She bit back the panicky How do you know? quivering at the tip of her tongue and cast a glance toward the door of the drawing room. She’d left it ajar, but there was no one about. “Do you care to explain yourself, sir? Such is a strong accusation indeed.”
“What is there to explain? You’ve been afraid of me for a long time, for something that you thought I knew. And yet what I knew in truth did not worry you at all. So it stood to reason that it hadn’t been a woman, but a man, that it had gone too far, and that Mr. Somerset has no knowledge of it.”
She’d struggled with it, the fact that she’d likely contracted a marriage under false pretenses. She’d decided that Stuart was too sophisticated a man and too kind a friend to take her to task for it, and that she’d make up for her lack of a hymen by being the best possible wife under the sun. But Mr. Marsden’s provocation again placed that moral dilemma front and center, forcing her yearning for worldly security to war with her conscience.
“You’ve no proof,” she said.
“And neither do you.”
He was referencing her breached maidenhead again. She almost snarled at the double entendre, but limited herself to a deep frown. “Well, this is a pretty impasse.”
In the silence that followed, he collected the sheets of calligraphy samples into a neat stack and slid them into his document case. He strapped and buckled the case shut, lifted it, then set it down again, as if he couldn’t decide whether to walk away or to stay. Then he glanced at her. “Perhaps we could learn to be friends.”
She snickered. Friends with this popinjay who wanted nothing more than to take her down? “And we will base our beautiful friendship upon…?”
“Our mutual knowledge of each other’s darkest secrets—and that it would cost us too dear to be enemies.”
“That is not enough,” she said flatly.
He twisted the serpent ring once around his finger. “Would it offer additional inducement if I said I liked you?”
At the beginning of their meeting she would have instantly believed it, but now she only frowned deeper. “My goodness, what do you do to people you don’t like?”
“I’m somewhat doubtful as to whether you will be good for Mr. Somerset. But that doesn’t mean I cannot appreciate you for what you are: a beautiful, clever, witty woman, cool under fire and persistent.”
Something in her ached. He’d described her precisely as she wanted to see herself, but increasingly could no longer. “Can a man such as yourself truly appreciate a woman?”
“As well as you can appreciate another woman.”
She said nothing.
He came close, took her hand, and brought it close to his lips. “What do you have to lose?”
Much, she was sure, though she could not name what her loss would be.
She thought he’d kiss the air above her wrist or some such, but he pressed his lips into the knuckles of her middle and ring fingers, and the contact was an electrical experiment gone awry. The nerves in her arm nearly snapped with the shock—and the thick pleasure—of it.
She yanked her hand back. He raised a brow.
“Good day, Mr. Marsden,” she said.
“Good day, Miss Bessler,” he replied. “And think of my offer.”
“Oh, Stuart, it’s beautiful,” exclaimed Lizzy.
They were in her drawing room and Stuart had come to present her engagement ring. He’d spared no expense. The ring he’d had in mind at first had been an ordinary engagement ring with a row of gems that spelled regards acrostically. The ring he’d been determined to buy when he returned from Fairleigh Park would have featured a large single sapphire—her birth-stone. The ring that was on her finger now, purchased in the morning, after he’d spent a fitful night dreaming of Madame Durant, was a spectacular diamond, burning with white fire.
“You shouldn’t have,” she scolded him. “Why, this could have paid for our servants for years to come.”
“I want you to be pleased,” he said. “That’s far more important. And—”
“But I am pleased,” she said, almost vehemently. “I couldn’t be more pleased with you.”
“And I want you to know how happy I am that we’ve made this commitment to each other,” he finished, hoping his words conveyed all of his sincerity and none of his desperation.
He was happy. He couldn’t be happier. Lizzy had so many qualities to recommend her. And she was beautiful, her face flawless, her figure straight out of a fashion plate.
Yet even as he gazed fully upon her loveliness, it was Madame Durant he saw in his mind’s eye—Madame Durant, who most emphatically did not have a nineteen-inch waist, or the slender arms that Lizzy showed to such advantage in her evening gowns.
In reality, his cook was likely short and dumpy. But he had trouble thinking realistically of Madame Durant. Instead, he thought voluptuous, shapely, erotic—and hungered after her body as he hungered after her food.
He lifted Lizzy’s left hand and kissed her just above where the ring glittered. She looked at him, her dark eyes wide and intense, as if waiting for lightning to strike. Then she averted her eyes.