She walked toward him slowly, listening to her body, walking almost on tiptoes because it felt right and because her legs were still trembling a little from the kiss. She walked to just before him, and paused.
“Garret,” she said. And raised an eyebrow.
“I think—you have mastered the art,” he said. His voice was strangled, dark, and she loved that.
So she tightened the cord around her waist even tighter, and sure enough, his eyes dropped to her breasts.
“Josie!” he said sharply.
She grinned at him. “You did say that men would slaver at my feet, didn’t you?”
“Not old men like myself,” he said, with a reluctant bark of laughter.
“I believe I shall stop being doctrinaire about age. Look how much I have learned from you.”
“Nothing that you couldn’t have seen in the eyes of men of any age,” he said. His voice had that low rumble again.
She smiled at him, a little crooked smile. “We’ll see whether I’m able to bamboozle these men with my new walk.”
“And no corset.”
“No corset,” she said, sighing.
“None of which has anything to do with the beauty of your face,” he said, turning up her chin with his hand.
“It’s too full,” she whispered.
He rubbed a slow thumb down her cheek. “Not all women were designed to be angular. Your cheek has the slightly sulky, round beauty of a Madonna.”
“Annabel said that too,” she said, feeling a little breathless.
“Your eyelashes are sinfully thick,” he went on. “And your mouth—” He stopped. “I’ll leave your mouth to the tremulous twenty-year-olds whom you desire so much.”
Josie digested this while looking at him. Of course he’d swept through the ton like fire through straw. Thinking of the discontented, skittish faces of most of the matrons whom she’d met in the endless round of debutante balls comprising the season, she would have been surprised if there was one among them who didn’t fall on her back at his approach. It gave her a peculiar sinking feeling, as if she were in danger of committing some sort of folly that she hadn’t thought possible.
“Garret,” she whispered.
His straight black brows snapped together and he dropped her chin. “Better not call me that in public, little witch,” he said, turning away. She watched him quickly pulling the pink dress forward. His skin was brown and the curved muscled shape of it made her feel queer. In danger. So she flashed back: “I hope you’re not afraid that people will think I’m hankering after you?”
He pulled on his shirt, and to her faint—but quite obvious—pulse of disappointment, a flutter of elegant white linen fell to his waist.
“God no,” he said, turning and giving her a wry smile. “I’m afraid they’ll think I’m hankering after you.”
Josie’s heart beat loudly in her ears. “Well, that would never happen.” His jawline was just faintly shadowed with beard. He looked like a black-browed pirate, although even as she watched, he tamed the shirt, cramming it into the waist of his trousers.
“Don’t watch me,” he muttered to her, pushing the shirt down so it didn’t leave a bulge in his knit pantaloons.
I’d like to do that, Josie thought to herself. But she was sure the thought didn’t show in her eyes. “It’s interesting,” she told him. “Who knew that it was so hard to control a shirt?” He wrenched on a jacket. It sat perfectly across his shoulders, turning him in an instant from a bold, derisive pirate to a sleek earl whose midnight blue jacket echoed his insolent blue eyes. Suddenly, instead of radiating a dangerous sensuality, he looked like an assured member of the world’s greatest aristocracy.
Josie sighed. It was a painful transition to watch, the more so because of her vivid knowledge of all the women who had seen Mayne turn from private to public, from hers to no one’s, and that in the turn of a coat.
“Well,” he said, “I’d better sneak you back into your house. Shouldn’t be too difficult.”
Not for someone with his experience sneaking in and out of houses, Josie thought. But she kept it to herself.
Her hair was down her shoulders and tumbling down her neck. She bent to pick up the corset, but he laughed and snatched it away, tossing it against the wall. “You’re not wearing that again. You go out tomorrow and buy yourself gowns that celebrate the body God gave you, rather than shaping you into a different one, do you hear?”
Even pale with exhaustion and champagne, hair tousled, jaw shadowed, he was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. “I will,” she said, filing the memory away. She walked past him.
“Go to that modiste Griselda uses,” he said, catching her hand.
She looked up at him inquiringly. “Don’t call you Garret. Don’t use my corset. Do use Griselda’s modiste. Do walk as if I were a man in skirts. Do consider men over thirty, but allow the younger ones to slaver at will.”
Mayne stood looking at her, feeling as if he’d been knocked off balance. Josie was so beautiful, with that cloud of witchy hair around her shoulders, her beautiful curved, laughing mouth and her intelligent eyes. “Christ, you’re breathtaking,” he said.
He could see in her eyes that she didn’t believe him. There was no question, though, that a decent gown would take care of that. If she would only prance into a ballroom wearing his dressing gown, the male part of the room would fall to their knees. He kept having to make himself stop looking at the way her breasts swelled seductively under the heavy silk.
“Will you be coming to the Mucklowe ball at the end of the week?” she asked him.
What was there about Josie that made a lump rise in his throat every time she looked anxious? “Mucking around with the Mucklowes,” he said, putting a hand on her back to lead her down the stairs. “I suppose I’ll be there, if Sylvie wishes to go. She has eclectic tastes when it comes to the ton.”
Josie reached the bottom of the stairs and waited for him. “It would be wonderful if you could be there.”
“If you want me to, I’ll be there.”
Her face eased into a smile. Those crimson lips of hers were dangerous. And he was a man in love with another woman.
“Sylvie and I wouldn’t miss it,” he assured her. And then took her back to her house. It was amazing how easy it was to return her to her room without being seen.
All those affaires of his had taught him something, he thought as he wandered back down the street toward his house, having sent his carriage trundling off before him. There was a thick fog settling as dawn came up, and he felt like walking. The trees looked blurred and furry, as the fog drifted in, until he found himself moving along in a small room walled by cloud.
It was a remarkably lonely feeling, as if he carried a small patch of ground with him, and all the rest of the world was unpeopled.
10
From The Earl of Hellgate, Chapter the Sixth
I told her that I would like to pass all my Nights with her, and she responded that she had only Days to give. I taxed her with being ungrateful to never have lent me a single one of her nights, but wasted them in the solitude of her bedchamber. She said…
G riselda took the news that Josie intended to visit her modiste that very morning and order an entirely new suite of clothing extremely cheerfully, although she had to miss a promise to ride in Hyde Park. Josie noticed that she was extremely vague about who she had promised to meet.