Chapter 10
Tristan’s manservant did not look at all surprised to find an enraged woman at his master’s doorstep at an unrespectable time.
He did, however, bodily block her entry with his tall form. “His lordship is not at home,” he said smoothly, his sleek black eyebrows exuding more arrogance than a full-fledged duke. He was not the valet she remembered from the days of Wycliffe Hall, either.
“You are new,” she said. “What is your name?”
His dark eyes contemplated her down his nose. “Avi, milady,” he finally said.
“Avi,” she said. “Lord Ballentine and I have a business matter to discuss. Unless you think his lordship wants the entire street to partake in it, step aside. My voice carries, I have been told.”
The brows swooped. “It does,” Avi said. “Carry. You are not armed with anything sharp, milady?”
“Other than my tongue?”
The valet relented in the face of such belligerence, bowed his head, and stepped aside.
She brushed past him, her heart drumming an angry beat.
The stairway was narrow.
The landing was small.
Part of her wondered why the future Earl of Rochester would set up home in a commoner’s house—
The door to the bedchamber was open, and the warm light of a fire and at least a dozen candles spilled onto the landing.
She rushed ahead and turned into the doorway.
She froze midstride.
At the back of the room, stretched out on his side and propped up on an elbow, the master of the house was lounging on a divan.
And he was naked.
She stared, for a breathless moment suspended in time.
He slowly raised his eyes from his book, looking . . . intrigued.
Her gaze jerked away like fingers touching something hot.
Too late. The sight was seared onto her mind and kept glowing behind closed eyes: the smooth, honeyed skin and chiseled muscle; wide, straight shoulders; a broad, broad chest . . . and a tattoo on his right pectoral.
Her mouth was dry. Her heart was pounding.
A trail of dark hair below his navel had dragged her gaze down and down. . . . He was not entirely naked. A pair of soft, low-slung trousers clung to his hips.
Still. Her face burned as if she’d stepped too close to a furnace. This was bad.
The divan creaked. She opened her eyes and, peering sideways, noted that his lordship had sat up. Her fingertips dug into her palms. Let the circus commence.
“Lucie.” His voice was rough. “Should they become true at last, my dreams of you in my bedchamber?”
“Would you mind making yourself decent?” she said to the door frame, her tone unnaturally prim.
“I say,” he drawled. “If nudity offends your sensibilities, I recommend you refrain from storming men’s boudoirs after dark.”
Some instinct told her not all nudity would make her nervous. It was this particular well-formed, golden nudity that had made her go a little weak in the knees.
In the periphery of her vision, she watched him rise and stretch with the grace of a large cat, his back muscles rippling beneath gleaming skin—could she blame herself for watching? It was as though a piece of art, a Roman marble, were coming to life.
Still, as he walked to the wardrobe, she was tempted to skip down the stairs again, past insolent Avi, and leave with whatever decorum she had left. Sometimes she had to wonder about her choices. She had just burst into a man’s bedroom, utterly unacceptable behavior even for a confirmed spinster, scandalous even by her standards. Years and years of shared antagonism must have given her a false sense of familiarity where Tristan was concerned.
“Voilà,” he purred.
She turned back.
He was standing next to the fireplace, not decent at all. He had slipped on a dressing gown of sorts: red silk, exotic floral trimmings. It fell open in the front and revealed a flat abdomen with well-defined slabs of more muscle. In the glow of the fire, his bare skin looked smooth like satin to the touch, and her lips responded with an excited tingle.
She steeled herself. This was as presentable as he would make himself. She strolled into the room with a nonchalance she did not feel, because hovering at the door like a ninny would be worse.
She noted a four-poster bed taking up near half the chamber to her right, and colorful wall tapestries and a wood cabinet to her left. The air smelled of him, and being cocooned in his scent was as unsettling as being confronted with him being in a state of dishabille.
“Did the cat get your tongue?” he asked, his voice soft.
He was watching her with a glint in his eyes. If he were a lion indeed, his tail would now have the telltale flick of a predator ready to pounce.
Except that he had already gone for the kill.
The resentment over why she was here in the first place surged anew; her body went rigid with it.
She propped a hand on her hip.
“Is it true?” she demanded. “You have set up residence in Oxford?”
He took his time contemplating her belligerent stance before granting her a reply. “For now, yes.”
“Why?”
