Seducing an Angel (10 page)

Though her smile indicated that she was very aware indeed.

And her heavy eyelids suggested that she anticipated the main feast with as much desire as he.

He watched as her hair began to come down, and then swallowed as it all cascaded about her face, over her shoulders, and down her back. One heavy lock fell across a breast, and then settled in the valley between.

It was heavy, shining hair of a vibrant red. It was her crowning glory. For once that tired old cliché had real meaning.

He swallowed again.

“Let us go to bed,” she said.

He caught hold of the edges of his coat, just below the lapels, but her hands came up to cover his.

“No,” she said. “Only your shoes, Lord Merton.”

Her hands left his and moved to the waist of his breeches. Her fingers worked deftly at the buttons while they gazed into each other’s eyes. The flap dropped open.

“Now,” she said, moving her head forward and setting her lips softly to his as she spoke, “you are ready. Now we are both ready. Let’s go to bed.”

He thought for a moment that it was because she could not wait for him to undress. But he knew that was not it. He knew she was cleverer than he. His blood pounded, his desire was almost pain. And it had something to do with the fact that he was fully clothed in his ball finery while she was naked.

She led him toward the bed and threw back the covers before lying down on her back and raising her arms to him as he came down on top of her.

She wrapped her arms about him and moved her breasts and hips against him, murmuring to him with soft, unintelligible words as he settled between her thighs. One of her feet caressed his leg through his breeches and his stocking. With his hands and his mouth he explored her, caressing, teasing, kneading.

He felt her fingers free him from the fabric of his breeches and drawers and feather lightly over his erection. He drew a sharp breath.

She laughed softly and drew him toward the wet heat between her thighs. But no. This was
not
seduction. He was
not
a virgin schoolboy to be played with by a practiced courtesan. He slid his arm beneath hers so that she had to release him, and set his hand where his erection had been a moment ago. He explored her with light, teasing fingers, rubbing, scratching lightly, pressing a little way inside, describing small circles as he did so. With his thumb he found and lightly massaged that small spot that had her drawing a ragged, audible breath.

If he was to be the seduced and she the seductress, then she would also be the seduced and he the seducer.

There was to be equality in this encounter.

Pleasure for both, to be administered and to receive.

He took a firm grasp of her buttocks, positioned himself, waited for her to lift slightly toward him in wordless invitation, and pressed hard into her.

He heard her laugh softly as her inner muscles clenched tightly about him and her legs lifted from the bed to twine about his. He
raised himself on his forearms and looked down at her. Candlelight whispered across her face and made flickering flames of her hair, tumbled across the pillow.

“Stephen,” she said, setting her palms against the lapels of his coat, sliding them up to his shoulders.

He shivered at the sound of his name spoken in her low, seductive voice.

“Lady P—”

“Cassandra,” she said.

“Cassandra.”

And she relaxed her inner muscles and rotated her hips about him.

“Stephen,” she said, “you are very large.”

He laughed.

“And very, very hard,” she said, her eyes mocking him. “You are very, very much a man.”

“And you, my lady,” he said, “are very soft and very wet and very hot. Very, very much a woman.”

Her lips mocked too, though her breathing was not quite steady, and he lowered both his head and his body and moved in her with deep, firm, rhythmic strokes, prolonging the intense, painful pleasure of their coupling for as long as he could before releasing into her and relaxing all his weight down onto her as the blood pounding through his temples gradually subsided and he wondered if he had waited long enough to give her too the ultimate pleasure.

He was ashamed of the fact that he was not sure.

“Cassandra,” he murmured as he withdrew from her and moved off her to lie beside her, his arm still beneath her head.

But there was nothing else to say. The exhaustion of sexual satiety overpowered him and he slid into a deep, satisfied sleep.

He was not sure how long he slept. But when he awoke he was alone—and still dressed in evening clothes that were going to be horribly rumpled. His valet would scold for a month and threaten to resign and find a gentleman who had greater respect for his skills.

The flap of his breeches had been neatly raised and buttoned, he realized with a flash of embarrassment.

The candles were no longer flickering. But the room was not quite dark. The light of early dawn was graying the window and the room itself. The curtains had been drawn back.

He turned his head and looked toward the dressing table. Lady Paget was sitting sideways before it, looking back at him. She was dressed, though not in last evening’s gown. Her hair had been brushed smoothly back from her face and tied neatly with a ribbon at the nape of her neck. It fell in a thick column down her back. She had her legs crossed. One foot was swinging back and forth, a slipper half off it.

“Cassandra?” he said. “I am so sorry. I must have—”

“We need to talk, Lord Merton,” she said.

Lord Merton?
Not Stephen any longer?

“Do we?” he said. “Would it not—”

“Business,” she said. “We need to talk business.”

6

C
ASSANDRA
had been awake for a long time. Indeed, she had done no more than doze a couple of times.

She stared for a long time at the ugly canopy above her head. She must remove it, she decided, or at least find a way to cover it with a fabric that was lighter and more cheerful. She must make the house into a home—if she was to remain here, that was. If she could afford to remain here.

And she turned her head and stared at the Earl of Merton for a long while in the flickering light of the candle. How very extravagant of her to let it burn! She had not extinguished the candles in the hall or on the landing either. As if she had
money
to burn.

He slept deeply and apparently dreamlessly. He looked as beautiful in sleep as he did when he was awake. His hair, short as it was, was rumpled and had freed itself of the combing that had tamed the waves and curls.

He looked younger.

He looked innocent.

He was
not
innocent—not sexually, anyway. There had not been a great deal of foreplay, either before they lay on the bed or after, and their actual coupling had lasted no longer than a few minutes. But
he had known what he was doing. He was a passionate and accomplished lover even if a bit rushed on their first encounter.

