A Game of Persuasion: Extended Prologue for the Art of Ruining a Rake (The Naughty Girls Book 3) (18 page)

She smiled and traced his stubble-covered jaw with her fingertip. “Because I want to. Why? Does it matter? Do you—do you love me?”

His expression turned grave, though to his credit, he didn’t flee the question. “You’ve touched me. I want to see you again. I beg you will not leave until we’ve settled this situation between us.”

Situation?
she wanted to cry.
What situation?

But she knew his interpretation of the evening must be very different from her own. Were they to compare situations, they’d find a large gap in their understanding.

If they even
had
an understanding.

From his bantering and the words he’d spoken just before he’d fallen asleep, she concluded he didn’t know it was her. Rather, in his mind, he had been seducing a new woman. A despicable turn of events she ought to have foreseen.

Yet there was one surprise she hadn’t expected. When he was with someone else, he was evidently thinking of her, Lucy. The woman whose name he’d called. That was better than him not remembering her at all.

But possibly confusing her with the woman beneath him wasn’t even the slightest bit comparable to the undying devotion she felt for him. Once again, jealousy welled inside of her so hotly, it was painful. If she’d somehow managed to marry him, and he’d done this exact thing, she might have had to stab him through the heart.

Her ears began to ring. Numbness tingled through her body. Time seemed to slow, as if the room itself moved in and out, her world truly turning upside down.

Dear Zeus.
She was experiencing one of her mother’s spells.

“Are you unwell?” Roman’s voice sounded far away. “Madam?” he asked again, peering into her face.

She gulped in air. Her eyes were dry, almost painfully so. She stared at Roman as if trying to see him for the first time. What she saw, however, was her reflection in his crystalline eyes. And she was a monster.

She flinched away from him. It was all becoming real. She couldn’t be trusted with him, not even for a night. Not when she could very well put a bullet through his duplicitous heart, as her mother had done to her father.

Lucy tried to clear her head by shaking it. The tinny sound in her ears finally subsided, and her body eased a fraction. After a moment, she stopped seeing her mother’s face. “I’m fine,” she said, her voice weak to her ears. “Perfectly all right.”

He loomed over her, handsome visage creased with worry. “You had a spell.”

The word struck the fear back into her. A fit. Just as her mother had suffered.

Lucy scrambled out from under him. She didn’t leave the bed, stark naked as she was, but scuttled toward the headboard. “You should go.”
For your own protection.

“But I’m worried now,” he reasoned politely, “and I want to know your name.” He grinned rakishly at her. “I hope we can do this again.”

Lucy was aghast. This man looked at a woman experiencing the worst fright of her life, and thought it a good idea to tease her about sex? Was nothing serious to him?

No, she answered, sensing it was the truth. Nothing was serious to him, nothing was sacred. And she was just now realizing…

She hated him for it.

“We can’t.” Her body still shook from her episode. How could he sit there and profess interest in furthering their consummated relationship, when he’d been lovesick over some young lady one week past, and spent an evening with her waxing poetic on wives and children just the other night?

He waved away her blunt rejection. “Yes, Bath, I know. But it’s a large city, and should I find myself thinking about you every day and night, I at least want to know who it is who stole my sanity.”

As he watched her with limpid, innocent eyes, she felt a rage build inside her. Roman, her fallen angel, felt no shame. Perhaps it was sanctimonious of her to think so, but it was true. He made promises he couldn’t possibly keep, such as this hope he was attempting to build in her when he didn’t even
know
her.

And the painting. She could never forgive him the painting.

Perhaps he did need to know who she was. Lucy drew her shoulders back, jutting her small breasts forward. With one smooth motion, she removed the demi-mask and stared defiantly at Roman, the man she’d loved from birth, it seemed, who didn’t have the slightest idea how to love
her
.

His mouth dropped open. “Lucy!” It was his turn to scrabble backward. He nearly tumbled onto the floor in his haste to leave the bed. “What the devil are you doing here?”

She was too filled with satisfaction to care much about the costs of revealing herself. She folded her hands under her breasts. “The same as you. Enjoying a good tumble.”

He gaped at her in horror. It would have been comical, her pretty Lothario naked and upended, except she was too vexed to laugh. So he
had
thought her someone else. It was written on his shocked, outraged face.

She didn’t know what to think. He
hadn’t
known it was her. The entire time, he’d been making love to someone
else
.

Jealousy consumed her until her vision clouded. Never mind it was her seduction of
him
that had provoked such a violent reaction. He hadn’t realized it
was
her. He might have, in fact, sated himself with anyone else.

And perhaps he had. Where had he been two nights ago? Three?

He was a scoundrel.

“B-but it can’t be you!” he stammered, running his hands through his hair. “You’re—you’re Ashlin’s sister!”

She shrugged, maintaining her poise. Cool. Calm. Collected. “That hardly makes me a saint.”

“I should say not,” he said, punctuating it with a horrified laugh. “Dear God, Lucy. We couldn’t have just—but for all that is holy,
why did we
?”

She toed the hem of the counterpane, the movement belying her raging emotions. “I wanted it.”

“Yes, well, I can’t argue that.”

Neither did she.

His face darkened as their situation seemed to sink in. “You were a virgin.”

She didn’t like the way he said it as an accusation. “There must be a first time for everyone.”

He didn’t laugh. “A first time, but no accident. Most young ladies’ introductions don’t include the expert use of a sponge.
Don’t
pretend you didn’t exercise caution. I know it was there.”

