Her dress was made of silk, in an odd, sandy color he would have thought bland had he seen the cloth in a shop. But it was trimmed with puffy red bows, and they seemed like flowers blooming in a desert. Then there was black lace, yards of it, dripping like a waterfall over her smooth shoulders and down the front, under a sash, down over her belly.
He made a twirling gesture with his finger. Obligingly she turned in a complete circle. She moved as effortlessly and gracefully as water, and the lace about her shoulders floated in the air with the movement.
When she finished the turn, though, she didn’t pause but walked on toward the carriage. He walked on with her.
“What is that dreadful color?” he said.
“Poussière,” she said.
“Dust,” he said. “I congratulate you, madame. You’ve made dust alluring.”
“It’s not an easy color to wear,” she said. “Especially for one of my complexion. True poussière would make me appear to be suffering from a liver disease. But this silk has a pink undertone, you see.”
“How can I make you understand?” he said. “I don’t see these things.”
“You do,” she said. “What you lack is the vocabulary. You said it’s alluring. That is the pink undertone, which flatters my complexion, and the magnificent blond lace, close to my face, is even more flattering as well as adding drama.”
“It’s black,” he said. “Noir, not blond.”
“Blond lace is a superior silk lace,” she said. “It doesn’t mean the color.”
This exchange took them to the carriage. He had braced himself for a continuation of last night’s battle, but she behaved as though they were old friends, which disarmed and bothered him at the same time. Too, he was so preoccupied with the nonsense of blond referring to every color under the sun that he almost forgot to look at her ankles.
But instinct saved him, and he came to his senses in the nick of time. As she went up the steps and took her seat, she gave him a fine view of some six inches of stockinged, elegantly curving limb, from the lower part of her calf down.
Last night came back in a dark surge of recollection, more feeling than thought, that sent heat pumping through him. He saw himself bending and grasping one slim ankle and bringing her foot onto his lap and sliding his gloved hand up her leg, up and up and up . . .
Later, he promised himself, and climbed into the carriage.
A short time later
“I hope you will do me the kindness of allowing me to present Madame Noirot, a London dressmaker of my acquaintance,” the Duke of Clevedon said to his hostess.
For a time, the noise about them continued. But about the instant the Comtesse de Chirac realized she hadn’t misunderstood the duke’s less-than-perfect French and that he had actually uttered the words London dressmaker in her presence and referring to the uninvited person beside him, the news was traveling the ballroom, and a silence spread out like ripples from the place where a large rock had landed in a small pond.
Madame de Chirac’s posture grew even tighter and stiffer—though that seemed anatomically impossible—and her chilly grey gaze hardened to steel. “I do not understand English humor,” she said. “Is this a joke?”
“By no means,” Clevedon said. “I bring you a curiosity, in the way that, once upon a time, the savants brought back remarkable objects from their travels in Egypt. I met this exotic creature the other night at the opera, and she was the talk of the promenade yesterday. I beg you will forgive me, and in the interests of scientific inquiry, overlook this so-great imposition upon your good nature. You see, madame, I feel like a naturalist who has discovered a new species of orchid, and who has carried it out of the hidden places of its native habitat and into the world, for other naturalists to observe.”
He glanced at Noirot, whose stormy eyes told him she was not amused. The tan and black she wore made her look like a tigress, and the bursts of red might have been her victims’ blood.
“Perhaps, on second thought, a flower is not the most apt analogy,” he added. “And all things considered, I might have done better to put her on a leash.”
The tigress slanted him a smile promising trouble later. Then she bowed her head to the countess and sank into a curtsey so graceful and beautiful—the lace wafting gently in the air, the butterfly bows fluttering, the fabric shimmering—that it took his breath away.
All about him, he heard people gasp. They were French, and couldn’t help but see: Here were grace and beauty and style combined in one unforgettable, tempestuous masterpiece.
The comtesse heard the onlookers’ reactions, too. She glanced about her. Everyone in the room was riveted on the tableau, all of them holding their breath. This scene would be talked about for days, her every word and gesture anatomized. It would be the most exciting thing that had ever happened at her annual ball. She knew this as well as Clevedon did.
The question was whether she would break tradition and allow excitement.
She paused, with the air of a judge about to deliver sentence.
The room was quite, quite still.
Then, “Jolie,” she said, precisely as though Clevedon had presented an orchid. With a condescending little nod, and the slightest motion of her hand, she gave the modiste leave to rise. Which Noirot did with the same dancer’s grace, eliciting another collective intake of breath.
That was all. One word—pretty—and the room began to breathe again. Clevedon and his “discovery” were permitted to move on, along the short reception line and thence into the party proper.
“A dressmaker? From London? But it is impossible. You cannot be English.”
The men had attempted to surround her, but the ladies elbowed them aside and were now interrogating her.
Marcelline’s dress had awakened both curiosity and envy. The colors were not unusual. They were fashionable colors. The style was not so very different from the latest fashions displayed at Longchamp. But the way she combined style and color and the little touches she added—all this was distinctively Noirot. Being French, these ladies noticed the touches, and were sufficiently intrigued to approach her, though she was a social anomaly—not a person but an exotic pet.
Clevedon’s exotic pet.
She was still seething over that, though a part of her couldn’t help but admire his cleverness. It was the sort of brazen nonsense members of her family typically employed when they found themselves in a tight spot.
But she’d deal with His Arrogance later.
“I am English and a dressmaker,” said Marcelline. She opened her reticule and produced a pretty silver case. From the case she withdrew her business cards: simple and elegant, like a gentleman’s calling card. “I come to Paris for inspiration.”
“But it is here you should have your shop,” said one lady.
