Chapter Three
C aroline held the paper with the riddles close to her bound bosom so no one saw the words written there, one riddle in particular not written at all. The answer…
A fart . Oh God, her cheeks raged red. They must. Could any other riddle have come to her lips but that one? It was not one she’d known as a child though, so Felix wouldn’t know it either.
Well, Mrs. Dove Lyon had wanted her to say something salacious, and this was close. In a way. Close to posteriors, and posteriors were salacious. God, she was going to combust with embarrassment.
She pushed the gentlemen’s answer sheets back toward them across the table.
Beckwith picked up his pencil with laconic ease, but Felix wrapped his giant paw around it like he was a beast holding a knife meant to sacrifice a virgin beneath a full moon.
It would surely crack under the pressure of his fist.
He scowled as he wrote, then he and Beckwith pushed their papers toward the center of the table at the same time. She gathered them, read them, almost fell apart. She could not breathe in these bindings, and now the donkey arses had both gotten the answer wrong.
She cleared her throat. It helped shake her man’s voice into place. “The answer, gentlemen, is”— oh God, how humiliating —“a fart.”
“Pardon me?” Beckwith leaned halfway across the table, ear tilted toward her.
She would not say it again.
“What was that?” Felix asked, arms crossed over his chest, the challenge blazing in his eyes. He knew what she’d said, knew who she was. And he was teasing her mercilessly.
She would. Not. Say it. Again.
“Mr. Maxwell,” the Black Widow snapped. “Louder please.”
“A fart!” Caroline rather screamed the word, wanting to melt right through the floorboards.
Her voice was high, higher than a man’s.
She was shrieking like a fishwife. Likely, in the main gaming room, the gamblers stopped everything and whipped their heads her way.
Control gone. Her disguise penetrated. The one man she’d most needed to hide from had found her out.
At least she wasn’t the only one embarrassed. Beckwith blushed red enough to set the entire place on fire.
“Got it wrong, I fear.” Felix covered a laugh then held out a hand to Beckwith. “Let me be the first to congratulate you on your upcoming nuptials.”
Beckwith shook his head slowly. “I got it wrong, too.”
They looked Caroline’s way.
Curse it. There would be another tie breaker.
She consulted her paper. There were several more riddles left. She’d use one he knew this time, an easy one so that Beckwith would know it and Felix could pretend he didn’t. Yes, excellent plan. Now that he knew who she was, he would lose on purpose.
She pulled up tall, straightened her cravat, and—
“If you clear your throat one more time, Maxwell ,” Felix said, “I’ll dump this wine over your head.”
Mrs. Dove-Lyon gasped. “You’ll do no such thing. It’s an excellent vintage.”
Caroline swallowed instead of clearing her throat. “Here is the next”—and hopefully final—“riddle. Nancy with the white petticoat, and the red nose, the longer she stands, the shorter she grows. What is she?”
Felix rolled his eyes and glugged his wine. He set the glass back on the table and tapped the pencil on the paper, watching Beckwith.
Who appeared utterly frustrated. He ran his hand through his hair and drummed his fingers on his leg. He shifted from one side of the chair to the other and then sipped his wine. Finally, with a grunt, he slashed letters across the paper and tossed it at Caroline. “An utter guess.”
She peeked at the answer. Curse it . “Wrong, my lord.”
“What?” Felix exploded from his chair and snatched the paper up. “An old woman? That’s your answer, Beckwith? It’s clearly a candle! How could you botch up something so…” The room grew eerily quiet. “Damn…” Felix’s face drained of color. “…easy.”
Mrs. Dove-Lyon tilted her head toward Caroline. “Well?”
Caro nodded. Her throat seemed to be closing in on itself, but she managed to add, “He’s correct.”
The Black Widow clapped slowly. “Congratulations, Lord Foxton. You’ve just won yourself a wife.”
Caroline jumped from her chair, sending it careening backward and to the ground. Before the clatter finished echoing, she had bowed, clapping her hat fast to her head, and somehow used language to take her leave.
She fled to the widow’s private room, slamming herself inside it even as she heard the widow and Felix entering the hallway.
“Would you care to meet your future wife?” Mrs. Dove-Lyon said, voice muffled.
Future wife.
Caroline was going to marry Felix.
This not the plan.
She paced the room, tearing at the cravat until it hung limp, unwinding it and tossing it to the floor.
