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‘Absolutely not! I have already accepted several invitations which I have no intention of letting slip through my fingers. Besides, if you withdraw from public so quickly after that little incident, it will only make people think the worst. You are just going to have to weather it out.’
Henrietta grimaced. She had agreed to go along with Lord Deben’s plan in the first place because she worried about what effect her Season in London would have on the rest of her family.
‘I suppose you are right. I shall attend all the events you wish me to attend, of course.’
‘That’s the spirit. And when you encounter Lord Deben the next time, you must exercise some restraint. If he should approach you, you must just be polite. Nothing more.’
‘Polite,’ she echoed. Would she be able to manage polite? She had been so used to speaking her mind with him that it would be very hard to draw back and treat him just as though he was anyone.
But she would try. She had to try. She was already far too tangled up with him, emotionally. Perhaps this would be the way to break free of the insidious hold he had over her. If she kept on behaving politely and with distance, perhaps eventually she would start feeling polite and distant, too.
* * *
‘You do realise,’ he said two evenings later, ambushing her as she exited from the ladies’ retiring room, ‘that this show of coldness on your part will only make me even more determined to storm your citadel?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Being cool and polite only had so much effect on Lord Deben. He had blithely ignored her show of hostility on the first night after the fan-breaking incident, saying he knew she hadn’t meant it. He’d infuriated her further by saying he didn’t mind the fact she had such a temper. That she had, at least, the virtue of not being boringly predictable.
She had listened with mounting anger at his patronising tone, thanked him politely, dropped a curtsy and beat a hasty retreat back to her aunt’s side.
‘I have been used to having women fling themselves at me,’ he said, sidestepping to block her progress down the corridor when she would have evaded him. ‘I have had my pick of them. Your very spirited resistance to what everyone is saying was an improper advance has apparently fired my blood. Now I must have you.’
‘Stop it,’ she snapped. Not only did he sound as though he was repeating the lines of one of the villains from a Covent Garden melodrama, but behind him she had just spotted two girls, who’d been about to avail themselves of the facilities, suddenly pretend they needed to adjust their hair in the mirror first.
‘People are watching.’
‘We want them to watch, don’t we?’
‘Not any more, no,’ she said wearily. It was impossible to hold him at arm’s length while he still thought she was playing the game. She needed to stop it, now, before she got really hurt.
‘You have been generous to devote so much of your time to me,’ she said firmly. ‘Particularly considering how ungracious I was about your offer to start with, but...’ It was too dangerous to continue. She rather suspected that, having experienced Lord Deben’s brand of lovemaking, she would never want any other man to touch her that way. He’d told her to watch other men’s lips and imagine what they would feel like upon her, but the only man’s lips she wanted to look at were his. Nor could she imagine anyone else being able to provoke such a response as the wild thrill that had gone through her on Lady Susan’s sofa.
Who was she ever likely to meet with half the experience, the charm, the attraction of a Lord Deben anyway?
Not that she could tell him why she wanted to end it. It would be mortifying to have to admit she was afraid she had fallen in love with him.
‘There is no need to continue. We have achieved our intended result.’
His face closed up.
‘So, now that I have made you a social success, you intend to toss me aside? I have served my purpose and now you have no further use for me?’
‘No! It is not like that.’
He inhaled sharply and bowed his head.
The dread of losing her made it feel as though he’d swallowed a rock.
It would all be much simpler if only they lived in an earlier age. An age where a man of his rank could just carry a maiden off to his castle and imprison her deep within his fortress. But it wasn’t the middle ages. This was the age of reason. He’d already seen that he would have to go about capturing in quite another way—with cunning and stealth, and subtlety. And that most potent weapon of all, the power he wielded over her body.
