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“You’re very…firm, Miss Vivianna Greentree. I can tell you will be a hit here at Aphrodite’s.” His eyes gleamed at her, as if he had made a joke. She felt beguiled, bewitched, and totally out of her depth. “I’m extremely flattered you’ve come to me first, but I don’t want the crop. I do want you, however. Even though your appearance reminds me of one of those tedious do-gooders who bleat about the poor.”
Tedious do-gooders! Shocked, Vivianna froze, and he took the opportunity to circle around behind her.
“I’d like to change your bleats to sighs,” he murmured, so close that his breath stirred her hair, and then his fingers brushed over the sensitive skin of her nape.
Vivianna jumped and spun to face him again, her heart beating fast, her body alive with conflicting signals. “My lord—”
“My name is Oliver, and I prefer it to all this ‘my lording.’ Say it.”
“Oliver—”
“Better. Now, I am sure we can both benefit from what I have in mind.” His dark brows lifted at her lack of perception. “Pleasure, Miss Greentree! I want to take pleasure from you, and give pleasure to you, and I am willing to pay more than the standard fee if it will buy your full cooperation.”
Pay? Sighs? Pleasure? You’re new.
With a series of horrid clicks, everything fell into place. Vivianna stared into his handsome face and knew she had made a terrible, terrible mistake, and that Lord Montegomery was about to make a worse one. “Sir, I fear you are under a misapprehension—” she croaked, but he thought it was all part of the game. The game he had believed her to be playing from the moment she entered the room.
“There is an earnest wholesomeness that shines from your eyes, Miss Greentree. Do you know, the thought of corrupting you has shaken off my boredom completely.”
“Oh, has it!” she declared. “Has it really!” She felt light-headed. Finally she understood what the hackney driver had been trying to tell her and she had failed to comprehend. She had inveigled her way not into a gentlemen’s club, but into a high-class brothel!
“Let me divest you of your cloak.”
He flicked open the fastening at her throat and the cloak promptly slid from her shoulders to the floor. Vivianna’s eyes widened, and he smiled into them. He was taller than her by a head—a surprising occurrence for a woman who was usually looking down on the men around her.
“You seem to have forgotten what you were going to say,” he said, and lifted his hand to brush one long finger down her cheek. Brief, light as the contact was, it raced through her body like one of the new railway engines.
“I know perfectly well what I am going to say,” she told him in an oddly breathless voice.
“Do you? Your eyes are telling me things, too, did you know that? Your pupils have become large and dark, and there is a flush on your cheeks. Here…and here…” He touched her again, and this time she gasped. “Your lips are soft and open, just a little. As if you want me to kiss them.”
“No, they are not! I do not—”
“Yes, they are. Soft and open.”
Vivianna felt her lips tingle, felt her heart redouble its efforts. He was so close to her now that his breath warmed her. His eyes were holding hers as if there were no one else in the world but her and him. And that was how it felt, as if they were together on a small, brilliantly lit stage and all about them was the darkness of an empty theater.
Why, this is the strangest thing! I am humming. Every part of me is so alive. Has he done this to me?
Vivianna was focused on her own feelings, but the growing ardor in Montegomery’s handsome face could not help but flatter her. Just as she had never felt this before, no man had ever before looked at her in such a way—as if he would gobble her up. She was finding it difficult to move, to breathe, to think. Her reasons for being here were blurring, while his presence had sharpened. And despite being very aware of it, she could not seem to do anything about it.
Good Lord! He is leaning in against me.
And he was. The entire length of his body was pressed to hers, from chest to hip and thigh. And he wasn’t like her at all. He was hard, his muscles so taut there was no softness to them whatsoever. His arm curled about her waist, holding her there against him, and there was power and strength in the sheer effort-lessness of it. Her breasts were crushed to his chest, and it hurt a little, and yet the pain was also very pleasurable indeed. So much so that she wanted to be held tighter, closer, nearer.
Vivianna’s breath left her lips in a soft whoosh, just as he bent his head and trailed a kiss along her temple, down over her cheek. “Be assured, Miss Vivianna Greentree,” he whispered. “I am a man who knows how to satisfy a woman.”
“I’m sure you’ve had plenty of practice!” Her voice was husky and small—a mouse’s squeak—and he rightly ignored it.
He smiled as his lips brushed across hers, light as air, and then back again, more forcefully. He ran the tip of his tongue around her own lips, as if to imprint the shape of them. Her head spun as if she had partaken of some of the champagne on the lavish table outside. And then, most shockingly of all, very slowly and very gently, he drew her bottom lip into his mouth and sucked upon it.
Vivianna felt her toes curl in her half-boots. Heat rushed into parts of her body where it had never been before, parts that she had hardly known existed. Her breasts swelled and ached, the place between her legs melted. She heard herself moan, and couldn’t help it. Didn’t want to. It occurred to her that it would be so easy, so very easy, to forget everything but the here and now. This pleasure he had spoken of was dangerous. He was dangerous.
There was heat in his eyes, making the blue burn. Did he feel this dangerous passion unfurling in him, too? As she tried to focus beyond the heat to the man within, he smiled at her with a rake’s arrogance that told her he had conquered many women, and she was just one more.
Instantly Vivianna was shocked back into sanity.
Her spine turned to steel; her head cleared. In the confined space she struggled to lift her hands and place them flat against his chest. His dreadful waistcoat felt warm from his body, and momentarily she was distracted again by the hard muscle within, and then one of the gold buttons scratched her thumb and she was sobered.
