That particular strategy seemed rather out the window now. “Something like that,” he admitted with a sigh.
“Of all the conceit! To think your advances would be so appealing to me that I would forget my duty to my employer! Not to mention my virtue and my self-respect.”
That nettled him. “A few kisses wouldn’t put either your virtue or your self-respect in jeopardy! And in my defense,” he added, “I’d like to point out that you weren’t exactly fighting me off.”
“I shouldn’t have had to!” she countered. “I should never have been subjected to your unwelcome attentions in the first place.”
“Unwelcome? Ah, so that explains why you wrapped your arms around my neck and kissed me back.”
“I did no such thing!”
“Liar.”
She folded her arms, glaring at him. “You are the one who lied,” she countered, refusing to be put on the defensive. “You never had any intention of doing those revisions, did you?”
“Intentions have nothing to do with it. The changes you want are so substantive and that manuscript so raw, I’d have to start at the first page and rewrite the entire book. I can’t do it.”
“You mean you won’t.”
“Phrase it anyway you like. Writing has become unbearable for me, but it’s not by choice. I can’t explain it any better than that because you wouldn’t understand.”
She took a deep breath. “I might. Explain it to me.”
Caught, he tilted his head back, staring at the ceiling. How the hell could he explain without giving chapter and verse? “Writing is first a desire,” he began. “The desire to express oneself, the desire to be heard, the conviction one has things to say.” He lowered his head to look into her eyes. “You know what I mean.”
“Yes. Go on.”
“Then one is published, and writing becomes a compulsion, a need—the need not only to be heard, but also to be admired, even adored. The more attention you receive, the more you crave. There’s no satiating it. But now everyone has expectations—your publisher, your family and friends, the public—and you know you will disappoint them and lose their admiration, possibly their respect. So you work harder, write more, burning your candle at both ends. Desperation begins to creep in, because deep down, you know you’re fighting a losing battle. The struggle to live up to your own and everyone else’s expectations is exhausting, and one day, you…” He paused, treading carefully. “You reach a moment when you just can’t tolerate any more, when you’re exhausted and uninspired and there are no stories left to tell. You’re empty. You’re finished.”
“For someone who’s too exhausted and uninspired to write, you seem to spend a great deal of time and effort inventing ways to avoid it.”
He looked away. “I have my reasons,” he muttered. “Reasons that are none of your business. The point is, I have no desire to write another word. Ever.”
“What if we could make you want it? For once, don’t argue with me,” she added as he tried to speak. “Just play along for a moment. What if we could find a way to make you want to write again?”
“For God’s sake, woman, don’t you ever accept facts? And I don’t understand why it matters to you one way or the other. Your task was to see I gave Marlowe a book. I’ve done that. Why should you care if the book is good or bad?”
“You are a gifted writer, and I refuse to allow your talent to be wasted!”
“That’s your reason?” He couldn’t help a laugh. “You’re doing this out of a sense of artistic altruism?”
“No, damn you!” she shot back. Her hands clenched into fists. “I’m doing this because I want to succeed at something! I want to become a great writer, and you’re going to help me do it!”
Sebastian stared at her, and in her eyes, he could see not only anger, but also hope. He exhaled a sharp sigh. “I told you before, there’s nothing I can teach you.”
“This isn’t just about my writing. It’s also about my obligation to Lord Marlowe. He hired me to help you write again. He did not hire me to accept a mediocre manuscript you wrote years ago just so that you could fulfill a contract.”
“It’s over!” he roared back, hating that she was pinning her hopes and dreams and ambitions on him. He didn’t want that sort of responsibility. “I haven’t a shred of inspiration left inside of me. I have nothing left to say.”
“You always have plenty of things to say to me, most of which are rude. And you may be the rudest, most temperamental man I’ve ever met, but you’re not empty. You’re not finished. I refuse to believe it.”
“Why? Because you write pages and pages every day without stopping? Because if you can deny this drought has happened to me, you can convince yourself it won’t ever happen to you?”
He thought he saw a glimmer of his own fear reflected in her eyes, but it was gone before he could be sure, and her former determination returned. “We need to find a way to bring back your creative instincts.”
“I don’t want to bring them back. I burned my candle at both ends for many years, petal, to satisfy my creative instincts. I’ve roamed all over the damned world. I’ve a reputation as a man of excesses, and it’s well earned. I’ve brawled and drank and gambled my way through some of the bawdiest taverns you could imagine. I’ve taken—” He broke off, startled and dismayed to realize he’d almost confessed his darkest, most insidious excess of all. “Do you want to know why I’ve done all those things? Because I’ve always been afraid, that’s why!”
“Afraid of what?”
“That one day I’d run out of things to write about.” He gave a bitter laugh. “Now, look at me. I am living the very thing I spent most of my life running from. An irony, wouldn’t you say? One of God’s little jests. My father would be so damned smug if he knew.”
“Your father?”
