Chapter 3 #2
Her timing here coincided with the Duchess of Argyll’s visit this evening. There were no coincidences in life.
In one swift motion, Argyll spun the lady, and trapped her between him and the Doric column. “Who. Sent. You.” He ran a predatory gaze over her.
Not even a flicker of fear crossed her ghost-like face.
At her silence, he propelled her against the pillar with force enough to shock, but not harm. “Diggory?”
Her eyes, speckled with silver, caught a sudden freezing light. Her gaze went sightless.
She sagged.
Cursing, he caught her by her shoulders to keep her from her faint.
The Devil himself, Diggory, had her in his snare.
“It is him,” he said sharply.
Her legs remained limp, leaving her already insignificant form completely weightless.
“It makes sense,” Argyll jeered. He shook her harder. “A creature with the look of death should be compelled by a man who kills for joy.”
A sweat popped up on the lady’s slender arms. Her breath came in wild, rapid spurts. Dark emotion ravaged her sightless eyes.
Such terror could not be feigned. And this chit didn’t have it in her to dissemble.
Argyll ran his palms in slow, smoothing circles along her arms. Dread slowly eased from the lady’s eyes.
Strength restored Miss Kearsley’s spine, returning the lady’s stiffly erect carriage.
“How did Diggory get his hands on you?” This time, he employed his silken rogue’s tongue to extract information he required.
“He has…not.” The lady blinked slowly. “I do not know a Diggory.”
Argyll gave her a look and then laughed. “You expect me to believe you’ve had that visceral reaction to a man you’ve never heard of?”
“I’ve he-ard of him. His name only.” Worry tipped he space between her high-arched eyebrows. “Madam Pomfret mentioned him.”
“Madam Pomfret?” he asked bluntly.
“My mother’s fortune-teller.”
“Your—” Argyll caught himself. “You know what?” The whacky family would have a fortune-teller. “Never mind.”
“Madam Pomfret helps me sharpen my skills.”
This time, he couldn’t call it back. “Your skills.”
“I see things. The…future.”
He drained the last of his champagne.
Done. He would not indulge this further. He set the empty glass on the stone stand beside the brass urn overflowing with roses.
The calm nothingness of her voice broke his patience.
Catching the peculiar chit’s delicate wrists in his larger, exacting ones, he pinned her skinny arms on either side of her. “You won’t quit.” A quiet, harsh laugh escaped him.
“I can’t.”
“Trying to trap me, are you?” He scoured her face for a hint of something…anything. The face-framing tendrils couldn’t even favor this one’s stark features with so much as a curl to soften her. That black fringe just above her black, prominently arched eyebrows added to her strangeness.
He tightened his grip upon her. “I’ve faced more women than can be counted of the same aspirations. Not a single one of them were as desperate as you to be my duchess.” He sneered. “But then they were exquisite works of art, bloody goddesses. The same will never be said of you.”
“Certainly not.”
How bloody matter-of-fact.
His apprehension soared. “Be warned, Miss Kearsley,” he layered ice within his warning. “You are playing with fire.”
A flash of unease flickered in her naturally saucer-round eyes. “You won’t hurt me.”
He chuckled. “Are you certain?”
The oddity searched him the way she might a map with an X drawn upon it. A tiny crease pulled between the lady’s jet-black eyebrows. “No—”
“You have at least some sense.”
“I do not believe you would hurt me.”
“I stand corrected,” he muttered.
Argyll traded tactics. “I do not play games, Miss Kearsley.” He placed his mouth near her sparse mouth. “That is, outside the bedchamber.” He curled his lips into a lascivious grin that would send any lady into a dead faint.
Any sane one, that was.
The Season’s strangest wallflower remained unshaken. By Argyll. His warnings. His touch. Not just unshaken, but bored.
This one didn’t give so much as an inch.
Her indifference stoked something primitive inside.
No one held dominion over him. He’d just humbled a duchess. A virginal wallflower without the sense God gave a turtle didn’t stand a chance. Certainly not the Lady in Black.
Argyll slackened his grip but kept her imprisoned in his arms.
He placed his mouth near the sensitive place upon her neck that drove all women wild. “That is what you want then,” he purred, bringing his lips in a deliberately accidental kiss. “The wallflower wants to be tupped by London’s most notorious rake.”
The natural uptilt of her snub nose wrinkled. “I’ve already told you what I want.”
Her reply contained a frown.
At last, some emotion from her.
Not, however, the anticipated, desired one—lust.
“And it is not to be…tupped by you.”
Argyll stiffened.
“Or any man,” she murmured, patting his arm gently.
