“Yes.” There was a pause while she sought some reason to explain disturbing him in the middle of the night. Then in a rush, “It’s not fitting that you sleep here. You’re the Marquess of Sheene. You should have the bedchamber.”
Aha, he thought, fighting the urge to tell her to stop talking and just do what she’d come for. Perhaps she meant to lure him to her bed first. He cast a derisive glance at his inconvenient couch. She’d certainly be more comfortable under him upstairs.
Then she confounded him as she almost always did. “I could sleep in here.”
So she wasn’t inviting him to share the bedroom. He had no right to be disappointed. As long as his will held—and it wavered by the second—he had no intention of tupping her.
“No, keep the bed,” he said shortly. How could he bear to sleep where she had slept? The idea was too evocative, fatal to his will.
“Your uncle said you’d been ill.”
His laugh was humorless. “Of course I’ve been ill. I went mad.”
The serious gaze didn’t falter. “No, he said you’d been ill this last year.”
“I see you were in the mood for confidences.”
She studied him with that damnably steady regard as if she meant to uncover his every secret. He had a strange premonition in his gut that she’d succeed. “Your uncle is an evil man,” she said softly.
That startled him. “Most people find him charming. Even I did, when I was a boy.” Then an unwelcome thought struck him. “Did he hurt you?”
His uncle rarely descended to violence. He had Monks and Filey and a host of other bullies to enforce his will when he wished to exert physical coercion.
She shook her head so the plait slid beguilingly along the valley between her breasts. Jesus, she was spellbinding. How could he fight her? He reminded himself that she was his uncle’s instrument but the idea was no longer so convincing.
“No, he didn’t hurt me.”
Something in her voice alerted him. “He threatened to, though, didn’t he?”
She’d started to turn away. Now she faced him with a stark expression on her drawn face. “He frightens me.”
For once, he couldn’t doubt her sincerity. He sent her a twisted smile. “He frightens me too.”
Surprisingly, she smiled back. “We agree on something at last.” She turned toward the door. “Goodnight, your lordship.”
“Goodnight, Mrs. Paget,” he echoed as she padded across the room and left him to candlelit solitude. While all the time his soul exulted in rusty joy.
He couldn’t mistake her revulsion when she spoke of Lord John Lansdowne. She might be his uncle’s cat’s paw, but the more he considered it, he doubted it.
In fact, call him a gullible fool, but he believed her to be exactly what she’d always claimed. A virtuous woman dragged into this catastrophe through no fault of her own.
Significant as the perception was, that wasn’t what made his heart sing.
He couldn’t be wrong. Her feelings were unmistakable.
She wasn’t his uncle’s lover. She’d never been his uncle’s lover.
Grace left the salon at a steady walk, then broke into an awkward run as she stumbled upstairs. All the time one word repeated again and again in her mind.
Coward, coward, coward.
She’d steeled herself to go to the marquess and seduce him. Surely, she could play the siren and make him take her. But when the time arrived, she’d been unable to do it.
Oh, how she wished she could say virtue had prevented her. But the truth was more humiliating.
Fear had stopped her. Fear stronger than the terror for her life that had shadowed her since her interview with Lord John.
She hadn’t been afraid that the marquess would take advantage of her. She’d been afraid that he wouldn’t. Even if she flung herself naked into his arms and begged.