“He didn’t want me to write. He deemed it a silly, pointless preoccupation, and whenever he caught me at it, he would become enraged. I was to be the next Earl of Avermore, he’d often say. I was destined for nobler things than pegging away at a typewriting machine like a clerk. Though why he thought spending money without any means of earning it was a noble thing, I’ve never understood. He threatened to disown me when I refused to have my first book published under a pseudonym. And he actually did disown me when I refused to marry the American heiress he’d chosen for me. That’s when I left England. I didn’t even consider returning until after his death.”
“That sounds like a fine basis for a novel.”
“Does it? Then why don’t you write it and leave me alone?”
He might as well have been talking to the air. “There must be something that would motivate you, inspire you, stir your senses.”
“Well, there’s you,” he said without thinking. “You stir my senses beyond belief.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I,” he said with feeling. “Kissing you was the most delicious thing I’ve felt in a long, long time.”
She didn’t seem flattered. She fell silent, studying him with a thoughtful frown, her head tilted to one side. If he were to guess her thoughts at this moment, he would have predicted them to be a condemnation of some sort, but Daisy, not for the first time, surprised him.
“All right, then.” She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin a notch, meeting his gaze with a touch of defiance. “How many of my kisses would inspire you to revise that damned manuscript?”
Daisy stared at Sebastian, stunned by her own outrageous proposition. She was mad to have made such an offer, yet she could not bear to take it back. Her pulses were racing, and she felt almost giddy with excitement.
Sebastian, however, did not seem to share this heady feeling. “A delightful notion, petal,” he drawled, “offering me your kisses as motivation. But I don’t think you quite know what you’re doing.”
It was mad, she knew—mad, wicked, and dangerous. The risks were enormous, the consequences grave if they were caught, especially for her. She met his gaze, her
heart in her throat, and shoved doubts out of her mind.
“I know exactly what I’m doing,” she assured him with all the bravado she could muster. “It’s like you said. I can’t very well write romantic moments in my books if I’ve never experienced them. You can help me and I can help you. That’s the whole reason I’m here, isn’t it?”
“Excellent point.” He unfolded his arms, and reaching out, he touched her face, tracing his fingers along her cheekbones. Then he cupped her cheeks and leaned closer. Her heart shivered in her breast when he brushed her lips lightly with his own. “But somehow,” he murmured against her mouth, “I don’t think this is the sort of help Marlowe had in mind.”
“You’re being so damned stubborn,” she whispered back, “I’m forced to improvise.”
“I’m stubborn?” He laughed against her lips. “Pot, meet kettle.”
His fingers tightened against the back of her head as if he intended to kiss her again, but Daisy had no illusions about his motives. She ducked her head and moved out of his grasp. “Not so fast,” she reproved, putting herself at a safer distance by circling her desk to stand on the other side. With that substantial rosewood barrier between them she felt much more capable of further discussion on the subject of kisses. “If this…this exchange is going to work, we have to establish some rules.”
“Rules?” He smiled and her stomach dipped with a strange, weightless sensation, as if she had just jumped off a cliff.
“Yes, rules,” she said firmly. She paused and took a deep breath, trying to steady her jangled nerves and think of how to make this crazy notion work. “The first rule,” she said after a moment, “is that you can’t have kisses any time you want them.”
“Why not?”
“This is a means of providing you with motivation and reward,” she reminded dryly, “not distraction.”
“It’s beginning to sound like torture.”
She wasn’t sympathetic. “You’ve already had one kiss, and that should be sufficient inspiration for the time being.”
“I don’t think so.” He leaned over the secretaire, smiling, a hint of mischief in his eyes. “I still feel a bit stale.”
“Too bad. If you want another kiss, you have to work for it.”
“How?”
She leaned closer. She heard him catch his breath, and the sound gave her an exhilarating sense of power she’d never felt in her life before. She lowered her gaze to the hard, sensuous line of his mouth. He wanted her kisses, but did he want them enough? She waited, making him wait, too, as she pretended to consider. “When you’ve revised one hundred pages of manuscript,” she finally said, “you may have another kiss.”
“One hundred pages? You’re joking.”
“I told you, I don’t make jokes.”
“Petal, be reasonable,” he murmured, trying to cajole. “At that rate, I’ll be having a kiss from you around Michaelmas, if I’m lucky.”
“That’s not true. You only have one hundred and twelve days to revise the entire manuscript. To make that deadline, you’ll have to have one hundred pages revised well before Michaelmas.”
“You don’t seriously intend to hold me to such a strict deadline, do you? That manuscript is five hundred pages. You’ve seen how difficult this sort of thing is for me. Be reasonable.”
“One hundred and twelve days.”
His lashes lowered. “If I’m going to rewrite the entire book in that amount of time, I’ll need lots of incentive.” He once again looked into her eyes. “I want a kiss every fifty pages.”
She couldn’t relent. For every inch she gave, he’d try to take a mile. If she did have power over him, she had to hold on to it, use it now, while she had it. “One hundred pages,” she repeated. “And I choose the time and place. And I approve the revisions to each one hundred pages before I give you your next kiss.”
He didn’t speak, and for a moment, she feared she’d pushed him too far, demanded too much. Though they were not touching and the desk was between them, she could sense the tension in his body, feel the rebellion in him. Any moment now, he’d tell her to go to the devil.
