Wicked Becomes You

by Meredith Duran

  She felt enormously pleased with herself. Her Baedeker’s guide decreed that the cafés on the south side of the boulevards were suitable for ladies, but the author certainly hadn’t assumed that she would be drinking her coffee unchaperoned.

  Smiling, she looked back to the newspaper spread open before her. Galignani’s Messenger printed a daily list of English newcomers to Paris; on Fridays, the list expanded to include notable departures to other spots on the Continent. A scan yielded no sign of Thomas’s name. He was probably still here, then. But where he might be skulking remained a mystery. Her concierge at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre had made discreet inquiries on her behalf, so she knew that he was not lodged there, nor at the Maurice, the Brighton, the Rivoli, or the Saint James and Albany. He had not even stopped in for a chop at Richard-Lucas. For an Englishman, he was proving remarkably unpredictable.

  “Enjoying yourself?”

  She twisted around from the waist, heart thumping. What on earth? “Alex!”

  “None other,” he said. He made an excellent impression of a well-heeled Parisian: gray suit, gray waistcoat, gray felt hat, gray suede gloves—even a gray necktie, appropriately loosened in the manner of the locals. He looked expensive and sophisticated and, thanks to the dark circles beneath his eyes, utterly debauched to boot: a man who enjoyed his nights as thoroughly as his days.

  He gestured toward the empty chair opposite her. She nodded. What else was she to do?

  As he sat down, the cramped quarters forced his knee into her skirts. He gave her a startlingly broad smile. Perhaps his temperament changed with the country, just like his wardrobe. She tried to look away from his throat, but the sight drew her back again. Since her arrival to Paris yesterday, she’d witnessed a hundred gentlemen with ties thus draped. But on Alex, the effect was . . . startling. As if he’d been interrupted while undressing.

  It occurred to her that the last time she had seen him, he’d just finished kissing her with expert skill. She felt her face warm.

  He threw one long leg over the other and glanced around, utterly at ease, as though he had not just ambushed her in a foreign country. She held very still, overly conscious of her breathing, of the way her fingers itched to fidget. His cheekbones had a dramatic slope to them.

  Loose ladies probably had fever dreams about his lips.

  Those lips showed no signs of moving in speech.

  “What are you doing here?” she burst out.

  He lifted one brow as he looked back to her. “What a disingenuous question. I told you I was coming to Paris.” The smile that curved his mouth seemed to weigh a variety of improper possibilities. “Perhaps I should ask if you were following me.”

  “What a silly question that would be,” she said irritably, “as I had also already expressed my intention to come here during our last conversation.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I believe I stated mine first.”

  “Yes, but my idea was born separately. It had nothing at all to do with you.”

  “You—” He ran a hand over his face and muttered something beneath his breath which she could not make out. Then he sat back in the chair and pasted on a lazy smile. “Ah, what does it matter. Paris is big enough for the both of us.”

  “Then why are you here at my café?”

  A muscle ticked briefly in his jaw. “An excellent question,” he said finally. “My sisters have no faith in your chaperone, and apparently their suspicions are correct. She is napping beneath cucumber slices while you are wandering about collecting wine carafes.”

  “So there’s my answer,” Gwen said triumphantly. “You found the note I left her.”

  The corner of his mouth lifted, but it did not appear to be a sign of good humor. “Yes,” he said. “I found the note.”

  “Well, I hope you haven’t come to harass me back to London. I believe I made my opinion very clear with regard to that ridiculous plan on being married by autumn.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I have no intentions of inflicting you on anyone, Miss Maudsley. I only wish my sisters felt the same. I’ve come to Paris strictly on a holiday.” As if to illustrate this, he tipped his face up to the sun. A breeze swept over the table, and he closed his eyes and slid lower in his chair, stretching out like some giant, basking house cat.

  “Hmm,” she said, wanting him to take note of her skepticism. To her knowledge, Alex had never gone anywhere for a motive as profitless as holidaying.

