But at the entrance to the conservatory, he turned to face her. Swathed in golden moonlight, he appeared to be gilded as he smiled. “Do not forget your slippers, Mademoiselle of Bare Toes.” He patted his frockcoat pocket. “I keep your stocking ribbons. Claim them Friday when we dance.”
#
Long after he hobbled away, Inès sat, remembering his affection and ruing his boldness to offer it.
She frowned, her traitorous pulse racing, her lower lip tingling from his touch. Her lack of any fond regards these past two years had not bothered her. She’d accomplished so much. Done it quietly, too, with only the aid of a good runner.
Now she had no assistant. No accomplice. No need.
I am alone in this.
A good thing. No one can know how I am so bound.
But by that man’s arrogance to caress her, he made her yearn for more loving ways. A bad thing, that. She did notwant. She did not pine. She did not need…not from any man.
She claimed a solitary life to keep her conscience clear—all others near and dear to her, innocent. What she planned was not for anyone else to know, to share, to advise or consent. Nor was it anyone else’s purview to debate.
And as for him? His allure?
Oh, he was the epitome of man. Dashing. Suave. So perfect of face, so muscular of form, that her body had tightened at his gaze—and rejoiced at his touch.
But she did not know him. She knew nothing of him. His background. A lord, whatever that meant. Here in England, everyone was a lord. Or those she’d been introduced to, at any rate. She did not wish it otherwise.
But she had a purpose to her days. A mission that meant her nights were not to be taken up with rendezvous. Affairs were not in her plan. They took time. They were complicated. They were ultimately very messy. And she was not a woman to tarry.
A shiver shook her frame.
Halsey had left her. Gone back to the party. Wise of him not to push her.
Ah, mais oui,she would not think of him until she learned more about him.
Besides, so many other men existed who might offer potential for her plan. She had to investigate them.
Furthermore, she had no reason to focus on one man so soon since her arrival. She would, as her friends had encouraged her, enjoy herself.
Too bad that could not be with so luscious a man as he, whoever he was.
Chapter Two
“What did you think of them all?” Augustine, Lady Ashley—or rather Gus, as she was better known to her friends—snuggled into the red leather squabs of her town coach, the Carlisles’ dinner party over. The lady was Inès’s friend of many years and a beauty with black hair and green-gold eyes. She’d given birth to her third child, a boy, in late September and had insisted that she would attend this dinner party to help introduce Inès to Society. She had brought baby Phillip and his nurse with them and was eager to get back to their accommodations in the hotel in Richmond proper. Kane—Lord Ashley, Gus’s husband—had been unable to travel up from London for this evening’s event, and so it was just the two ladies in the cab. Outside, however, Gus’s ever-present guard rode beside the carriage. “Meet anyone you found intriguing?”
Inès rolled a shoulder and fingered the collar of her pelisse.The man with the limp?She should not ask, should not want to learn more. “I enjoyed meeting Giselle’s new husband.”
“Carlisle. A good man.”
“What is he? Comte? Vicomte? Chevalier?”
“A marquess, as we say here, and from a long line. I know not how many preceded him. Kane will know.”
Kane was an earl in his own right, and as an Englishman who had grown up surrounded by his peers, he would know these technicalities.
“Giselle is happy,” Inès said with the warmth that suffused her. “She deserves it.”
“And with a child to come, she is ecstatic.”
“The loss of her little daughter three years ago was a tragedy. That child was her saving grace after all her challenges with her despicable husband and, later, Vaillancourt in France.”
René Vaillancourt was the deputy to Joseph Fouché, head of French security. Both werescourges upon mankind, as they spied and seized Frenchmen off the streets and invaded their homes. All for the despicable offense of resisting the new emperor, Bonaparte, and his band of supporters.