He let out his breath in a slow sigh. “All right,” he agreed. “It’s a bargain, then. One hundred pages for a kiss.”
Daisy felt a flash of triumph and relief, but he gave her no chance to savor it.
“But,” he went on, making her tense, “I insist upon some rules of my own.”
“What?” She straightened away from the desk, staring at him. “Not a chance.”
“I’m not the only one who receives benefit from this little game,” he reminded her. “We are supposed to teach each other, remember? Learn from each other. Help each other.” He smiled. “Quid pro quo, Miss Merrick. We both benefit, so we are both allowed to make some of the rules.”
She studied that smile of his, wary, sensing a trap. “What rules do you have in mind?”
He tilted his head as if thinking it over. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I have to think about it. I reserve the right to bring my rules in later.”
“That is absurd! I won’t agree to anything that ambiguous!”
He folded his arms. “Then I won’t revise.”
“Then you won’t be paid.”
“Fine. You’ll have to face Marlowe and tell him you failed.”
Daisy sucked in a sharp breath. Clever bastard, she thought, glaring at him, seeing the glimmer of satisfaction in his eyes. He knew he’d found a vulnerability in her, and there was no pretending otherwise. And she realized with chagrin that when it came to using power, she was only a novice. He was a master.
“Oh, very well,” she agreed crossly. “One might as well argue with a bull as argue with you. You may add a rule of your own.”
“Three rules,” he countered at once. “You made three. I’m entitled to make three.”
She should have known he wouldn’t agree to being allowed only one. “All right, all right! But,” she added before he could crow about his victory, “no rule you enact can negate an already established one. No changing one hundred pages to fifty or one kiss to two.”
“I would never do anything like that,” he said with such innocence in his expression that she knew she’d been right.
“It’s exactly what you’d have done,” she said. “could read your mind like a book.”
He didn’t deny it. Instead, he held out his hand. “Are we agreed?”
Daisy lowered her gaze to his outstretched hand—the long, strong fingers that had caressed her face and wide palm that had touched her so sweetly through her clothing. What rules would he come up with? Doubt once again whispered in her ear, doubt and caution, but she refused to listen. Instead, she reached out and clasped his larger hand in her smaller one to seal their bargain. “Agreed.”
Chapter 13
Fill your paper with the breathing of your heart.
William Wordsworth
Daisy could not sleep. Her outrageous proposition reverberated through her head like the blaring of trumpets, making sleep impossible.
How many of my kisses would you need to revise that manuscript?
What on earth had she been thinking? She was no bawd. She was a virtuous woman, properly brought up. Whatever had possessed her? Lucy, she knew, would never have done such a thing. But, then, she wasn’t Lucy. Try as she might, she’d never been able to master tact or restraint.
She sighed into the dark. Tonight, there had been nothing restrained about her. Any other woman would have gasped in maidenly outrage and slapped his face for what he’d done. Not her, though. Oh, no. She’d done the very opposite. She’d proposed that he give her more.
Perhaps she was out of her mind. That might explain it.
Daisy plumped her pillow and rolled onto her back, pondering the matter of her sanity as she stared at the intricate white swirls of plasterwork and the darker lines of their shadows on the ceiling of her room. It was past midnight and the house was silent, but she was wide awake. Despite the cool spri
ng breeze that floated through the room, she felt much too warm, her body still tingling from Sebastian’s kiss and the exhilarating aftermath.
She hadn’t lost her mind, she told herself. She’d invented that preposterous idea of kisses for a reason. She was hoping it would help him, that it would inspire him, spur him on to do those revisions.
Even as she told herself that, she knew it was a lie. Their bargain might save his literary career, it might motivate him to write again, but she couldn’t even pretend to be altruistic about this. She hadn’t done this for him. Daisy bit her lip. She hadn’t done it for him at all.
Sebastian had been right about her. She’d had little experience with romance. Every story she’d ever written had a pair of lovers, but until today, she hadn’t understood why she’d always had so much trouble describing their emotions and expressing their passions. Now she knew the reason was her own lack of experience. She had the chance to finally understand what lovers did in shadowy corners and what they talked about in whispers so chaperones could not hear. And then, once she knew how lovers behaved with each other and the romantic things they did, she could write about them with authenticity.
Yet, even as she acknowledged that motive, she knew it wasn’t the true one either. It wasn’t literary considerations for either of them that had impelled her to make such a reckless, imprudent proposition to the most notorious man she’d ever met.
She’d been wondering what his kiss would be like, yes, and she’d been sure it would be nothing like her first kiss all those years ago, yes, but the touch of his mouth against hers had gone beyond anything she could have imagined. It was the most extraordinary thing she’d ever felt in her life. And, shameless as it was, she wanted to feel that way again.
She’d always thought a kiss was sweet, poignant, blissful. But now she knew it wasn’t like that at all. It was a lush, lavish, shocking exchange, with open mouths and tongues that touched. It evoked the strangest sensations—an aching warmth, and a hungry, desperate need for more. She remembered how he’d unbuttoned her shirtwaist and pressed his lips to the base of her throat, and how that had made her feel—as if she were melting into a puddle on the floor.
With Seduction in Mind Page 16