  But his lashes did not so much as flicker at the sound. He covered a yawn with his palm. Perhaps he was telling the truth, then. Certainly she’d never seen him look so . . . carefree.

  Indeed, this unusual repose freed her, for once, to look as closely as she liked at him. She decided that his lower lip should give her hope. It looked full enough to pull off a good pout—far too sensitive to belong to a bully.

  Despite herself, she leaned forward. Really, his mouth was remarkable. Were men supposed to have such lips? They were a shade darker than his tanned skin, the upper a fraction longer than the lower, but not quite as full. The edges were so precisely defined that she could have traced them, given rice paper and a pen.

  He spoke without opening his eyes, his sleepy voice giving her a dreadful start. “Have you found the viscount?”

  She jerked back in her seat. “Not yet.”

  His eyes opened directly on hers. “I told you I would find him for you. Do you think me incapable?”

  Strange that she did not recall being unnerved by his eyes in the past. But they were a startling light blue and seemed to catch her like a fist around the throat. “I don’t doubt your skill,” she said. “And I know my brother would have appreciated your offer. But as I said, I have come to Paris for a variety of purposes, one of which is to make known to the viscount my immense distaste for his actions.” She paused. “I had written a letter about it, but somebody rudely intercepted it and forbade me to mail it.”

  “Forbade you?” He looked amused. “Do you always listen to what others tell you to do? Seems rather conventional, to me.”

  “I am a fledgling free spirit,” she said with a shrug. “My wings are still sprouting. But you’re quite right; I shall endeavor to ignore you completely in the future.” When he laughed, she added, “Even if you do persist in following me about in this brotherly mode.”

  He laughed and sat up. “Brotherly? Brotherly? What lies have my sisters been telling you? I believe the last time I was properly brotherly, it was 1876, and Belinda had just skinned her knee.” The corner of his mouth lifted. “Do you need me to inspect your knees, Miss Maudsley?”

  She lifted her chin. “My knees are quite fine.”

  “Ah, good to know.” He laid his index finger on the carafe of burgundy sitting by her glass, drawing an idle path through the collected condensation. “One hopes they’ll remain so,” he said, “for I suspect you have very pretty knees, and running off can be dangerous. One tends to slip.”

  She watched his hands. His fingers were long and elegant, well suited to musical instruments; she had seen them stroke piano keys with exquisite finesse. Apparently they could just as easily pummel a man until his jaw broke—or so people liked to whisper, when neither he nor the unfortunate Mr. Reginald Milton were in the room. As for Lady Milton, Reginald’s mother, she thought Alex the devil incarnate. But probably even she would admire his hands, so long as she did not know to whom they attached.

  Gwen looked to her own fingers, knotted together limply in her lap. They were stubby, the hands of a washerwoman, not even figuratively: her paternal grandmother had been a scullery maid at an estate of the Roland family. She did not advertise this fact when supping with Baron and Lady Roland, of course.

  The next time she saw them, perhaps she would mention it. “I do not ‘run off,’” she said firmly. “I am twenty-three years of age, you know. I suppose you could say that I have the right to simply go—when and wherever I please.”

  “Admirable philosophy,” he murmured. His nail tapped the carafe. “You
may want to try it sober, at first.”

  She frowned. He glanced past her and jerked his chin. This somehow managed to draw the approach of the waiter, a skinny lad who wore his sandy hair parted horizontally, brushed forward over a set of enormous, winglike ears.

  Alex’s request for une bock seemed to delight him. “Boum!” he cried, and blew away again.

  Gwen scowled. Her order had not merited such enthusiasm.

  “Have you had a falling out with Mrs. Beecham?” Alex asked idly.

  She looked at him blankly. “What? Of course not. Only last night we went to the Opera to see a show.” She grimaced. “Rather tragic, in fact.”

  “Grim play, was it?”

