The Sinner Who Seduced Me (9 page)

“Wellll,” Clarissa demanded, finding it difficult to finish the word.

“Yes,” James answered, standing over her with his hands on his hips. “You’re drunk.”

“In my cups?” Clarissa pressed as she attempted to cross one leg over the other, with little success.

“Yes.”

“Foxed?”

James nodded in agreement, then knelt before her and yanked at the knots in her cravat.

“Disguised?” Clarissa asked. “Though I have to admit that I don’t understand that one at all. Actually, I don’t understand ‘foxed’ either, but ‘disguised’ is by far the most mystifying of all.”

He ignored her, continuing in silence, undressing her with impersonal precision.

Clarissa found this irritating, for all the wrong reasons. Even in her inebriated state, she realized that what vexed her wasn’t the fact that a man was removing her clothing. No, what was truly needling was the fact that he seemed completely unaffected by it.

“I must say,” she began, sitting up as he untucked her shirt, “this feels nothing at all like the time you purposely provided me with far too much champagne.”

His fingers froze, the top button of her shirt caught halfway through the buttonhole. “You had two glasses, Clarissa, and if I remember correctly, it was you who nicked the champagne from your parents’ party.”

“Two glasses, is that all?” Clarissa watched as James finished with the buttons and gestured for her to raise her arms. “But isn’t that the first time that we made love?”

He pulled one arm free of a sleeve and then the other, tossing the shirt onto the floor. “Clarissa, must we speak of this?” His voice was grim, his tone forbidding.

He set to work on her boots, tugging off first one and then the other, with ease.

“I loved you, you know.” Clarissa hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but judging from James’s abrupt rise to his
feet, she’d done just that. “More than anyone before—and anyone since. You needn’t have bothered with the champagne that day. I wanted you to—”

James pulled Clarissa upright, standing her on her feet before him, and began to unwind the material about her breasts. “Clarissa, you’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

She grasped his upper arms to steady herself and looked up into his eyes. “And now here we are, thanks to a spoiled young woman’s flights of fancy, thrown together despite everything.”

“Clarissa,” he pleaded in a low husky tone, finishing with the wrap. He forcefully removed her hands from his arms, his darkened gaze fixed on hers. “There is no point in dredging up the past.”

She closed her eyes, swaying with relief at being able to draw deep, unfettered breaths with the wrap removed. James caught her and held her against him, his hands settling at her bare waist. Clarissa set her own hands on his. “I assumed that you wanted all of me too. How could I have been so wrong?”

She opened her eyes and looked at him, catching her breath at the depth of emotion that played over his face. He felt the pain too, deep down in his heart, where she couldn’t have known it was hiding.

And then he kissed her hard, his lips bruising hers as he demanded more. His tongue forced her mouth open, plunging with a possessiveness that both terrified and excited Clarissa. He picked her up, the strength of his arms wrapped around her, crushing her bare breasts against his chest. She laced her hands behind his neck as he walked toward the bed, her tongue meeting his with matching ardor.

Then he tossed her in the air and she landed, sprawling on the soft, overstuffed bed.

“Good night, Clarissa,” he uttered in a barely measured tone, his breathing labored.

Her head was spinning and she closed her eyes, certain she’d misheard him. But when she looked again, he was gone. She was alone in the beautifully decorated blue room.

For Clarissa, sketching was seeing without being seen. Touching the truth of her subject with a few quick strokes of charcoal in those moments of revelation before they retreated and hid their souls away. Beauty, in its truest form, was often stark and sometimes profane in both clarity and cut, from the local fishmonger plying his odorous trade to prostitutes hawking their wares on filthy street corners. Whether the scene was the neighborhood tabby sunning itself in the street or exhausted nannies in the park with their screaming charges—each slice of life revealed itself with flashes of insight to the artist within Clarissa.

She loved the act of creating. But even more, she craved this intimate view of others afforded through her work. Perhaps she yearned for the contact because she herself found it nearly impossible to withhold or conceal herself from others. Her own emotions bubbled up, surfacing with the slightest of provocations. Restraining her natural openness was as foreign to her as living as an elephant in India would be. And so the curiosity, to discover, to understand, deepened her passion and drove her to examine life through her art time and again.

The subject currently under her discerning eye, Mr. Bennett’s daughter, Iris, was quite beautiful, that was obvious enough, Clarissa thought. But what would their time together reveal? She took up her charcoal and bent to the work, the precise curve of Iris’s cheekbones proving
elusive. What lay beneath the exquisite bone structure? Clarissa studied the girl’s eyes, a deep blue that held … boredom, if Clarissa was correct. And perhaps some impatience, further revealed by the pursing of her heart-shaped mouth. The girl turned at the far-off, muted sound of a dog barking and Clarissa huffed. Iris murmured “
Pardon
” in a more than passable French accent. Yes, Clarissa reflected, Iris was what those in Clarissa’s set—when she was part of such a thing—would have called a diamond of the first water.

Clarissa smudged her thumb along the pencil line defining Iris’s right cheekbone, the black charcoal stark against pale drawing paper. “
Parfait,
” she declared aloud in a satisfied murmur, tilting her head to admire her sketch. Clarissa herself had been too tall, too flatchested, and far too unpredictable to have been considered the matrimonial catch of her own London Season. But it had hardly mattered to her. The frothy dresses, delicious shoes, glittering jewels—oh, Clarissa could hardly think on it without crying. It had all been for her. Not to please a man, but to please herself. And it had. She’d never understood those women who’d fought the “restraints” of womanhood. To her way of thinking, anything that accentuated her figure or face only gave people more reason to want to know her. And once they knew her, they couldn’t help but appreciate her for everything that she was—unconventional beauty and intelligence.

