves with their new counterparts. And you can find what you are looking for.”

  “I can’t trust someone on my staff to do it for me. To find what I seek.”

  “You can direct them yourself.”

  “No.” He turned the book in his hands. “Besides, I’d rather spend my energy on other pursuits.” His eyes were dark and molten, and he tossed the book to the floor, the volumes there swallowing it into their midst, hiding it from view.

  She winced at the possible damage that might have been done. “Surely one of your servants can read their letters.” What type of other pursuits did one attempt when looking at someone in that way?

  “Surely.”

  She shifted under his penetrating gaze. “Your butler or an underbutler? Your housekeeper? They could arrange them alphabetically. Solve the entire situation. It would be a privilege to be so challenged.”

  Preserve the precious volumes. Reassemble the glorious room. Shift his energy—so focused upon her, the heft of it pressing into her—to something or someone else so that she could recall how to draw breath…

  How easy it was to imagine how he had become the apple of the gossips’ eyes. It wasn’t just his looks or words, his seductive actions. It was an intangible piece of him straining at some bond, making the viewer wonder if perhaps this time the bond would snap. Fascinating and terrifying. For what might he do when it snapped? Might he be captured forever? Or would he destroy everything in his path?

  “I do need someone to catalog and organize the books so that I know what I have.” His gaze shifted away from her, the tension easing from her a bit, and he picked up the illumination she had placed on the chair.

  “Very good, my lord.”

  He tossed it on top of a shorter stack and sifted through a taller one until he found whatever it was he was looking for. From the gilt glow, another illumination. He handed it to her, and she automatically took it, relieved that he wasn’t tossing it to the floor too.

  “Be here tomorrow at nine then?”

  “Yes, very…pardon me?” She clutched the book against her chest in sudden light-headed alarm.

  “You have convinced me. Be here at nine. Wear something comfortable, I’d think. See you then.”

  He turned and was halfway through the doorway before she caught him.

  “I don’t think you understood. Or that I understood, perhaps. I was merely suggesting that you find someone to do it for you.”

  “And I have. Thank you.” He smiled, a seductive curve of full lips. He touched his fingers together, and suddenly a severely dressed, very sober man appeared.

  “My lord, you are needed in the drawing room.”

  “Very well, Jeffries. Please fetch Mr. Rutherford’s books for Miss Chase before she leaves.”

  M
iranda spared a half-second look at the man with the name she had cursed. He didn’t even look her way before nodding and melting back into the shadows. Did everyone in this house live in them?

  “Good afternoon, Miss Chase.” The viscount began to stride away from her.

  “Wait.” She hurried after him. “I’m not coming here tomorrow. You have your books from the store. Finally. I’ll be on my way. I’m sure that you have someone quite competent to help you.”

  “But you are the most competent person I know,” he said as he kept walking. “I’m sure it will be a marvelous fit. I will pay well, of course.”

  “You don’t know me. And this isn’t about payment.”

  “No? Twenty pounds a week is not enough? Shall I increase it to fifty?”

  “Twenty p—…fifty p—” she sputtered. “Are you mad?”

  He turned a corner. “My brother delights in telling me so.”

  “I can’t possibly—”

  He stopped abruptly, turning, and steadied her as she nearly ran into his chest.

  “No?” He touched her gloved hand. His fingers were ungloved again today, not the same class breach of protocol here in his own home. It was a fleeting touch. Almost as if it were accidental.

  Her verbal sputtering died abruptly and her blood took up its cause, her skin a thin barrier to the heat suddenly searing beneath.

  “Your uncle thought you might enjoy the task. I know I would enjoy it if you’d agree.” His fingers brushed hers again as he tapped the book held tightly against her chest, forgotten in her flight after him. “Keep the text regardless. I know you will find my key. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Another fleeting touch, then he pulled on leather gloves—produced from a pocket somewhere—turned on his heel, and disappeared into a room. She caught sight of a few faces and heard hazy chatter before a footman closed the door.

  She stood mute, her fingers absently tracing the gifted book’s carved ivory—embellished with what looked like molten gold casting beacons through the shadows. Closer inspection showed two figures entwined. An early instruction manual for medieval dances?

  Or…or something else entirely?

  Like Pandora’s box, rife with seduction, her fingers hovered to turn the page. To open a box that might leave her bereft in the end. With only hope to keep her going.