of her breasts on his coat, and the sound of her dress brushing his trousers.
His heart beat too fast and hard, heat flooding through his veins and racing downward. He wrapped his arms about her and splayed his hands over her back, over silk and the neckline’s lace edging and the velvety skin above.
He slid his hands lower, down the line of her back and along the curve from her waist to her bottom. Layers of clothing thwarted him there, but he pulled her hard against his groin, and she made a noise deep in her throat that sounded like pleasure.
Her hands came away from his face and slid between them, down over his neckcloth and down over his waistcoat and down further.
His breath caught and his body tensed in anticipation.
She thrust him away, and she put muscle into it. Even so, the push wouldn’t have been enough to move him, or-dinarily; but its strength and suddenness startled him, and he loosened his hold. She jerked out of his arms and he stumbled backward, into the wall.
She gave a short laugh, then bent and collected her reticule. She brushed a stray curl back from her face, and with an easy, careless grace, rearranged her shawl.
“This is going to be so much fun,” she said. “I can hardly wait. Yes, now that I think about it, I should like nothing better, your grace, than to have your escort to the Comtesse de Chirac’s ball. You may collect me at the Hotel Fontaine at nine o’clock sharp. Adieu.”
She strolled away, as cool as you please, down the passage and through the door.
He didn’t follow her.
It was a splendid exit, and he didn’t want to spoil it.
So he told himself.
Yet he stood for a moment, collecting his mind and his poise, and trying to ignore the shakiness within, as though he’d run to the edge of a precipice and stopped only inches short of stepping into midair.
But of course there was no precipice, no void to fall into. That was absurd. She was merely a woman, the tempestuous type, and he was a trifle…puzzled…because it had been a while since he’d encountered her kind.
He went the other way, to find his friends—or the bodies of the fallen, rather. While he arranged for their transport to their respective lodgings and domiciles, he was aware, in a corner of his mind, of a derisive voice pointing out that he had nothing more important to do at present than collect and sort a lot of dead-drunk aristocrats.
Later, though, when he was alone in his hotel and starting a letter to Clara because he couldn’t sleep, he found he couldn’t write. He could scarcely remember the performance. It seemed a lifetime ago that he’d sat in the theater, anticipating his next encounter with Madame Noirot. His notes about the performance became gibberish swimming before his eyes.
The only clear, focused thought he had was of Madame de Chirac’s ball looming mere hours away, and the fool’s bargain he’d made, and the impossible riddle he’d insisted on solving: how to get the accursed dressmaker in without sacrificing his dignity, vanity, or reputation.
When Marcelline returned to her hotel, she found Selina Jeffreys drowsing in a chair by the fire. Though the slender blonde was their youngest seamstress, recently brought in from a charitable establishment for “unfortunate females,” she was the most sensible of the lot. That was why Marcelline had chosen her to play lady’s maid on the journey. A woman traveling with a maid was treated more respectfully than one traveling alone.
Frances Pritchett, the senior of their seamstresses, was probably still sulking about being left behind. But she’d come last time, and she hadn’t taken at all to playing lady’s maid. She wouldn’t have sat up waiting for her employer to return, unless it was to complain about the French in general and the hotel staff in particular.
Jeffreys awoke with a start when Marcelline lightly tapped her shoulder. “You silly girl,” Marcelline said. “I told you not to wait up.”
“But who will help you out of your dress, madame?”
“I could sleep in it,” Marcelline said. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Oh, no, madame! That beautiful dress!”
“Not so beautiful now,” Marcelline said. “Not only wrinkled, but it smells of cigar smoke and other people’s perfumes and colognes.”
“Let’s get it off, then. You must be so weary. The promenade—and then to be out all night.”
She had accompanied Marcelline on the Longchamp promenade and obligingly faded out of sight when Marcelline gave the signal. Unlike Pritchett, Selina Jeffreys never minded in the least making herself inconspicuous. She’d been happy simply to drink in the sight of so many rich people wearing fine clothes, riding their beautiful horses or driving their elegant carriages.
“One must go where the aristocrats go,” Marcelline said.
“I don’t know how they do it, night after night.”
“They’re not obliged to be at work at nine o’clock every morning.”
The girl laughed. “That’s true enough.”
While she was quick, it was efficiency rather than hurry. In a trice she had Marcelline out of the red dress. She soon had hot water ready, too. A full bath would have to wait until after she’d slept—later in the day, when the hotel’s staff were fully awake. Meanwhile Marcelline needed to scrub away the smell of the gambling houses. That was easy enough.
The taste and smell of one gentleman wouldn’t be eradicated so easily. She could wash her face and clean her teeth but her body and mind remembered: Clevedon’s surprise, his quick heat, the bold response of his mouth and tongue, and the thrumming need he’d awakened with the simple motion of his hand sliding down her back.
Kissing him had not been the wisest move a woman could make, but really, what was the alternative? Slap him? A cliché. Punch him? That hard body? That stubborn jaw? She’d only hurt her hand—and make him laugh.
She doubted he was laughing now.
He was thinking, and he would need to be thinking very hard. Harder, probably, than he’d done before in all his life.
She felt certain he wouldn’t back down from the challenge. He was too proud and too determined to have the upper hand—of her, certainly, and probably the world.
It would be entertaining, indeed, to see how he managed her entrée into the comtesse’s party. If it ended in humiliation for him, maybe he’d learn from the experience. On the other hand, he might come to hate Marcel-line instead, and forbid his wife to darken the door of Maison Noirot.
But Marcelline’s instincts told her otherwise. What-ever his faults—and they were not few—this was not a mean-spirited man or the sort who held grudges.
“Go to bed,” she told Jeffreys. “We’ve a busy time ahead of us, preparing for the party. Everything must be perfect.”
And it would be. She’d make sure of it, one way or another.
Awaiting her was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, nearly as important as stealing the about-to-be Duchess