  “Oh, not at all. But neither she nor I could make sense of the French—this colloquial variety is dreadfully confusing—and then we ran out of small change for all the pourboires. It wasn’t our fault at all! The attendants in the cloakroom insisted on installing us in the seats with these rickety little footstools that used up all our coins. So when the ouvreuse came around to sell a playbill, we tried to deny her. Only apparently she was not asking a purchase so much as demanding it, and she made an awful scene. Such rudeness!” She shook her head. “I told Elma I shan’t go back. And I mean it, although she will try to convince me.”

  He laughed. “She was not concerned about the opera so much as your refusal to accompany her on calls.”

  “I thought she was napping.”

  “Yes, but she briefly deigned to lift one of the cucumber slices.”

  Gwen sighed and picked up her wine. A sip for courage, perhaps. “Elma has a hundred friends here and wishes to visit all of them. She has made a list, in fact, and it goes on for three pages, organized by location: today she works her way through the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Tomorrow, it is Rue de Varenne and Rue de Grenelle. Twelve, fifteen families at a time.” As the wine went down, she did her best not to grimace; the warmth of the sun had soured the burgundy. “At any rate, I count it a favor to leave her be. Everyone will want the latest gossip from London, and since I am the gossip, she could hardly share it with me by her side.”

  “Very generous of you,” he said dryly. “Where have you been going, then?”

  She tried out a one-shouldered shrug, the sort that he favored. All it did was awaken a cramp in her neck. “All the places one might think to find an Englishman in Paris.”

  The waiter reappeared with a tall glass of beer. She wanted to try one, and she was finished with disguising her desires. She said to the boy, “Une canette, s’il vous plaît.”

  “That would be the larger size,” Alex said mildly.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s why I ordered it. Only a brother would mention that,” she added.

  “A brother would also carry you back to the hotel when you passed out, but you may rest easy on that count: I won’t bother.”

  She smiled despite herself. Alex was the only man she’d ever known who seemed to positively invite one’s rudeness. Before, this had always unnerved her about him; the obligation had been upon her to ignore his provocations. But now, for the first time, she could answer with equal flippancy, and the effect was strangely heady, more intoxicating even than the wine had been. “I have a good head, you know.”

  “Yes, I hear you once drank two whole glasses of the stuff.”

  “And I’ve heard that sarcasm is no substitute for cleverness.”

  “Have you heard this? Kidnapped heiresses are not just the stuff of novels.”

  “Kidnapped?” A laugh escaped her. “Wouldn’t that be a lovely piece of irony! Abandoned by two men, and kidnapped by a third!”

  He paused. “You shouldn’t be out on your own,” he said in a different, more serious tone. “That’s all I mean. The world is not so kind as it looks in Mayfair.”

  “Does it look kind in Mayfair?” she asked blandly. “Perhaps I had a bad view, last week, when I found myself standing alone at the altar.”

  “I’m not speaking of wounded feelings,” he said quietly. “Things do happen. You need only think on your brother to realize that.”

  She glanced up at him, startled. He held her look, but his very impassivity betrayed an awareness of the moment’s significance. They had never spoken of Richard’s death. All the details about it had come through the twins.

  She wanted to be flippant again, to turn the mood back into banter. But instead she found herself saying, “I miss him.”

  “Yes,” he said at length. “So do I.”

  The sobriety of his reply further dampened her spirits. Richard had been dear to him as well.

  It was Alex who had returned the ring to her.

  She had felt so grateful to him for it that day. Even amidst all the other mad, grieving ideas that had raced through her head, she had still wanted to hug him, to cry onto his shoulder, for the favor of returning the ring.

  “I can’t believe I gave it away,” she whispered.

  He shrugged. Apparently he did not even need to ask what she meant. “You thought to wed the man, Gwen.”

  There was no censure in his tone. And Elma and the twins had said the same. But perhaps that was the worst part: she had felt justified in giving Thomas the ring.

