Three Lessons in Seduction

by Sofie Darling

  “You killed a man?” she asked, eyes wide, but lacking any trace of hysteria or fear.

  “This can be a dirty business. Clearly, my investigation into the assassination plot has touched a nerve with the wrong people. I thought it best that I not be myself for a time.” Frustrating Nick was that he’d told only the right people of this mission. This led to a single, unavoidable conclusion: his operation was compromised.

  “How is Hortense connected to your mission?”

  “After the attack,” he began, “she was put in place as a maid to watch for suspicious activity around this suite in case anyone returned.”

  “You instructed her to spy on me?” Mariana asked. Her eyes held a mutinous light. Nick felt her slipping from him. He must tread with care.

  “That was a stroke of luck.” Truth would best serve the moment. “Once Hortense saw you check in to the hotel, she took it upon herself to become your lady’s maid.” He hesitated before making his next request. Mariana had never responded well to being told what to do. “I would ask that you keep her on. She would be useful in an unsavory situation.”

  Mariana’s amber eyes searched his, and the distance between them became insignificant. The only world that mattered was the world he saw in there, threatening to reach beyond the carnal and into a realm he never did understand and never wanted to understand. In this intimate space lay the ingredient for his undoing, yet he couldn’t resist its pull, even as he understood its potential for destruction. “If we are to work together, there is something you should know,” he found himself saying. “Ten years ago—”

  A forestalling hand flew up, and her eyes hardened into flat, brittle stone. Cold distance instantly dispelled any false sense of intimacy between them. “Don’t,” she commanded.

  “Don’t?”

  “Apologize for your affair,” she continued, her tone matching her eyes. “Or is it affairs? The gossip rags do so love to have a field day with your exploits. All done in the course of information collecting, I now see.”

  Even after all these years, her words hit him squarely in the solar plexus. Yet he would press on. “Mariana, the opera singer—”

  “I shall do it,” she cut in.

  “Pardon?” She was turning him into a simpleton.

  “I shall collect information for you.” She spoke the words as if she was as surprised as he to hear them emerge from her mouth. “But not if you insist on dredging up the past. It’s done. It has no place in Paris. Isn’t that the way you’ve conducted your life this last decade?”

  He cleared his throat, but found no available words. He nodded once, curtly.

  “Besides,” she began, the mean hint of a smile playing about her lips, “the Comte de Villefranche certainly is handsome.”

  The suggestion embedded within those words cut Nick to his core. But he deserved it, for it had been he who had set the idea of seduction into motion. She’d simply been the one to vocalize it. The matter was moot now.

  Mariana was going to seduce another man. And he had no one to blame except himself. His blood boiled at the thought.

  “I do have a request, though.”

  “Yes?” he asked, the monosyllable hesitant and wary. He wouldn’t like whatever words next emerged from her mouth.

  “You lose the voice.”

  He didn’t need to ask. He knew the voice she spoke of. He’d long been aware of how his popinjay persona grated on her nerves. Now she was stripping his already meager arsenal of one of his most effective defenses against her. “As you like,” he granted. Surely, he could devise other defenses.

  Her smile brightened, dispelling the impenetrable fog of their ticklish past. “It will be a lark.”

  A prickle of foreboding raised the hairs on Nick’s neck. “A lark?” The word rang false to his ears. He took a step back, hoping to gain a little perspective. “You’re not the larking sort.”

  “No?” A daring glint lit her eyes. “For England. How is that?”

  “I’m not certain,” he said, the words emerging syllable by slow syllable in a weak effort to buy time.

  What was happening? She’d turned the tables on him.

  Of course, she had.

  Arrayed before him in a state of partial undress, both impossibly sensual and impossible to ignore, stood the Mariana of his dreams and his nightmares: denuded of jewels; dress falling off her luscious form; gold locket temptingly nestled between her breasts; her face infused with a youthful eagerness he’d believed a memory. She looked so open . . . so Mariana . . .

  A problem with his plan hit Nick with the force of a lightning strike: Mariana’s open face. How could he have overlooked the trait that defined Mariana as . . . Mariana? Spies didn’t possess open faces. At least, successful spies didn’t. And definitely not the ones who lived.

  A shot of regret tore through him. What had he begun?

  “When do I begin?” she asked as if privy to his thoughts.

  “Tomorrow you accept Villefranche’s invitation to shop in the Palais-Royal.” Was that panic in his voice?

  “I suppose your people reported that conversation back to you?”

  Nick nodded. “I shall be in touch.” With that, he pivoted on a heel and fled the room.

  Perhaps he fled her keen face.

  Perhaps he fled his budding desire to tell her the truth about ten years ago. He definitely fled desire. Except, this desire had naught to do with the past. This desire lived squarely in the present, base and implacable.

  And it wasn’t the truth either of them needed.