He gave a lazy shrug. “It is such a pretty little town.”
She shook her head. “You would never voluntarily settle in such a provincial hovel,” she said, the sweep of her hand encompassing the room. “First you buy half of my publisher, then you set up house in my city—what are you scheming, Ballentine?”
He raised a brow, rather superciliously. “Your city? A bit grandiose, don’t you think?”
Her hands curled into fists. “We cannot both be in the same room, or the same town, for a minute without quarreling,” she said. “Working together is impossible, you must know this. Sell me your shares. I shall put it in writing that your books will be well cared for.”
He cocked his head. “Perhaps I enjoy our quarreling,” he said. “It adds a certain piquancy to my day.”
Of course, he would draw it out and try and make her beg.
She’d sooner give her first vote to the Tories.
“See reason,” she tried. “We cannot both own exactly half.”
Again his brow went up. “Because it means I can—and will—veto anything endangering our sales, such as, say, radical women’s politics?”
“Yes,” she hissed.
She realized then that she was closer to begging than she’d ever been. Her plans, for two years in the making, dashed. By him, of all people. To her horror, tears of frustration were burning in her nose, when she couldn’t remember the last time she had cried.
Tristan’s brow furrowed. “Come now,” he said. “Potentially ruining your own business cannot be in your interest, either. And I know I played pranks on you during those summers at Wycliffe Hall, and some were not in good taste. But we are both adults now, so can you not forgive and forget and let us begin anew? I shall apologize for my youthful transgressions if that settles it.”
Bells of hell. She saw red. A lecture on grace by a man, who, if rumors could be trusted, had recently jumped from a balcony into a rosebush to escape an enraged husband. But he’d toss her an apology, if doing so made her biddable?
Any sense of defeat went up in angry flames. “You think I dislike you for your childish pranks?”
His eyes narrowed. “What else could it possibly be?”
“Your ignorance is astonishing.”
“Enlighten me,” he said darkly. “Just what crimes have I ever committed against you to merit such a degree of dislike?”
“Dislike?” she said. “Very well, this is why I dislike you: you are a libertine. You seduce people for the sake of it, for sport. You will use and discard a woman just to pass an afternoon . . . you value trivial things and mock serious matters, and you talk a lot but say very little, which leads me to conclude your mind is lazy or foolish, or both . . . you misuse your superior station with your hedonistic ways, when most people cling to their positions by the skin of their teeth, and, worst of all, you have been assigned a seat in the House of Lords and yet you have not used it once—not once!—when millions go without a voice in this country. Truly, I can think of few men more useless than you, and I don’t dislike you, my lord, I detest you.”
A dam in her, long cracked, had broken; the toxic words were pouring out of her like a waterfall.
The ensuing silence was deafening. There was only the sound of her breathing, shaky and erratic.
Tristan stood as still as if shot.
Eerily still.
There was no mistaking the angry color slowly tinging his cheekbones.
An uneasy sensation stirred in her stomach. A line had been crossed she hadn’t known they had heeded until now.
He took a deep breath. “Useless,” he said. The word dripped from his lips in cold contempt.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “Well, yes,” she muttered. “And I cannot share a business with you.”
“I see.” His tone was controlled, but in the depths of his eyes simmered something sinister. The deliberate slowness of his gaze traveling over her, from her face down to her toes, raised all the fine hairs on her body. She had terribly provoked him.
He turned to the fireplace and stared into the glowing embers on the grate. In his flowing robe, with one hand on the mantelpiece and his profile hard and brooding, he looked like a vengeful young god contemplating the firelight.
“Tell me, Lucie.” His voice was silky-smooth. “How badly do you want it?”
The question slipped like a satin rope around her neck. She could feel her throat tightening.
This was a trap.
She raised her chin. “Name a price. And I shall see whether I can pay it.”
“Oh, but you can.”
The fingers of his left hand had begun an idle exploration of the objects on the mantelpiece, trailing over the smooth curve of the ceramic clock, an oblong box, the heavy candlestick turned from oak wood. They lingered on the candlestick, slid around it, tested its girth.
Heat poured over her like liquid fire.
“You can,” he repeated, and turned to look at her. His eyes were fathomless pools in the flickering shadows. “The question is whether you are willing.”
