Chapter Eight
Where a sated woman presses her luck.
Percival Everard Trentham, Earl of Merevale—called tipsy by some and pickled by others, though neither was remotely true—seemed to be in a foul mood.
His frown had been firmly in place since Upper Street, deepening as they rattled along City Road, and showing no sign of lifting by the time his opulent carriage turned west onto Oxford Street.
“Female trickery,” he muttered, rapping his knuckle against the rain-streaked windowpane. “I realize this now that my head has finally stopped spinning.”
Isabella questioned how dishonesty had been laid at her feet. Could he truly fault her for seduction when she was only just beginning to understand its power? Undeniably, the kiss (and everything that followed) lingered like nothing before it, shifting the axis of her world much as it had his.
She smoothed a fingertip across her lips, the ache drifting into that newly awakened place, and wondered how she might persuade Ever to give her the “more” he’d promised before his head settled decisively between her thighs.
“Stop,” he ground out. “I’m barely holding my ground as it is, and your quivering little sighs are not helping.”
“I can see that,” she murmured, her gaze dropping to the straining length beneath his rumpled trouser placket.
Much to her dismay, when she’d wanted to touch, he’d only let her look.
With an oath, Ever grabbed his beaver hat from the seat and set it atop his lap.
Isabella settled back to study him, aware their time together was drawing to a close.
Lamplight struck him in intervals from the swinging lantern, flashes like stolen glimpses revealing him piece by piece before slipping away.
His hair was tousled from her fingers, wisps of grey at his temple lending him an air of hard-won elegance.
He would have been displeased to know the evening had only deepened her attraction. His complexities, like hers, were many.
What an intriguing puzzle.
For one, he was honorable. Not during their encounter, when he’d seized the opportunity to give her the most astonishing pleasure she had ever known, but afterward, when remorse gentled him.
He’d wrapped her in her spencer with deliberate care, kissed her hand, her cheek, her lips, then drawn himself away.
His awkward restraint, even as he thrummed like a tuning fork with bottled arousal, endeared him to her as nothing else could.
Second, he was fascinating. The men in her experience had been single shades of color, easily drawn and quickly exhausted, while Everard Trentham was a spectrum.
Impatient, yet capable of great kindness.
Sharp-tongued, yet exacting in his tenderness.
World-weary in manner, yet stirred to intensity by the smallest provocation, proof his calm demeanor concealed far more than it revealed.
Third, he was the most splendid man in England.
Tall and dark, with unnervingly intense green eyes that fixed on her as though she were the only thing in the room, he invited an unwise question: what might it feel like to wake beneath that gaze?
She’d been decidedly taken with him since barging into his office.
Sleeves rolled high on his forearms, shirt unbuttoned low enough to invite trouble, this was more the man he was in private than the one he presented to society, and her thoughts slipped back to that earlier, dangerous question of how he might look when undone.
She knew he believed himself too old for her, a conviction she found wholly unconvincing.
How could she make this false courtship real?
“I wish I had more junior agents like you,” he grumbled, flicking aside the curtain to stare into the night. “I feel unnervingly seen.”
Ah, I’m getting somewhere.
“Is that what you do?” She traced the seam of her glove, giving him reason to think she wasn’t overly interested in his answer. “This game you play.”
His gaze tracked back to her, smile grim. “For another thirty-seven days, yes.”
“How long—”
His labored exhalation cut her question short.
He reached inside his coat and drew out a flask.
The signet ring—clearly an item that unsettled him—winked in the lamplight.
He’d removed it from his pocket when they first entered the carriage, stared at it, then finally jammed it onto his pinkie.
“I can’t tell you. I’m obviously mad to tell you anything at all. Proof my retirement is a wise choice.”
Isabella let the charged moment level, a decided skill. He was right; she would have made a formidable spy. “We can talk about it. They’re up top,” she said, meaning her maid and the ever-watchful Brick. “Lottie is quite taken with your manservant. A little rain won’t keep her away.”
He laughed and slouched lower in the seat, sending his hat tumbling to the floor. “Though you may not guess it to look at him, my manservant has a way with women,” he murmured, gazing at her over the beaded rim of the flask. “She was shivering when she arrived, but not when she left.”