  ~ ~ ~

  Mariana lay atop the bed’s soft damask coverlet, watching flickering shadows dance about her ceiling. As a child, she would imagine they were the shadows of fairies come to protect her as she slept. This twilight stage between waking and sleep had been her favorite part of bedtime. She hadn’t been the dreamy sort of girl who frolicked about vast imagined landscapes. She’d been too grounded in the present. Except for this one bit of whimsy that came to her every night as she relaxed and sank into slumber.

  She understood this would be her last stretch of stillness for some time. Once before, she’d experienced this singular feeling: the night before her wedding. She’d sensed then, as now, that she was about to step over an edge, and there would be no turning back. Gravity didn’t work that way. It pulled one toward an inevitable conclusion, and she never was one to hesitate on the brink of a precipice. She simply went right over.

  Tonight, she’d hesitated. She and Nick created a gravity of their own. And they’d reached their inevitable conclusion once before. Ten years. It was so very long ago, and, yet, it felt like yesterday.

  When her eyes had held his and his fingers brushed the space between her shoulder blades as his breath caressed the nape of her neck, she’d longed, yearned, ached for the press of his body against hers. Not because she didn’t remember, but because she did.

  Her eyelids fluttered shut. As the fairies eased her into sleep, a hopeful note sounded. The grim past didn’t have to push its way into the present. It was true that a gravitational thread linked them, one with no connection to their shared name or children. Nick had always been able to ignore it. Why not she, too?

  The past was the wrong direction. The only direction now was forward.

  Chapter 5

  Caterwauling: Going out in the night in search of intrigues, like a cat in the gutters.

  A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue

  Francis Grose

  Nick’s feet hit the flat cobblestone sidewalk at a clip that could only be characterized as a near run. He flipped up his collar to guard against the dense layer of fog that now wrapped Paris in a shroud of mist.

  How great was the temptation to find the nearest tavern and drink this night into oblivion in hopes of a c
learer head tomorrow. But it wouldn’t work. He needed to keep moving. A long and circuitous ramble through the city was the only way to rid himself of the panic rioting through him.

  What had he been thinking? Mariana wasn’t a spy. She might be the most obvious person he’d ever known. It was a quality that simultaneously charmed and struck a note of terror within him, but he couldn’t deny that it was part of her appeal.

  He exhaled a sharp gust of air through gritted teeth. It wouldn’t do to think about Mariana’s appeal right now. What he should do was return to the hotel, admit his mistake, and help her pack for London.

  But he couldn’t return to the hotel. He’d left her in a state of partial undress in her bedroom, and he didn’t trust himself not to finish the job of removing her corset of a trollop, her gossamer muslin chemise, her stockings, her garters, her everything. Then what? His efforts of the last decade—to keep his distance, to keep her safe—would be entirely undone.

  Not to mention he’d almost revealed the truth about the opera singer. Blast. What exactly did he hope to accomplish with that particular revelation?

  Did he want to anger Mariana into leaving Paris? Or was it to win her back?

  Ridiculous. The truth would likely upset her more than the original lie.

  Ten years ago, it had been easy to tell himself that it was the necessary choice, the best choice to ensure her safety. He’d repeated words like necessity and safety to himself until he believed them—almost. A deeper truth lay below the façade. He’d taken the convenient way out of their marriage, and he knew why.

  As his feet carried him forward across slick Parisian byways, his mind traveled back, beyond the night a lie ripped their marriage apart. It went toward the day he’d met Mariana, and she’d become an obsession from which he would never recover.

  ~ ~ ~

  The Cotswolds

  5 March 1811

  Nick was late for the most important meeting of his nascent career. Over the course of the morning, what he’d thought would be a straightforward ride from London had devolved into a tangled knot of missed turns and wrong country roads. Every mile or so, he unleashed another round of invectives against his blasted bad luck.

  Near the end of his tenure at Cambridge, a family friend, one Mr. Bertrand Montfort, had approached him at a social gathering with an interesting offer from the Foreign Office. He was riding out today to explore its possibilities. A younger son, like himself, needed an occupation, and the church wasn’t his calling. A position within Whitehall was worth investigating.

  At long last, he found himself galloping across Montfort’s Cotswolds estate, the sprawling house just ahead on the verdant horizon. Suddenly, his gaze snagged on a flurry of movement on the periphery of his vision. Some hundred yards to his right walked a young woman and a dog, skirting the edge of a copse of woods. He and his horse slowed to a complete stop while he watched this tall and willowy woman, long hair the hue of wild honey streaming down her back, locate an imperceptible trail and vanish inside the shadowy depths of the woods.

  For a full minute, he watched the spot where she’d disappeared as if he could conjure her up at will. Something about her—her decisive stride, her air of determination, or the glimpse of the transcendent beauty of her profile—spurred his heart to race faster as she embedded herself into the forefront of his mind. Who was she? Had she been a figment of his imagination? He then heard the muffled baying of a hound, and the reality of her grabbed hold of him and refused to let go.

