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She showed no sign of displeasure at his rebuff, nor did the caressing foot stop its sensual slide over his calf. The heavy silk slithered off his knee, exposing the length of his leg, and her eyes narrowed as her foot moved higher. ‘Your patron is unhappy not to receive the Chalice, then?’
‘Yes. He is not a patient man.’ He concentrated on regulating his breathing and not flinging off the bed away from her. It was what she wanted, a reaction from him, any sign she was hurting him. Men did not refuse Ana de Cordovilla, she rejected them.
‘And if you cannot retrieve it?’
‘Then I will have to repay him.’
‘Can you afford to?’
‘Yes.’ It would clean him out; he would probably have to sell some of his own carefully selected investment collection and the carriage as well if he was to retain the resources to travel, earn again.
‘You are a richer man than I realised. But better not to have to. Better by far to deliver the Chalice and to earn your fee, which must be substantial. Big enough to share, perhaps?’
‘Is that an offer of help?’ Her toes had reached his groin, slipping under the edge of the robe, the lovely taut line of her leg fully extended. Theo closed his hand around her ankle and lifted her foot away. He had no intention of gratifying her with the evidence of the effect she was having on his body. If she was angling after a cut of the fee, then she did not have the Chalice. Or was it simply a bluff to distract him while she negotiated with the count for some other pieces?
‘Why not?’ Ana curled her legs under her, a still golden figure in the candlelight. ‘We are a formidable team. I will begin by seducing Sir Ian—perhaps he knows something.’
‘We were never a team, Ana, and, no, I do not require your help. And leave the man alone, he loves his wife, they do not need your meddling.’
‘Love?’ A flicker of anger passed over her face. ‘Foolishness. What is the use of love? You are too sentimental, Teó.’ Before he could move she had uncurled herself from the end of the bed and was in his arms, her mouth hot and hungry on his, her long fingers curling around him in a blatant caress. It was so very different from the last pair of lips that had pressed themselves to his.
He made himself lie still until she lifted her head, staring down haughtily at his unresponsive face. ‘Embracing chastity, Teó?’ Her hand moved, sliding expertly down his aroused flesh. ‘Difficult, is it not? Or perhaps you are saving yourself for your virginal spinster cousin. I am sure she would appreciate your…interest.’
Theo lay still until he heard the door close behind her, his eyes on the underside of the bed canopy. He reached down and flicked the skirts of his robe back across his legs, despising himself for reacting to Ana in any way, uncomfortably aware that her jibe about Nell had focused that tense ache on her image.
My virginal spinster cousin. He had polished the gem stone a little and now she sparkled, but it was not simply her looks that had attracted him. He knew it was her humour and her stoicism and her intelligence and that gleam in her eyes when she looked at him and the trust of her hand in his and her mouth under—
‘Theo?’ Nell was inside the room, the door closing behind her, and he had not even heard her opening it. He was hallucinating—he had fallen asleep and was dreaming.
Chapter Ten
‘What the hell are you doing in here?’ Theo sat bolt upright, appalled. Inappropriate thoughts about a young lady were one thing, finding her in his bedchamber, quite another.
‘Shh! I knew you were awake, I saw the marquesa leaving.’ She perched on the end of the bed on the rumpled patch of cover where Ana had coiled her long body and regarded him critically. ‘Are you sure that it is a good thing, becoming intimate with her again?’ She blushed. ‘I mean, of course…trusting her?’
‘I—’ Theo snapped his mouth shut. He’d been within an inch of explaining that he had rebuffed Ana’s advances, being defensive as though there was something between Nell and himself, something beyond friendship. ‘What the devil were you about, watching my door? Is there a queue out there
?’
Disconcertingly Nell snorted with laughter. ‘I am sure Laure and Antoinette would be there if they dared. I was watching because I wanted to talk to you about searching the chateau.’
‘This is not the place, nor the time. Have you any idea what would happen if you were discovered in here?’
‘It would be all right, you are my cousin,’ she began, for the first time sounding doubtful. He saw her eyes flicker to the robe he was wearing and to his bare feet and ankles. All he had to do was to reach out, push her down on to the bed and use his strength and his sensual expertise and she would be his. She was too innocent not to yield, he thought, disgusted at himself, fighting to make sense of his impulses. What was the matter with him? He had just repulsed a sensual and experienced lover and here he was contemplating seducing an innocent.
Self-recrimination made him snap, ‘I am a man, you idiot girl. Do you want to end up married to me? Because I am damned sure I don’t want to find myself in that situation.’ What, he asked himself savagely, finding reasons to push her away, would he do with a wife?
He realised he could not interpret the expression in her eyes. Shock at how indiscreet she was being? Alarm at finding herself in a man’s bedchamber? She slipped off the bed and went to the door. Theo felt the breath he had been holding sigh out of his lungs, then she turned the key in the lock and padded back and sat down. ‘Now no one can walk in and surprise us,’ she said prosaically. ‘You are quite safe.’
Which was more than she was. ‘You look about seventeen,’ he said crossly. It was not what he had intended to say: Get back to your room this minute being the highest on the list. She was valiant, his Nell. But she was regarding him candidly from those wide hazel eyes, clad from head to toe in a plain cotton nightgown of utter respectability with her hair in a heavy plait over one shoulder. A greater contrast to Ana it would be hard to imagine. And yet he was aroused. Painfully, embarrassingly and inconveniently aroused in both body and mind by a virgin bluestocking with no experience except a few kisses.
‘I do not think that was a compliment,’ she observed severely. ‘Theo, listen, I have been studying the plan. It will take ages for one person to search alone, but if we do it together—’
‘And if we are found?’
‘We will think of something. Two brains are better than one.’ He shook his head, feeling control beginning to slip away from him in the face of her certainty. ‘Well, in that case I will search by myself, which is not a rational way to proceed.’
Silence. Theo regarded Nell, wondering what would happen if he took her by the shoulders and shook her. He rather thought he could not trust himself to touch her. But he believed her threat to explore by herself. And somewhere in all of this mystery was the person who had knocked him unconscious and taken the Chalice.