“Like me,” she said evenly, refusing to look away. If he wouldn’t bring up what had happened, she would.
He sipped calmly, his eyes glinting in the guttering light. “Hell’s teeth, you’re terrifying. I feel for your brothers.”
Isabella would not take the bait or let him goad her into forgetting her purpose.
They had scarcely ten minutes before his carriage delivered her home.
“I imagine when you marry, Lady Merevale will be the serenest belle in the parlor,” she said, giving the loose thread on her sleeve a sharp yank.
“Pouring tea without a single dribble. A countess possessed of the finest manners in England. A proficient watercolorist, a gifted conversationalist. No doubt exquisitely beautiful as well—calm, flawless, admired. The sort of woman no one ever dares accuse of being inconvenient.”
“My countess sounds dull as shite,” he whispered. “And who called you inconvenient, sprite?”
She flicked the question aside with the scrap of thread, letting it drift to the floor. “Who hasn’t, you mean?”
He stretched his long legs out, his boot intentionally bumping her slipper.
“I’m a lowly second son who entered service after my family’s finances collapsed, the grander burden falling to me when my elder brother—conceivably the cruelest bloke I’ve ever known—succumbed to the French pox, leaving me a title and not only my father’s debts, but his as well.
That’s why I’ve gone into trade with Weston and the Duke of Mercer.
I inherited a country home in Derbyshire, which I admittedly adore, but the responsibilities, the tenants, the village—”
He sighed and let his head fall back against the velvet squab. The woeful shrug that followed ended in a grimace, a reminder of his injury. She hadn’t thought of it once since he dropped to his knees before her.
“You could marry someone with a sizable dowry,” she whispered, the vision of his forearm tensing as he slid his finger inside her flaring hot behind her eyes.
Isabella stopped herself from covering her stinging cheeks by force of will.
He would know—he simply would—that she was thinking something improper.
And, heavens, what these memories were doing to her. She felt softened and overheated, like wax held too near a flame.
She’d not imagined desire like this until him.
She tried again while he brooded. “You would have your choice of women in the ton.” With his title and ruinous good looks, even with scarce funds and a questionable reputation, he would have his pick. Men truly had all the luck.
“I can’t continue these charades. I’m exhausted,” he said at last, twisting his signet ring on his finger. “If I marry, it must be the one honest thing, lest I be lost to the lies.”
Isabella turned to the window, her heart sinking. Despite the considerable settlement—an open secret—the Earl of Merevale had not once considered turning their deception into something real. Which vexed her.
And the only thing worse than anger was boredom.
Isabella was dangerous in either state.
“Lord Fitzhugh is in a similar situation.” She chased a raindrop down the windowpane with her fingertip, not daring to look at Ever while she spun one of the webs he’d mentioned earlier.
“He remarked on it to Penny at a musicale last week, discreetly, of course. He questioned her about my association with you, imagining like the rest, that it’s a candle soon to be snuffed out.
The funds attached to me interest him, no doubt. ”
Isabella almost smiled—almost—when his bootheel struck the floorboard. “Why should you care what Fitzhugh thinks? I thought you didn’t wish to marry.”
She traced another raindrop down the glass. “I don’t. But relationships, as you’ve shown me this eve, can be…more.” She laughed softly; not all the pretense was false.
She was beginning to understand the appeal of pleasure without promises.
The Earl of Merevale bridged the distance in a heartbeat, and Isabella gasped.
He braced his fist against the wall above her and leaned in, his mouth inches from hers.
“I’ll be damned before you throw yourself away on Fitzhugh.
You won’t find what we have with just anyone, sprite.
Trust me on this. Must I add him to the list?
I’m visiting Ireton tomorrow morning to close the deal there. Shall I pay Fitzhugh a call as well?”
His forcefulness drew her, igniting something she ought to resist. Catching him by the nape, she pulled him into a kiss.
He cradled her cheek, thumb firm at her jaw, angling his mouth over hers. Their short, sharp moans filled the carriage, breath turning heated and close. The kiss strengthened until it felt dangerously easy to forget everything else.
Then the carriage hit a rut, jolting them apart.
His gaze was tight with passion, his irises a potent green when they met hers. “You’re an envoy of enviable skill, Isabella Anstruther-Colbrook.”