  How willingly she had deluded herself! She’d not even had the courage to recognize her own hypocrisy. Thinking on it turned her stomach now. It was like that childhood game, in which one whirled in circles, round and round, until one managed to convince oneself that the sky and earth had switched places and the horizon was so close that one could touch it. But when one came to a stop, the world caught up and everything slammed into place, stolid and unchanged. Everything returned to the way it had been. Nothing new at all. And the nausea in one’s stomach was born half of wonder, half of fear: How did I convince myself, even for a moment, that things were different? I knew the truth all the time.

  Her order arrived, jarring her from her thoughts. The beer foam presented her with a bit of a dilemma. She decided to plow through it, and ended up wiping suds from her nose.

  Alex was smiling faintly. “Oui?”

  “Oui,” she said, because she liked the smile, and the fact that he was not chiding her. It tasted like rotgut, though.

  He spoke slowly. “I sense that you’re on somewhat of a larger mission, here in Paris.”

  She gave him a bland smile. “I do intend to try new things, if that’s what you mean. Life is too short to spend simply behaving oneself, don’t you think?” On a laugh, she added, “But perhaps you’ve never tried that, Alex. Maybe you should be my example.”

  He propped his elbow on the table and cupped his chin in his hand. “I would advise you to look elsewhere, for I can lead you nowhere good.”

  “Perhaps I don’t want to go anywhere good.”

  His smile slipped into something more contemplative. “But the only place I’d have a use for you is in bed.”

  She froze, glass pressed to her mouth. Surely he didn’t mean . . .

  “Oh, you have it right,” he said. “I mean that in a purely sexual way. Nothing brotherly about it.”

  The word registered like a physical shock. She put her glass down hastily lest she drop it, then cast a panicked glance around. Nobody looked to be eavesdropping.

  His laughter snapped her attention back to him. “You don’t have it in you to do this, Gwen.”

  The sound of her name went through her like an electric current. He had a lovely voice, low and smooth. Gwen. She’d never realized how pretty her name could sound. “What—what do you mean?” Good Lord! What would his sisters have said if they’d been able to hear this conversation? Alex, interested in her in a purely sexual way! “I don’t have it in me to do what?”

  “To rebel,” he said.

  “You’re mistaken. I intend to live for myself now.”

  He inclined his head. “I don’t debate your motives,” he said. “But living for yourself requires you to stop caring about what others expect from you.”

  “Yes,” she said. �
��I know. Perhaps I want to be judged.” Last night, Elma had been abuzz with news of some duke, newly widowed—a fact less startling when one learned he was seventy. But his age had not stopped Elma from formulating a grand plan to rehabilitate Gwen into a duchess. Nor would it stop the man from courting her, probably. Elma assured her that his ancient-and-doddering grace was simply desperate for funds. “Perhaps ruin would please me,” she said. She was done with purchasing grooms.

  What would it take to drive off these men, anyway? A scandal of Hippodrome proportions? Only something truly heinous would counteract the appeal of her three million pounds. Poison, murder, devil worship. The sight of an altar.

  “If it’s done right, ruin would surely please you,” Alex said with open amusement. “But the consequences wouldn’t. You’re a kitten, Gwen, and I say that with no censure whatsoever. You live to be smiled at, to charm people. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, so long as you choose the right people to charm. It’s the choice that has been your failing to date.”

  The words stung, but only because, until so recently, they had been true. Why charm anyone? What a futile exercise it seemed now! People blew away like dandelion thistles, carried off by death or indifference or sheer, inexplicable whim. Why bother to grasp at them? One would only be disappointed eventually.

  And of all people, Alex certainly understood this. He’d spent his entire adult life avoiding his home and family. What hypocrisy for him to encourage her to do what he never bothered with! “I am telling you right now,” she said fiercely. “I no longer care.”

  He sat back in his chair, setting his fist to his mouth as he studied her. “All right,” he said at length. “Let’s test it, shall we?”