As awkward as it would have been to have had him point out out her contraception during their lovemaking, looking at him dead-on in the morning light didn’t make the topic easier. Heat seeped into her face. “I read about it.”

He glared at her. “There has never been and never will be an innocent in the history of time who properly inserts a sponge. I don’t care how many illustrations you’ve looked at.” Before she could go on the offensive about
his
experience with sponges, he continued, “You had help. Who was it?”

Before she could
not
answer, the color leached from his face. “Dear God. Celeste taught you.”

Her own face betrayed her. She couldn’t help the flow of her blood; it simply drained. Staunchly, however, she proclaimed, “You’d believe any bad thing about her—”

He sliced his hand through the air. “You don’t know what I think.”

The abrupt outburst silenced her. Mutely, she watched him begin to pace the sunlit bedchamber, his body on glorious display. “Ashlin will kill me.”

“I’m glad my brother’s opinion is heavy on your mind.” It bespoke his great experience that he could push aside their lovemaking and focus on anything else as more important.

Roman looked daggers at her. “You’re not the one he’s going to bludgeon to death.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him Trestin wasn’t the Lancester most likely to mortally wound him, but she didn’t. She was still too shaken by her violent fantasy to make light of it. “Trestin won’t harm you because he won’t
know
.”

“Like hell he won’t. When we tell him we’re getting married—”

“We are
not
getting married.” She pushed onto her knees. “Don’t even think it.”

Roman stopped glaring so he could stare at her as if she had two heads. “That might not have been the most romantic way to state my intentions, but make no mistake, this little interlude
will
end in us locked in holy matrimony.”

“I’m moving to Bath,” she stated flatly. “Marriage to you has never been an option. But I do thank you for the enlightening evening.”

Roman continued to gawp at her. “You can’t be serious.”

She stared mutely at him.

“Dear God, you do mean it. But you must know you’ll be ruined.”

“Not,” she said firmly, “if you don’t tell anyone.”

Indecision warred on his face. He must know what this meant to her. She prepared a lengthy rebuttal, certain she’d need every argument in her arsenal to overcome his insistence they marry.

Never had she thought he’d insist on marriage.

In the end, he didn’t. He merely went to the chair where their clothes were strewn in a rumpled heap and fished out her chemise and his stockings.

They dressed in silence. The tension in the room almost crowded them out of it; Roman always seemed on the verge of saying something, but he didn’t.

Finally, Lucy went to the door and unlocked the latch. She turned her head partway to glance over her shoulder, but she didn’t look—couldn’t look. Not at him. “I did enjoy it.”

He sighed heavily. At the first sound that passed his lips, however, she closed the door behind her.

She didn’t intend to see him again.

Chapter 12

LUCY DID, HOWEVER, need to see Celeste. While things hadn’t gone entirely to plan, she couldn’t leave Mrs. Galbraith’s house without feeling she’d triumphed in some way. Perhaps because the wool had been lifted: Roman was a wolf in wolf’s clothing, and she’d been the suicidal sheep who’d pranced under his nose.

She smiled to herself. In the end,
she
was the one who’d fooled
him
. He’d thought himself in control, and he’d been very, very wrong.

As she rapped on Celeste’s door, belatedly, Lucy remembered Trestin might be in residence here. She mustered up the courage to question Celeste’s impressive butler when he answered her knock. “Is Lord Trestin…eh…here?”

Mr. Gordo looked her up and down without comment. “No,” he said, giving her his back. “Come.”

After availing herself of the breakfast tray Mr. Gordo brought her, Lucy felt much more the thing. And just in time; Celeste materialized in the doorway not long after the tray was cleared.

“I knew you’d try to find me,” Lucy said when Celeste stared at her as if dumbstruck. “I thought I’d save you the trouble.”

Celeste’s blank expression didn’t reveal even a hint of her reaction. Nervously, Lucy forged ahead. Whether or not Celeste had seen her at the masked ball, she need to to share her victory with
someone,
and she couldn’t have succeeded without Celeste’s help.

“What an interesting turn of events last night, hmm?” Lucy asked. “Trestin and you, Montborne and me…” She raised her brows suggestively. “We’re taking the town.”

“You should not have been there!” Celeste’s usually placid expression was full of outrage.

And hurt. So she had been seen, though surely not by Trestin, or else her brother would have dragged her bodily from the room.

Lucy took stock of the situation. Celeste had seen her, yet she seemed to be keeping her secret, which was why Lucy was confused. She’d done nothing more than take the next step in the progression she and Celeste had worked out. Why was it cause for concern?

“No one knew it was me,” Lucy insisted. “Even Trestin looked right at me and didn’t recognize me.”

Celeste gave her a look of incredulity. Her red hair flamed about her shoulders and dark circles marred the skin beneath her eyes, bespeaking her own sleepless night. “How did you even get in? You didn’t have a voucher. You shouldn’t have even known about it—”

“Why,” Lucy began, brushing aside the fact she’d been caught in an act of petty theft, “everyone who is anyone knew about Mrs. Galbraith’s little party. It was to be quite the scandalous affair.”

Yet she couldn’t squelch the feeling Celeste was right about this, at least. She ought to have given Celeste a warning—if she’d told her friend in advance, perhaps her brother wouldn’t have been encouraged to attend, thereby allowing Lucy more time with Roman before they’d…