The jacket followed. The hat too. Her gown was shoved in her bag on the other side of the room, but she needed out of these clothes now .
Everything strangled her. Just as a marriage to Felix would.
Gone the waistcoat, shirt ripped out of the britches, yanked off, dropped to the floor, fingers flying at the fall—
Voices beyond the door.
“Wait, my lord,” the Black Widow said, “I know you are eager to meet her, but—”
“Tell me who she is before you introduce us.” He knew. He knew . She’d release him. Of course she would. Marrying this man was impossible.
She rushed across the room for her valise and wrenched it open as the door burst open. She grappled inside for the gown, and the door shut softly.
“Lord Foxton!” Mrs. Dove-Lyon cried. “I have not given you permission to enter my private rooms.”
“I think I know the bride. Indeed, we’re good friends.” Felix. That voice like honey. It dripped across every inch of her exposed skin. And she exposed too much of that at the moment. “Caro, I can see you. Stop pretending.”
One leg behind the screen, she froze as if his voice controlled her.
Footsteps coming closer, then stopping.
She would not look.
“Mrs. Dove-Lyon, is this my bride?”
“Yes.”
Caro squeezed her eyes tight. Perhaps she’d disappear into the darkness.
“May we have a moment of privacy?” Felix asked. Soft voices could be dangerous. His certainly was.
“Ten minutes,” the Black Widow said. “Then I return. I’m aware much can be done in ten minutes, but I’d prefer any action taken in this room to be of the dressing variety, not the un dressing kind.”
“Naturally,” Felix said, voice still soft.
The door opened and closed, and then Caroline knew by the buzzing silence growing louder and thicker around them—they were alone.
And she was half-dressed.
And the man she was now contractually obligated to marry had just reached out and tweaked a curl at her neck. His gloves were soft. She shivered. Then bolted away from him. The screen offered blessed privacy, but it did not save her from his voice. Honey, softness, danger.
Of course, the first thing he said to her in private would be about her breasts.
“It cannot be good for your breasts to bind them like that.” That’s what he’d said. What he’d considered saying and thankfully kept behind his lips: let me help you free them .
“Why did you do that?” she demanded, her voice muffled by the screen and the rustle of various fabrics.
“Speak of your breasts? Apologies. It… slipped out.” She’d been standing there in men’s britches and nothing else but the long, white binding circled round her torso, biting into her skin and pressing her flat. Or trying to. The woman was luscious .
When they’d met as children, he’d thought her a flower in a field—dainty, hardy, pretty as a weed was pretty, in a simple way.
Then one summer he’d realized prettiness could multiply, bloom over a handful of nights into stubborn beauty.
And a few years after that, when she’d asked him to give her a kiss—her first—he’d become something of a connoisseur of beauty with one fastidious rule: any form of it not like Caro’s form simply…
. lacked. It had been years, though, since his boyish admiration… adoration. He’d long ago starved it.
But one glimpse of her was like a drop of whisky to a man who had struggled to stop drinking. It reminded him of his obsession, brought it roaring back to life.
At some point over the last decade, she’d acquired the sort of curves a man liked to sink his teeth into.
Felix liked to sink his teeth into. Hips perfect for a man’s hand, smooth skin a rough tongue could worship, and breasts…
well, he couldn’t quite be sure about those, hidden as they were, but the way his cock had leapt at the sight…
if he ever saw them unbound, he might lose his mind.
“I won’t do it again.” He certainly would not. Uninterested in losing his mind. Liked to know where it was at all times. “Speak of your breasts, that is. Though”—he whistled—“someone should likely write sonnets about them.”
She glared.
He held his hands up, palms flat. “Not me, of course.” Though he could. Absolutely he could.
Caroline had ever been his weakness.
And he’d just seen her naked. New information always impacted the understanding of a whole. Seeing her half-dressed like watching a painting unfold; it revealed more of the story, changed the tone entirely.
“Not that,” she snapped. Oh, he knew that tone.
Displeasure . Her brows would be storming toward one another, her shoulders shoved back in indignation.
“Are you dicked in the nob? You answered the riddle! You were supposed to get it wrong . It’s why I gave you one I thought you would know. So you could answer it incorrectly .”
Ah, that. He’d gotten caught up in the competition, blurted out the correct answer and likely ruined his life in the same exact sentence. “A mistake, I assure you. I did mean to lose.”