  Even as he spent the remainder of the day closeted with the other three Foreign Office recruits in Montfort’s study, receiving the details of their first mission on the Peninsula—Napoleon hadn’t finished ravaging Spain and Portugal just yet—the knowledge that she occupied the same premises as he, completely overshadowed the proceedings. He was ravenous for any morsel of her.

  Her name was Lady Mariana Montfort. She was his host’s niece and would debut this Season. And, if he allowed it, she would be the ruin of him. No one had to tell Nick the last part.

  If he believed in fancy and whimsy, he might have thought it love at first sight. Of course, he believed in neither fancy nor whimsy. And, love, well, he didn’t believe in that either.

  When she joined the small group at the supper table, he would have sworn the air in the room became lighter, almost effervescent. He avoided looking directly at her, even as he studied her from the corner of his eye. For most of the meal, she remained quiet at the table, her attention darting from conversation to conversation and her full lips occasionally tipping up into a quick smile at a witticism.

  It was when she’d disagreed with an opinion that he’d first heard her speak. “What do you mean those dirty immigrants?”

  “Oh, the Catholics from Ireland and those Latin countries. You know, Italy, Spain, and the like.”

  Nick watched her chin notch higher as she warmed to the debate. “Lord Farnsworth, where else would you have found the cheap labor to build your mansion in Grosvenor Square?”

  “Precisely,” Lord Farnsworth replied. “Montfort, your niece certainly has the right end of the stick. Well done, good sir.”

  A pink flush crept all the way up to the delicate tips of Lady Mariana’s ears. “I’m afraid you misinterpret the meaning of my words. I was being ironic.”

  The men of the table chorused an indulgent chuckle, and Montfort patted his niece’s hand, effectively silencing any additional ironies she might voice. Nick intuited she likely had a few.

  Then her eyes slid sideways and found his. Her direct, amber gaze could have held him suspended until the end of time. In reality, the contact lasted no longer than a pair of heartbeats. But it was all he needed to know with certainty that she was as aware of him as he was of her. A lightning bolt of elation, unlike any he’d experienced in his two and twenty years, streaked through him.

  Later, after the men had finished their cigars and were rejoining the ladies in the small salon, Nick watched her slip through a crack in the exterior French doors. In his defense, he had paused. A man like him had no business following virgins into the night for he had no intention of ever marrying. Marriage and children crippled a man involved in espionage.

  Yet the hesitation had lasted only long enough for him to set down his brandy. In three short strides, he was through the doors and beneath an indigo sky dotted with a million stars, the sort of sky only possible outside the fog-bound city. He’d stood uncertainly on the stone portico feeling exposed and a thousand ways a fool.

  Where had she gone?

  Instinct guided him down the wide staircase and onto a crushed granite path lined with all manner of flowers. Montfort’s was the quintessential English garden with its riots of overgrown blooms of every hue, tonight rendered monochromatic by the stark rays of the moon.

  He’d begun to doubt his instinct when he rounded a bend in the path and spotted her some ten yards ahead, seeming to be in no particular hurry. Her ease was apparent in the relaxed set of her shoulders and the way her hand trailed idly above the flowers, allowing their velvety petals to brush the bare flesh of her palm. The way the light washed over and embraced her called to mind Selene, goddess of the moon. He should turn back before they ruined each other.

  Just as he made to retrace his steps toward the house, she called out over her shoulder, “Are you going to skulk behind me all night?”

  They were the first words she ever spoke to him. His heart kicked up a notch, and his tongue became a sodden blanket in his mouth as a series of facts occurred to him:

  He’d followed her. He was alone with her. And he wanted nothing more than to touch her and know the scent of her. His stride increased in length to catch her.

  “Do we need a formal introduction before you will speak to me?” she teased, presenting him her flawless profile. The moon above limned her features in a con
tradictory soft, yet crisp, glow. “Or are you simply shy?”

  “You must know who I am,” he called out to her back.

  “He speaks.” An enchanting giggle floated over her shoulder. “I know you are one of many young men who venture out to my uncle’s estate to discuss England’s politics. But who you are specifically, I can’t say.”

  They reached the ha-ha, and he watched her clear its low wall with ease before turning toward the edge of the woods, him following at her heels like a lap dog hungry for the tiniest crumb of her attention.

  He found himself close behind her, close enough to catch her scent of jasmine and neroli. It struck him that this wasn’t the one-note scent of a debutante. On the surface, the floral jasmine indicated the shallow innocence of her peers, but the deep bitter-orange neroli complicated that assessment and made for a more interesting conclusion. She was different. “Why did you leave the house?”

  His lips curved into a half-smile when she jumped at his words. Words so close she might have felt their dewy warmth on the nape of her neck.

  “I was hot.”

  Three simpler words didn’t exist in the English language. Yet that one simple word—hot—sent a spike of longing straight through him. “I suppose the air was a bit stale,” he rasped.

  They climbed a short rise that overlooked a small pond, wavy beams of moonlight rippling across its fluid surface. What was he doing in the woods with this moon goddess? It wasn’t too late to turn back.

  Then she spoke the next words, and he was lost.