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It made him want to hold her tighter. Tell her she was not alone anymore. That he would look after her…
‘And I am sure,’ she said, removing her arms from about his neck, reminding him that he was the last person she’d willingly accept help from, ‘she will still take me, if only you will arrange for me to get on the next coach.’
‘I am sure she will not,’ he said, tightening his own hold round her waist in instinctive reaction to her attempt to escape him. She was going nowhere until he was ready to let her go. Until he’d wrung every last drop of satisfaction from this encounter. She hadn’t anything like begun to repay him for the insults she’d heaped on him over the years. If he couldn’t make her eat her words, precisely, then he could at least rub her nose in the fact that she was where she was because she’d fallen so very far short of the exacting standards she’d always been waving under his nose. ‘Nobody wants to employ the kind of girl who gets into fist fights in public inns.’
‘I didn’t!’ She glanced guiltily at his nose. ‘That is, she isn’t likely to find out about it.’
‘Oh, but she is. Things like this get out. People like Johnny Bruton make sure of it.’
‘But she lives so far away from London…’
‘If she is part of a network of elderly women, who have little better to do with their time than write letters, somebody is bound to write and inform her of your part in this fracas.’
Clare’s mouth turned down at the corners as the truth of his observation struck home. Oh, but revenge could be sweet.
‘Even if she does not know anything about it to start with,’ he persisted, ‘the fear of discovery will hang over your head from the moment you inveigle your way into her household.’
‘I would not be inveigling my way anywhere!’
‘Oh, but you would. No doubt Clement promised her, and her family, the companionship of a gently reared, caring, competent young lady. Once they hear about this little escapade, they will think you have deliberately deceived them. That your brother deliberately deceived them.’
‘No, no. You are making it sound far worse than it was!’
‘And how do you think the likes of Johnny Bruton will make it sound? And how much do you think the tale will be embellished every time it is repeated? Why, the gossips will probably have the pair of us repairing to one of the bedrooms in this establishment and making up our quarrel in the most uninhibited fashion.’ Which would, now he came to mention it, be the way he’d rather like this interlude to progress. The taste of her lips had been every bit as sweet as he’d once dreamed it would. And, though she’d fought her response, there was no hiding the fact that she had responded to him. If this were any other woman, they’d be negotiating terms by now.
But Clare, being Clare, was looking wildly round the perfectly respectable coffee room, then wrinkling her nose in disgust.
‘You are probably right,’ she said gloomily. ‘Particularly given your reputation.’
And even though he’d been thinking along the very same lines, to hear her estimation of his character come out of her lips in such a disdainful manner was like a slap to the face.
He tried not to tense. He was not a rake or a libertine, but Clare had never managed to comprehend that a young man, with tolerable looks and plenty of money, was bound to make the most of the opportunities that came his way. In her opinion, men and women should never yield to the temptations of the flesh, outside the marriage bed.
‘Exactly,’ he purred, injecting every ounce of lasciviousness into his voice that he could muster. Living right down to her low expectations of him, the way he always did.
‘Nobody will ever believe that I could take a young woman into a private room, particularly not one to whom I have declared myself to be betrothed, and allow her to walk away with her virtue unsullied.’
‘Oh, dear.’ She buried her face in her hands and bowed over as though trying to curl up into a ball.
And hang it if another surge of protectiveness didn’t choose that very moment to sweep away his urge to needle her. Causing him to start rubbing his hands up and down the curve of her back.