His hand circling the candleholder languidly slid up over polished wood, then down again, a lewd gesture if she’d ever seen one. Terribly mesmerizing, too, because the firelight was playing over his bare chest and he had well-formed fingers that knew every shameless caress under the sun.
That he should dare it left her breathless.
“Your price,” she whispered. “Name it.”
A glint of canine teeth. “You’re an intelligent woman,” he said. “Take a guess.”
“You are leering at me whilst fondling a phallic object,” she said. “It does not take great intelligence to assume you are propositioning me.”
“Mmh,” he hummed. “Assume that I am.”
“Lecherous, shameless creature.”
“Are you speaking of me, or yourself?”
She could only stare and loathe him.
He took his hand off the candlestick. “Darling, you forget who I am. I know lust from twenty paces, and despite your outburst of virtuous severity earlier, you are roiling with it. It’s in the shine of your eyes and the charming flush of your cheeks. If I were to lay my fingers against your throat now, I would feel your pulse beat unnaturally fast and hard.”
Her body was suddenly too heavy for her legs. The heated cheeks, the quickened pulse, were all true.
“You are ridiculous,” she said, and it came out husky.
His smile was pure vindication. “And yet neither one of us is laughing,” he said. “One night. One night in your bed for one percent of company shares. And you shall give it to me in writing that you look after my books. That is the price.”
She was breathing too fast, she was dizzy from it. “So you lied,” she said. “You said you never force your attentions.”
His brows rose. “I don’t. I doubt anyone else in my position would even contemplate the potential ruin of their business by making any kind of offer. Decline it, and things shall rightfully remain as they are. Take it, and London Print shall be yours.” His attention moved past her, to the bed. “We could begin now. You would wake up tomorrow morning well-pleasured and the owner of a publishing house. I’m a fool to offer you such a bargain.”
The bed was close, a step or two to the right. His tone, for all its derisiveness, was matter-of-fact. Her hands clenched; for a fleeting second, she had almost felt the softness of the counterpane beneath her palms, had seen his bare throat and shoulders move over her. His seduction was already at work, naturally—he must have honed it by years of practice. . . .
The perverted entrancement he had spun around her with his silken voice and sliding hand shattered.
“If you think I’d trade a company share for the pox, you are deluded,” she said coolly.
He made a face. “There are ways of preventing such things.”
She doubted he used any of them.
She turned on her heels.
“I shall make it a standing offer, until the end of summer,” she heard him say, and there was a smirk in his voice.
She spun back round to face him. “You sound rather desperate for me to take your offer.”
His smile left his eyes stone cold. “I’m always desperate, princess. Take your time to consider it—as it is, I’m not all that useless in the bedchamber.”
She knew. Women talked.
“Go to Hades,” she said, and stomped out of his room.
The window’s bull’s-eye pane grotesquely distorted Lucie’s cloaked shape as she disappeared into the shadows of Logic Lane. Tristan continued to stare down into the dusky emptiness of the street. The heat wave engulfing him minutes ago was abating only slowly. He realized he was fingering his cheekbone, quite as though he were twelve again and felt the sting of her slap.
He dropped his hand and gave a puzzled laugh.
Useless. Of all the insults she could have chosen, the little witch. She might as well have flown at him brandishing a scimitar. In fact, he would have preferred a knife attack, as he would have dealt with it rather more smoothly.
He turned to the room and sprawled back down onto the divan, and the piece of furniture shrieked in protest. To hell with it. Nothing in this provincial hovel was built for his size. Except the bed. The bed was built for two.
His gaze lingered on the silken counterpane as he reached for his brandy flask. What a sobering chain of events. He had not expected her to hold him in such contempt, nor that it would grate on him so to learn that she did. Apparently, his youthful preoccupation with her ran deeper than he’d known; so deep, it had become invisible beneath the years piling up upon it. But there it was, a furrow carved across a forgotten part of his soul, and it had filled up with want like a wadi in a flash flood when he had seen her stand next to the bed. He must have still thought of her as a fairy, had held an idea of her frozen in time. In truth, she was a red-blooded woman and he did not know her much at all. And she desired his body, which changed everything. Pleasure spread through him as he imagined her under him, on top of him, wanting, needing . . .
By the time the brandy had burned down his throat, he had decided to seduce her. And he would have to seduce her until she would consider it worth it regardless of the company shares, because he’d have to lose his mind before he ever let those go.