Cassandra thought he was probably a very decent man from a decent family. For a moment she regretted choosing him. But it was too late now to choose again and to choose differently. She did not have the time to dally with several lovers before picking the one who best suited her.

Finally, when early dawn was beginning to gray the windows and make the candle’s light unnecessary, she could lie in bed no longer. She edged away from him so as not to wake him, but he did not even stir. His arm was still stretched out along the bottom edge of her pillow, the fabric of his evening coat noticeably creased where her head had lain. She leaned over him and very carefully lifted and buttoned the flap of his breeches, darting looks up into his face as her fingers worked.

He must, she thought, look quite magnificent without his clothes.

Next time she would see him. She felt an unexpected eagerness for that moment.

She got up from the bed, extinguished the candle, noting ruefully how much it had burned down, and let herself quietly into the small, cramped dressing room beside the bedchamber. Without the benefit of any light, she chose a day dress from the wardrobe there and pulled it on, after first washing her hands and face in the cold water that remained in the pitcher from last evening. She felt for a hair ribbon on the upper shelf of the wardrobe and brushed back her hair and secured it at her neck.

All the time she could feel a slight soreness within, where he had been. It had been a long time …

Surprisingly, it was a rather pleasant feeling.

He was still not awake when she returned to the bedchamber. She drew back the curtains from the window and stood for a few moments looking down at the street, which was still quiet despite
the fact that the darkness of night was fast lifting. Finally a laborer hurried past, head down.

And then she went to sit on the chair before her dressing table, turning it so that she could see the man on the bed and know when he awoke.

It amazed her that he had not woken long before now, eager to resume the pleasures of the night. Her lip curled with scorn that he had not done so. Had she played her part so poorly? Or supremely well?

She crossed her legs and swung one foot idly until he finally stirred. It took him a while to come fully awake and to turn his head and see her sitting there.

“Cassandra?” he said. “I am so sorry. I must have—”

She cut him off. She did not want to know for what he was apologizing. For sleeping so long? The morning was still so early that even the tradesmen were not in the street yet, only that one laborer, who might have been on his way home from his night work. Or did he apologize for sleeping at all instead of availing himself of her willing body as many times as the night allowed?

He spoke her name as if it were a caress.

He had spoken it, she remembered, after he had finished with her body—as if she were not
simply
a woman’s body made for his pleasure, but a person with a name.

She must be careful not to be seduced by this man. It was she who was the seducer.

“We need to talk, Lord Merton,” she said.

“Do we?” he said, raising himself on one elbow, a smile in his eyes. “Would it not—”

—
be better to tumble back into bed and talk later if at all?

“Business,” she said before he could finish. “We need to talk business.”

This was the moment upon which the whole of her future hinged.
She continued to swing one foot, careful not to increase the speed or otherwise show how tensely nervous she was. She half closed her eyes, half smiled.

“Business?” He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, brushed his hands rather ineffectually over his clothes, and attempted to tidy the fall of his neckcloth. He still looked like a man who had slept fully clothed.

“I did not seduce you,” she said, “for the pleasure of just one night in your company, Lord Merton. Especially when you slept through most of it.”

“I beg your—” he began.

She held up one hand.

“I take your sleeping so soundly as a tribute to the pleasure I gave you,” she said. “I slept through most of the night too. You are a very … satisfactory lover.” She curved her lips upward at the corners.

He did not say anything.

“I want you tonight again and tomorrow night and every night into the foreseeable future,” she said. “And I can see to it that you will want me equally as much and for at least as long, Lord Merton. Or do I not need to employ further seduction? Do you already want it?”

His answer gave her a slight jolt of alarm.

“I do not like the word
seduction
,” he said. “It suggests weakness on the part of the seduced and cold calculation on the part of the seducer. It suggests an inequality of desire and need. It suggests a puppet and a puppeteer. I have never admired male seducers because they exploit women and make of them only playthings for their beds. I have never met a female seducer, though I am very familiar with the story of the sirens.”

“Did you not meet one last evening, Lord Merton?” she asked him.

He smiled at her.

“I met a lady,” he said, “who
called
herself that. You, in fact. I would prefer to think that in your loneliness—pardon me, your
aloneness
—you looked for someone for whom you could feel the comfort of an attraction, and you found me. You did not seduce me, Cassandra. You were open and bold about the attraction you felt, something I have not encountered in any of the ladies of my acquaintance, who usually employ a whole arsenal of more subtle wiles if they are interested in capturing my attention. I appreciated your openness. I felt an equal attraction to you. I would have asked you to dance with me even if you had not collided with me just before the waltz began. I do not suppose I would have also invited you to share a bed with me quite so soon if you had not made it very clear that it was what
you
wanted, but our mutual attraction might have led us here eventually.”

He had misunderstood entirely. Which was just as well.

Our mutual attraction
.

“Yes,” he said, “I do want to sleep with you again and again into the future. But I must ask some questions first.”

She raised her eyebrows and regarded him haughtily.

“Indeed?” she said. She had somehow lost control over this business conference. She was supposed to be doing the talking, he the listening.

“Tell me about Lord Paget’s death,” he said. He was leaning forward, his arms draped over his knees. His blue eyes were looking very intensely at her.

“He died,” she said, smiling scornfully. “What more is to be said? You want me to tell you that his skull was cleaved in two with an axe, Lord Merton? It was not. It was a bullet that killed him—a bullet through the heart.”

He was still looking very directly at her.

“Did you kill him?” he asked.

She pursed her lips and looked back into his eyes.

“Yes,” she said.

She did not realize he had been holding his breath until he expelled it audibly.

“I might have found it difficult to wield an axe,” she said, “but a pistol was a weapon I was quite capable of using. I used one. I shot him through the heart with it. And I have never regretted it. I have not for one moment mourned him.”