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“And you, my dear?” Felicia said, returning to a more interesting topic. “Do you think to remain in your husband’s house, or will you return to your mother?”

“Well…just for your ears only, Lady Saville—”

“Do call me Felicia!”

“Felicia,” the countess repeated. “What a lovely name. The truth is, I haven’t quite made up my mind! For some things, you know, husbands are a necessary evil.”

Felicia nodded, although to be sure, she couldn’t think of a single one of them.

Forty-one

The Seduction

Floating through the house, up the stairs, came fragments of melody. He was playing the same piece over and over, the madrigal from Act Two, she thought.

Finally Helene got up and put on her serviceable dressing gown, tying it tightly around her waist. It was a good thing there were so few servants, given the number of nights she had spent tiptoeing around the house inadequately dressed.

The candelabra on the piano were burning quite low. They cast a pool of light that made the polished surface of the piano look clover-yellow, and tipped Rees’s eyelashes and curls with fire. She walked forward. Her robe made a gentle hushing noise as it dragged through the sheaves of paper that had again accumulated around the piano.

His head jerked up immediately. Without speaking, without taking his eyes from hers, he rose from the piano.

Helene was experiencing, for almost the first time in her life, the heady intoxication of being a siren, a séductrice. She pushed the ugly, white dressing gown from her shoulders as if it were made of flowing silk, let it catch on her elbows so the fabric framed her body. She’d left her night rail on her bed.

Rees took one step toward her and then Helene started to walk toward him. It was as if the candlelight drew her into its circle; as she came closer to him, her body turned to flame itself, heat racing up the back of her legs.

He seemed mesmerized. She slowly walked forward until she stood in the circle of light that made the rest of the room fade away into obscurity, as if there were only the two of them in the world.

Still without saying a word, he wrenched off his shirt. The swirl of air made the candles bend and dance. Golden tongues of fire swept over her body, over his chest. She couldn’t remember why she thought chest hair was so revolting, years ago. Compared to Mr. Fairfax-Lacy’s hairless chest, Rees looked ruggedly masculine, with a kind of burly strength that made her feel weak in the knees. His heavily muscled chest rippled when he moved, making her breasts tingle to be crushed against him.

She let a little smile play on her lips, and then she dropped the dressing gown entirely, allowing it fall to her feet.

The next second he was there, one arm under her neck and another under her knees, scooping her up and taking her over to the sofa. With a terrific swirl of paper, all the drafts and parts and pieces of the opera swooshed to the floor.

“I don’t want to be treated like a lady,” Helene said, but he was kissing her.

Kissing her. His tongue plunged into her mouth as if she were terra incognita, new land, and he an explorer. And she, rather than feeling any kind of revulsion, gasped and said, “Oh,” and then said, “Rees,” and then said…nothing. One of his hands was holding her head tight against his. But the other was sending trails of fire down her spine, roaming her body with hungry violence.

Helene had her arms wound around his neck, but she wasn’t a lady. Not tonight. She tore her mouth away. “How did Lina make love to you?” she said, her voice oddly hoarse.

Rees pulled her back. “Who cares?” he said before crushing her against him again, capturing her mouth and pulling them both into a whirlpool of desire and trembling sensation.

“I do,” Helene gasped, when she got her breath back. “I do.”

Rees let her pull back slightly. “It was nothing compared to you. Nothing.” The rasp in his voice told her it was true.

“It’s not that,” Helene whispered back. “I want to know how to give you pleasure, Rees. Not—not like a lady. May I touch you?”

His eyes were pitch dark in the candlelight. “Lina never touched me,” he said, his mouth wandering hungrily over her skin.

“I want to,” Helene said, her voice quivering as his mouth closed over her nipple. “I—” but she lost the thought as her body arched toward his, her hands clenched in his hair, a moan flying from her lips.

“Do you want this?” he growled, sucking harder, so that she shuddered under him, gasping, unable to speak. One of his hands curved under her body, jerking her up against the leg wedged between hers, making her cry out with pure pleasure.

But she still retained some small crumb of sanity, enough to twist suddenly in his arms and end up lying on his body. “I want to be just as wicked as you,” she whispered, raw desire speaking in her voice like velvet. “I want to make love like one of those Russian dancers who performed on my dining room table.”

He smiled at that, that sardonic crooked smile that she loved, so she had to kiss him. It was different, bending her head to him rather than the other way around, having that powerful body under hers. It made her feel even more sensual, if outrageously strumpet-like. Part of her simply couldn’t believe that she was straddling him, naked, where anyone could see her.

“Do you see whether I turned the key in the door?” she asked shakily, when he let her mouth go.