‘That could take hours,’ he said, stalking back to the bed and cupping her face before placing his mouth firmly on her own.
Her knees went weak at once. And after only a little longer, she was wriggling out of the quilt and winding her arms round his neck so that she could pull him back down on to the bed. Only the aggravating man drew back, gave her naked body a scorching look and said, ‘Hours and hours.’
The portrait. He was talking about the hours he would spend painting her portrait. Not the hours and hours she could have with him in bed.
Or was he?
That was the trouble with men like Nathan. They could say one thing and mean another. They called it flirting.
Well, no matter. As long as she didn’t believe his apparent eagerness to spend time with her was something on which she could base her life, the way she’d done when she’d been younger, she would be fine.
She returned his smile with a brittle one of her own.
‘Well, I’d better come for a sitting tomorrow then, hadn’t I?’
* * *
‘It occurred to me after you left last night,’ said Nathan as he handed her into the fiacre he’d hired to take her...well, he hadn’t told her where he was going to take her, yet. Aggravating man, ‘that you never finished telling me about those two.’ He jerked his head towards the window from which Fenella and Gaston were watching them drive away. ‘And there was something you wanted to rebuke me for, specifically,’ he said, folding himself into the seat next to her. ‘I think you should get it over with now, don’t you? Then I won’t have to live in terror of the moment when you decide to bring it up.’
‘Are you deliberately trying to provoke me?’
‘Is it working?’ He leaned back in his seat and spread his arms wide in a gesture of surrender. ‘Come on, do your worst. I can take it.’
She breathed in slowly through her nostrils, then lifted her chin and turned her head to look out of the window on her side of the carriage.
‘Not in the mood for fighting yet? Very well,’ he said, sitting up again and nudging her with his elbow. ‘But you really do need to finish the tale from which I...distracted you last night.’
‘I don’t see why. And anyway,’ she said haughtily, ‘I cannot recall exactly how much I told you.’ And she didn’t want to bore him by repeating a story that hadn’t been able to hold his attention the first time.
‘Just that they saw themselves as Romeo and Juliet, with you as both sets of parents. And how you grappled with your very natural desire to turn him off because he’d not only seduced your friend while she was foxed, but because he was trying to come between you, persuading her you would judge her for falling from grace.’
Goodness. He had not only been listening to her prattling on, as they’d made their way slowly up the Wilsons’ staircase, but had committed the whole thing to memory.
‘I was waiting with bated breath for you to get to the part where he confessed his real name, since you accused me of alerting you to the fact he’s currently using an alias.’
‘You knew, all along, that Monsieur Le Brun is in reality the Comte de...’ she frowned. ‘Well, he rattled off a very long list of names and honorifics, but I was so stunned that I cannot recall any of them now. It was the last thing I expected to learn about him.’
‘What did you expect?’
‘Why, that he was wanted by the law for some crime or other...’
‘In a way, he is, or was. His parents went to the guillotine, you know. And he only narrowly escaped with his own life.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘At one time, I played a very minor role in an attempt to make sure that the very many French émigrés who cluttered up London were actually who they said they were and not spies.’
‘Goodness,’ she said, looking at him properly for the first time since he’d made that jest about doing her worst. ‘I knew you’d got into Parliament, but I never imagined you ever doing anything useful. I thought you’d been one of those who used their position to cut a dash in town and treated the House of Commons as nothing more than a highly select sort of gentlemen’s club.’
‘Oh, no, I wanted to use my position to make a difference,’ he said bleakly. ‘It just...didn’t work out that way.’
She decided not to press for reasons why it hadn’t worked. It wouldn’t be very pleasant for him to talk about his total failure as a politician, even in such a junior role.
‘Did you find out much about my Monsieur Le Brun? It is just that he claims to have property in England and the means to look after Fenella, as well as having a string of unpronounceable titles and a claim on some land in France. If he is lying, it would be tremendously useful to know about it now.’
‘I cannot recall much about him, to be honest,’ he told her. ‘It took me some time to work out where I’d seen him before, because I met him at only one or two gatherings thrown for émigrés claiming to be friends of England.’ And he’d done his best to blot out as much of that portion of his life as possible. If he didn’t dwell on it, he’d hoped it would all fade into the mist, rather than remain fixed at the foreground in lurid detail.
‘He was only one of many that were under subtle investigation. What has he told you?’
She pouted. ‘Well, he says that he is using his work as a courier as cover to enter France and see how the land lies. See whether it is possible to have some of what was confiscated from his family restored, now that the Bourbons are back in power. He claims he dare not move about openly under his true name, in case there are still enemies lurking in wait for him.’
‘It could all be true,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of people attempting to reclaim land and titles that were once theirs. And he was certainly introduced to me in London as the dispossessed Comte de...somewhere or other. It was what made me refer to him as the man who calls himself Monsieur Le Brun.’
‘It would certainly account for his excessive arrogance,’ she huffed. ‘There are times when I can quite understand why French peasants wanted to teach the aristocrats a lesson—though not, of course, quite such a brutal one—whereas Fenella finds his tale wildly romantic. Which was what made the rest of that outing almost unbearable.’ Her lips curled in disgust. ‘She would keep looking up at him as though he were a hero stepped straight out of the pages of some rubbishing novel. But,’ she concluded, ‘whether he really is a dispossessed French count, or just a mountebank, makes no difference, I suppose.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, if he is a mountebank, and has no real intention of marrying Fenella, it will break her heart. And if he is what he says he is and does marry her, it will break up our happy little household.’ For no man, particularly not a member of the aristocracy, could stomach the thought of his wife living anywhere but in his own home. ‘Neither of which outcome,’ she said glumly, ‘particularly appeal to me. I suppose that sounds selfish, doesn’t it? And it’s not that I don’t want Fenella to be happy. If anyone deserves to marry a title, even a French one—even a French one that might not actually exist any more—then it is Fenella. For she is a lady,
