style="font-size:15px;"> To compound his sins by continuing her downfall would be despicable, and he prided himself on carrying on his amours with women who knew the rules. Somehow he had managed to convince himself she was an innocent after all and, picturing her looking as confused and confounded as he had felt just now, he could not believe her the hard-eyed seductress he half wanted her to be. If only she were that siren, he could take her and be damned, but somehow he must slam the door on that heady notion if he was to be fit for company any time soon.
Could the wench’s eyes be best described as sea-green, aquamarine or turquoise? he mused. Without the abundant life behind them, they could be any of those fanciful colours. With it they were extraordinarily her own and then there was her mouth, so soft and yielding under his that he felt the rogue she thought him as his body clenched with need. He shook his head in an effort to gain control over his baser self. No sooner had he resolved to forget all idea of succumbing to Hetty’s artless charm that the memory of her tripped him up once more.
Well, it had to stop—the little witch was quite right to wish him on Miss Rashton. He lacked the funds to keep his vagrant waif in anything but penury, if he ruined her for the sake of his pleasure and made it impossible for her to stay under his cousin’s roof. Anyway, it would inevitably be more than that—once he lost the self-control he had once prided himself on, he knew he could never stop his obsession ruining her in more ways than one.
Hetty Smith was an ingenue with hard edges who could not possibly understand Virgil, he reassured himself, and marched from the room as if he was back on parade. He even managed to look delighted at the sight of the heiresses gathered in the drawing room, despite what fate and Miss Rashton had in store for him. At least he could not dwell on the third housemaid’s hidden depths in their presence, for fear of saying or doing something so idiotic even Miss Rashton gave him up as a lost cause.
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