Phin’s cool look of seduction broke into a smile of undisguised delight. “That could be the most American thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s true,” Lenore said, reaching for the bottle of wine on the table and pouring for both herself and Phin as if she were the hostess and not a guest. If he intended to make the evening a cozy one, then she would participate to the fullest. “Once they reached Haskell, Papa tried his hand at a couple of different businesses. Unlike other men who tried multiple things because they failed, Papa succeeded at everything he put his hands on. He tended to get bored easily, though, and he still does, so he would start one business, sell it to someone just moving west, then start another. That all resulted in him owning one of the more successful ranches in Wyoming.”
Which, of course, made him a target for some of the more cut-throat ranchers who were causing so much trouble in the state at the moment, but the range wars were the last thing Lenore wanted to think about on what was shaping up to be a lovely evening.
“And what about you, Mr. Mercer?” she asked as they both started in on their supper. “What made you decide to publish erotic stories as a means of making a living?”
Phineas laughed. “I assure you, I don’t know what you mean,” he said, looking right at her. He was a brilliant liar, she had to give him that. The fact should have made her uneasy, but strangely, it only made her heart beat faster and made it harder for her to sit still. “I am but a humble member of the gentry,” he went on. “My father is a baronet, Sir Anthony Mercer. Our family has an ancient and dilapidated estate in Yorkshire that provides almost no income. Which has meant that my brother and myself have been forced to seek our fortunes elsewhere so that we might support our ailing father and three younger sisters, Hazel, Gladys, and Amaryllis.”
Lenore’s brow rose and her heart fluttered. She hadn’t expected Phineas to be so open or so domestic in his conversation. She’d expected the two of them to trade barbs and to tease each other mercilessly throughout supper in a way that would make Bonnie’s girls back home blush, until the moment their passions were so worked up that they couldn’t resist spilling into each other’s arms. Somewhere along the line, she’d planned to withhold affection from him until he confessed to authoring Nocturne just so that she would put him out of his misery. Now she found herself leaning closer to him, warmed by sentimentality.
“It must be difficult to be so far away from your family,” she said, fully aware that her tone had changed to something just as nostalgic as his talk of his family.
“It is,” Phineas said, shaking himself slightly, as though he, too, realized how far off course from his intentions he’d veered. “But Yorkshire is just a train ride away, whereas Wyoming….” He sent her a pointed look.
Lenore swallowed the bit she’d just taken, her throat squeezing as she did. She missed her parents and siblings terribly, and her chances of ever seeing them again were slim at best. “They write to me as often as they can,” she said, reaching for her wine.
She drank more of it than she should have in one gulp. How had the evening gotten so far off track already? She had to pull herself together and focus on her intentions if she was going to prove that Phineas was the man he refused to admit he was.
“So, has Lady Hamilton come knocking on your door, demanding blood yet?” she asked, batting her eyelashes teasingly at him and spearing a parsnip on her plate with particular ferocity.
Phineas’s expression melted back into the calm seduction it had been when she’d first arrived, something she had a feeling both of them were more comfortable with for the moment. “I don’t know what you can be referring to,” he said with an arch of one brow. “I barely know Lady Hamilton. The encounter in the Pickwick family’s hallway the other day was the most we’ve ever spoken to each other.”
“I see,” Lenore said, taking another sip of wine. He wasn’t going to crack with words alone. She would have to find a far cleverer way to get the truth out of him. “Then you wouldn’t be at all worried about her determination to bring the author of Nocturne out into the open?”
“Only in as much as an action like that might be seen as suppression,” he said with a casual shrug. “I believe that people should be free to speak their minds and to share ideas that society in general might not approve of.”
“But you approve of these ideas?” She sent him a pointed look. “Even though they are salacious to the point of being wicked?”
“If one chooses to be wicked, then it is a personal choice and should not be stifled by snobbery or false moralizing,” he said, giving Lenore the feeling that she’d hit on an issue he felt passionately about. “It is common knowledge that a good half of the people who rail against any given activity as being evil or sinful are guilty of practicing it themselves behind closed doors. Why not simply be open about one’s proclivities? If, indeed, those things are a sin, whose business is it other than the sinner’s?”
“What a fascinating opinion, Mr. Mercer.” Lenore grinned from ear to ear, wondering if she were getting somewhere. “I think you should write about that someday.”
“Someday, I might,” he replied with a wink that lit his gorgeous face with allure that had Lenore’s heart pounding.
There wasn’t a shred of doubt in Lenore’s head that Phineas was the very best kind