She looked again at Iris, impressed by the girl’s ability to keep her back ramrod straight despite the time that she’d been required to sit and pose. Iris wanted it all—the portrait that would lend her distinction, the husband that would declare her ton-worthy, the distance that England would afford between herself and her Canadian family.

Yes, Iris wanted, perhaps yearned. But Clarissa felt
sure, as she watched the girl’s foot tap out a staccato beat on the oaken floor, that Iris hardly knew herself well enough to make such choices. She was young—well trained, but inexperienced. She desired, but she couldn’t know why.

Clarissa had not been so very unlike Iris at her age. She’d felt sure of her future simply because there was no reason to question it. She would marry, become a mother, perform the duties required of her station, and so on and so forth. And then she’d met James. He was so wrong for her … yet so right. He wasn’t bothered by her moodiness—quite the opposite, actually. Their quarrels almost always led to the most meaningful of conversations, and the most passionate of encounters. He encouraged her to challenge him, something no other man had done before, nor since.

Iris had so much still to learn. Clarissa felt sympathetic toward the girl—and angry. If not for Iris and her need to catch an English aristocrat, Clarissa would be safely at home, with her mother by her side. She looked up to examine Iris’s brow line and the girl’s sharp gaze met hers.

Drat
. Clarissa’s fingers tightened on the charcoal with a viselike grip and she forced herself to continue. If she was being completely honest, she could not blame Iris, she thought. Nor the girl’s parents. After spending time—and drinking the dreadful brandy—the previous evening with James and Mr. Bennett, she had to conclude the Canadian knew nothing of Les Moines’s involvement in this scheme. Either that or Mr. Bennett was quite a good actor. Clarissa herself was rather gifted in the dramatic arts and would wager her jar of gold leaf that the man had been telling the truth rather than putting on a performance.

And so that left Les Moines to blame—and by association, James.

“Monsieur St. Michelle,” Iris said brightly while keeping her head perfectly still. “Where is Monsieur Rougier? Should he not be assisting you in some way?”

Clarissa rubbed at her jawline in a masculine fashion and wondered for a moment if the girl had the ability to read minds, dismissing the fanciful notion almost at once. “I gave him the afternoon off. There’s little the man can do while I’m sketching.”

That wasn’t entirely true. James had woken Clarissa just before dawn. After forcing her to drink a truly vile concoction that he’d assured her she desperately needed, he’d told her he would be unavailable for most of the day. She’d poked and prodded but he’d refused to cooperate, giving her little information other than that his plans involved other business.

“He seems a rather interesting chap,” Iris continued, sighing with relief and slumping for a moment when Clarissa gestured for her to relax.

Iris’s purposeful use of the common English term was charming, but Clarissa felt uneasy at her line of questioning. “
Peut-être,
” she answered vaguely, setting the length of charcoal on her drawing table. “Hardly the sort that you hope to attract though,
non
?”

Iris rose from the richly upholstered settee and walked toward Clarissa, her countenance changing as she did so. She squared her shoulders and her chin tilted determinedly. “Monsieur St. Michelle, from what others have told me, you, of all people, would not judge a person for desiring a taste of what the world has to offer.”

Ah
, Clarissa thought to herself. Even her revealing sketch could not have unearthed this surprising turn. She was torn between admiration for the girl and utter shock. And she couldn’t help but be a bit curious about just what tales of the real St. Michelle’s escapades had reached England—and whether they were even close to
being true. She suspected not. “Really,
mademoiselle
, you cannot believe everything that you hear.”

The girl laughed, a hint of wickedness in the sound that confirmed deeper layers yet to be revealed. “I believe your interest in which stories may have been bandied about rather than the state of my virtue proves my point.”

“
Touché.
” Clarissa had to give the girl credit; there was more to her than a hopeless romantic in search of her titled prince—though Clarissa could hardly encourage her to set her sights on James. Their time in Hampstead would be difficult enough without such distraction. And that was the truth. In its entirety. Clarissa scrubbed roughly at the charcoal on her fingers with a damp length of linen. “
Je suis désolé
. I cannot allow a dalliance to distract Rougier from his duties.”

Iris’s brows lowered as she contemplated Clarissa’s words, the small vee created by the finely arched eyebrows smoothing away a moment later. “Oh, I see. Well,” she paused, looking at the sketch before reaching to gently smudge the edge of one eye with her fingertip. “Sometimes these things cannot be controlled.”

She bowed politely and offered Clarissa a bright smile before turning and leaving the studio, silky golden ringlets bobbing gently about her head as she went.

Clarissa took the sketch in hand and promptly tore it in two. “I should have told her James preferred men.”

In the kitchen, James lingered at the scarred wooden table where the servants had just finished their midday meal. Though he was full, he reached for a loaf of bread and cut a second piece for himself. He slathered it with butter, drizzling honey over the top before taking a bite.

The last of the maids and footmen scraped their chairs across the stone floor and hurried out of the warm
kitchen, save one at the opposite end of the table. The man, nearly as tall as James but rail-thin, eyed the bread. Then he picked up his plate and walked the length of the table to take a seat next to James. He tore a generous portion from the fragrant loaf of bread and spread a thick layer of butter atop it.

“You’ve got everything you need, then?” the man, introduced as simply Pettibone to James yesterday, mumbled around his first bite, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed.

James suspected there were a number of Les Moines within the household, but this was his first encounter with one. The note left beneath his door last night had been simple and to the point. James would provide progress reports to his contact. The contact, already well entrenched within the household and with a network of men outside, would then pass along the information to Durand in Paris. Conversely, any news deemed necessary for James to receive would be passed through the route in reverse.