Thunderation, the bizarre chit sought to soothe his pride?
Let us see how far she could carry on this way.
“Ah,” he breathed against the hollow of her throat.
“How could I forget? Miss Kearsley yearns to be my bride.” He lightly sucked at the dark vein along the deliciously long curve of her neck.
Alternating between his tongue and his lips, Argyll traced that surprisingly tantalizing blade of blue.
Lust stirred. For the first time and what would certainly be the last, in his mind, he stripped the lady bare. She’d be just as oddly white all over, with more of those veins on vivid display, he’d follow to what delightful places.
He bit her harder than intended.
His breathing came slightly faster.
It’d be folly to mark the lady. Why, with what she’d revealed, he likely had more than a foot into a marriage trap. He’d never had one like her before.
“I need you, Gregory.”
Masculine victory over this woman who’d, until now, revealed nothing sent his lust climbing.
He’d cracked her unfaltering defenses. Argyll buried his smile against her throat.
“Yes, you do.” He filled his hands with her small, perky breasts.
“You need me. Let me help you.” Through the lacy fabric of her lace and silk bodice, he teased her nipples.
They sprung to tight, sizeable peaks. How interesting.
Such big tips for breasts so small they didn’t even fill his palm.
Argyll dragged his thumbs along her nipples, playing with them. Teasing them. Teasing her. And surprisingly enjoying his diversion very much.
A fresh wave of lust hit his randy cock.
Argyll didn’t dally with innocents. They were too much work, too prone to tenderness and weeping and all manner of inconvenient expectations.
He’d never taken a virgin and had little appetite for breaking a woman in.
But Miss Kearsley, a known wallflower and a woman who knew her mind, deserved a measure of fun in her depressingly dull, grim life.
His breathing slowed, a touch ragged with wanting. “You needed only to say what you yearn for, Miss Kearsley.”
“Daria.”
He brushed a kiss at the angle of her jaw. “Daria.” Fine. Whatever pleased the wallflower.
“I believe you misunderstand. I do not want to have relations with you, Gregory. I need to marry you.”
Argyll stilled, lips paused at her chin. He lifted his gaze.
The lady’s decidedly un-heaving bosom shifted beneath a careless, almost apologetic shrug.
He blinked. Once. Twice.
By God, she was…she was…unmoved?
With a low curse, he tore his hands from her and retreated several steps, as though distance might restore sense. “Your attics to let, madam,” he whispered, appalled.
She tilted her neck—the very neck he had worshipped with deliberate, well-honed attentions—bloody mystified over what he was on about.
Shaking his head, Argyll proceeded to leave.
Here he had been, executing a seduction perfected over years of indulgence and sin, and she had met it with all the enthusiasm of a woman mildly inconvenienced.
At the quiet slap of her slippers behind him, he lengthened his stride.
Persistent little devil.
She darted around him with surprising speed and came to a halt directly in his path. “Stop.” Her palms lifted, an unmistakable command.
Argyll bypassed her.
“Blast it, Your Grace, would you just…stop? Please.”
The lady’s frustration stretched across the terrace.
Your Grace.
Pleading?
That first real display of emotion proved particularly intriguing.
And, oddity that she may be—no, was—Miss Daria Kearsley exhibited a remarkable poise and strength that stirred even Argyll.
Which recommended her, as Argyll wasn’t impressed by anyone and couldn’t dig forth a memory where he had been.
If he were the kind of gent whom those admirable traits mattered to, then he’d give her an actual consideration.
Slowly, he turned with predator’s steps. A familiar rake’s grin curved his lips out of habit alone. This one never met his eyes. Something colder, far less charming, stirred within him. “Trying to trap me, are you, my aspiring duchess?”
“Never. I would not want us to marry like that.”
Too add to Miss Kearsley’s believability, her voice didn’t contain any actual fervor.
“There is at last something we can align on,” he muttered. “neither one us wishes to wed the another.”
The steady, perceptible unease deepened. Argyll searched the porch.
By God, let the lady’s big brother catch them. Argyll still wouldn’t wed the dotty wallflower.
“That is encouraging, Gregory. We’re already coming to think in accord.”
He paused to recall his last words. “Is that a jest?” Disbelief crept his voice up an octave.
“Not a good one. But yes.”
Folding his arms at his chest, Argyll stared icily back.
The lady took this as the invitation it wasn’t. “I understand this is all highly—”
“You may put your hands down, Miss Kearsley.”
Her huge eyes nearly swallowed her face. Which was good. The chit desperately needed some color. Argyll could list no fewer than one thousand things he’d do to the lady to make her blush every shade of pink to red.