'Alas,' she said, speaking low and injecting humor into her voice, 'I am being rejected. Spurned. I am unwanted, unattractive, ugly. I shall go home and cry hot tears into my cold, unfeeling pillow.'
She stretched out one hand as she spoke and set it on his leg, her fingers spread. It was warm through the silk of his breeches. She could feel the solidity of his thigh muscles.
He turned to her, and even in the darkness she could see that he was smiling.
'You know very well,' he said, 'that not a single one of those things has even a grain of truth in it.'
'Except, alas,' she said, 'for the hot tears. And the unfeeling pillow.'
She slid her hand farther to the inside of his thigh, and his smile faded. His eyes held hers.
'You are probably,' he said, 'the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.'
'Beauty can be a cold, undesirable thing, Lord Merton,' she said.
'And you are without any doubt,' he said, 'the most attractive.'
'Attractive.' She half smiled at him. 'In what way, pray?'
'/Sexually/ attractive,' he said, 'if you will forgive me for such explicit speaking.'
'When you are about to bed me, Lord Merton,' she said, 'you may be as explicit as you wish. /Are/ you about to bed me?'
'Yes.' He slid his fingers beneath her hand, lifted it away from his thigh, and carried it to his lips. 'But when we are in your bedchamber, the door closed behind us. Not in my carriage.'
She was content, though her next move was to have been to lean forward and kiss him.
He set their clasped hands on the seat between them as the carriage rocked through the darkened streets of London, and kept his head turned toward her.
'Do you live quite alone?' he asked.
'I have a housekeeper,' she said, 'who is also my cook.'
'And the lady with whom you walked in the park yesterday?' he asked.
'Alice Haytor?' she said. 'Yes, she lives with me too as my companion.'
'Your former governess?' he asked.
'Yes.'
'Will she not be shocked when you arrive home with a – a /lover/?' he asked her.
'She has been warned,' she told him, 'not to come out of her room when I arrive home, Lord Merton, and she will not.'
'You knew, then,' he asked her, looking very directly into her eyes despite the darkness, 'that you would be bringing a lover home with you?'
He was a tiresome man. He did not know how to play the game. Did he imagine that like a lightning bolt out of a blue sky she had been smitten with love as soon as her eyes alit upon him in his sister's ballroom? That everything had been spontaneous, unplanned? She had /told/ him it had all been very much planned.
'I am twenty-eight years old, Lord Merton,' she said. 'My husband has been dead for more than a year. Women have needs, appetites, just as surely as men do. I am not in search of another husband – not now, not ever. But it is time for a lover. I knew it when I came to London. And when I saw you in Hyde Park, looking like an angel – but a very human and very virile angel – I knew it with even greater certainty.'
'You came to Meg's ball, then,' he asked her, 'specifically to meet /me/?'
'/And/ to seduce you,' she said.
'But how did you know I would /be/ there?' he asked her.
He sat back in his seat. But almost at the same moment, the carriage rocked to a halt outside her shabby- genteel house, and he moved his head closer to the window and looked out at it. She did not answer his question.
'Tell me, Lord Merton,' she said, her voice almost a whisper, 'that you are here not only because I set out to seduce you. Tell me that you looked across the ballroom at me earlier this evening and wanted me.'
He turned back to face her, and she could just make out his eyes in the prevailing darkness. There was an intensity in their gaze.
'Oh, I wanted you, Lady Paget,' he said, his voice as low as hers. 'And that is not just past tense. I /want/ you. I told you earlier that when I go to bed with a lady it is because I choose to do so, not because I am unable to resist seduction.'
Yet he would not have spared a thought to bedding her tonight if she had not deliberately collided with him – or /almost/ collided, just before the waltz began. He might not have even spoken with her or danced with her, unless he had done so for his sister's sake. /No, Lord Merton/, she told him without speaking aloud, /you have been seduced/.
His coachman opened the door and set down the steps. The Earl of Merton descended, handed her down, and dismissed the carriage.
There was a certain feeling of unease, Stephen found, mingled with the pleasant anticipation of sensual pleasures. He could not quite understand the discomfort, except perhaps that they were in her home, where her servant and her companion were sleeping. It did not feel quite right.
Sometimes he despised his conscience. While he had lived an active, even adventurous life since he was a boy, he never had sown very wild oats, though everyone – including himself – had expected that he would.
To his relief, they encountered no one inside her house. One candle had been left burning in a wall sconce in the downstairs hall, and one on the upstairs landing. In the dimness of the light they shed, he could see that the house was respectable, if somewhat shabby. He guessed that she was renting it, and that it had come furnished.
She led him inside a square bedchamber at the top of the stairs and lit a single candle on the heavy dressing table. She angled the side mirrors so that suddenly it seemed as though there were many lights.
He shut the door.
There was a large chest of drawers in the room beside a door leading, presumably, into a dressing room. There were small tables on either side of the bed, each with three drawers. The bed itself was large, with heavy spiraling bedposts and an ornate canopy covered with a faded dark blue fabric that matched the bedcover.
It was neither an elegant nor a pretty room.
But it smelled of her, of that subtle floral scent she wore. And the candlelight was soft and flickering. It was an /enticing/ room.
He wanted her.
Ah, yes, he wanted her very badly indeed. And he could find no rational fault with what was about to happen here. He was unmarried and unattached. She was a widow and was more than willing – indeed, she was the one who had initiated all of this. They would be harming no one by becoming lovers tonight – and perhaps remaining lovers through the rest of the Season. They would simply be giving pleasure to each other and to themselves.
There was nothing wrong with pleasure. There was everything /right/ with it.
And there were no expectations on either side, no sensibilities to be hurt. She had been quite firm about the fact that she was not in search of a husband and never would be. He believed her. He was not in search of a wife. Not yet, anyway, and probably not for another five or six years.
But he felt uneasy.
Was it because of the rumors circulating about her? /Had/ she killed her husband?
Was he about to sleep with a murderer?
Was he afraid of her? /Ought/ he to be?
He was not afraid.
Only uneasy.
He did not know her. But that was no cause for unease. He had not known any of the women with whom he had had sexual relations over the years.
He had always treated them with courtesy and consideration and generosity, but he had never known any of them or wanted to.
Did he want to know Lady Paget, then?
She was standing beside the dressing table, looking at him in the candlelight, that strange smile on her face that seemed both inviting and scornful. He had been standing overlong close to the door, he realized, probably looking like a frightened schoolboy about to bolt for freedom.