Marcelline let her gaze move slowly over their attire. “You don’t need me,” she said. “The English ladies need me.” She paused and added in a stage whisper, “Desperately.”
The ladies smiled and went away, all of them mollified, and some of them charmed.
Then the men swarmed in.
“This is a mystery,” said Aronduille.
“All women are mysteries,” Clevedon said.
They stood at the fringes of the dance floor, watching the Marquis d’Émilien waltz with Madame Noirot.
“No, that is not what I mean,” said Aronduille. “Where does a dressmaker find time to learn to dance so beautifully? How does an English shopkeeper learn to speak French indistinguishable from that of the comtesse? And what of the curtsey she made to our hostess?” He lifted his gaze heavenward, and kissed the tips of his fingers. “I will never forget that sight.”
I’m not a lady, she’d said.
“I admit she’s a bit of a riddle,” Clevedon said. “But that’s what makes her so . . . amusing.”
“The
ladies went to her,” said Aronduille. “Did you see?”
“I saw.” Clevedon hadn’t imagined they’d approach her. The men, yes, of course.
But the ladies? It was one thing for the hostess to admit her, politely overlooking a high-ranking guest’s bad manners or eccentricity. It was quite another matter for her lady guests to approach his “pet” and converse with her. Had Noirot been an actress or courtesan or any other dressmaker, for that matter, they would have snubbed her.
Instead, they’d pushed men aside to get to her. The encounter was brief, but when the women left, they all looked pleased with themselves.
“She’s a dressmaker,” he said. “That’s her profession: making women happy.”
But the curtsey he couldn’t explain.
He couldn’t explain the way she talked and the way she walked.
And the way she danced.
How many times had Émilien danced with her?
It was nothing to Clevedon. He’d never do anything so gauche as dance with her all night.
But considering he’d risked humiliation for her, he was entitled to one dance, certainly.
Though Marcelline appeared to heed only the partner of the moment, she always knew where Clevedon was. It was easy enough, his grace standing a head taller than most of the other men, and that head being so distinctive: the profile that would have made ancient Greece’s finest sculptors weep, the gleaming black hair with its boyish mass of tousled curls. Then there were the shoulders. No one else had such shoulders. But then, no one else had that body. Very likely he could have spouted any nonsense he pleased at their hostess, and she would have accepted whatever he said, for aesthetic reasons alone. Well, prurient ones, too, possibly. The countess was old and cold but she wasn’t dead.
For a time he’d danced, and now and again, the steps took them within inches of each other. But he always appeared as attentive to his partner as Marcelline did to hers. One might have believed he was completely indifferent to what she did. He’d got her into the party, and anything after that was her affair.
But one must be an extremely stupid or naïve woman to believe such a thing, and she was neither.
She knew he was watching her, though he excelled at seeming not to. In the last hour, though, he’d shed the pretense. He’d been prowling the ballroom, his friend trailing him like a shadow—a talkative one, by the looks of it.
Then at last the Duke of Clevedon’s seemingly casual wanderings brought him to her.
Men crowded about her, as they had from the instant she’d satisfied the ladies’ curiosity. He seemed not to notice the other men. He simply walked toward her, and it was as though a great ship sailed into port. The pack of men offered no resistance. They simply gave way, as though they were mere water under his hull.
She wondered if that was what it had been like, once upon a time, for her grandfather, when he was young and handsome, a powerful nobleman of an ancient family. Had the world given way before him, and had it likewise never occurred to him that the world would do anything else?
“Ah, there you are,” Clevedon said, as though he’d stumbled upon her by accident.
“As you see,” she said. “I have not shredded the curtains, or scratched the furniture.”
“No, I reckon you’re saving your claws for me,” he said. “Well, then, shall we dance?”
“But Madame has promised this next dance to me,” said Monsieur Tournadre.
Clevedon turned his head and looked at him.
“Or perhaps I misunderstood,” said Monsieur Tournadre. “Perhaps it was another dance.”
He backed away, as a lesser wolf would have withdrawn before the leader of the wolf pack.
Oh, she ought not to be thrilled. Only a giddy schoolgirl would thrill at a man’s snarling over her, the way a wolf snarled when another wolf dared to approach his bitch.
Still, this was the most desirable man in the ballroom, and his little show of possessiveness would have excited any woman in the room. Whatever else she was, she was still a woman, and a young one, and for all her worldly experience, she’d never had a peer of the realm warn another man away from her.
Before she could tell herself not to be a ninny, he led her out into the dancing. Then his hand clasped her waist, and hers settled on his shoulder.
And the world stopped.
Her gaze shot to his and she saw in his green eyes the same shock that made her draw in her breath and stop moving. She’d danced with a dozen other men. They’d held her in the same way.
This time, though, the touch of his hand was an awareness so keen it hummed over her skin. She felt it deep within, too, a strange stillness. Then her heart lurched into beating again, and she gathered her wits.
Her face smoothed into a social mask and his did, too. Their free hands clasped in the next same instant, and he swung her into the dance.
They danced for a time in silence.
He wasn’t ready to speak. He was still shaken by whatever it was that had happened at the start of the dance.
He knew she’d felt it, too—though he couldn’t say what it was.
At the moment, her attention was elsewhere, not on him. She was looking past his shoulder, and he could look down and study her. She was not, truly, a great beauty, yet she gave that impression. She was handsome and striking and absolutely different.
Her dark hair was modishly arranged, yet in a slightly disarranged way. Had they been elsewhere, he would have dragged his fingers through it, scattering the pins over the floor. The slight turn of her head showed a small, perfect ear from whose lower lobe dangled a garnet earring. In that other place, elsewhere, he would have bent and slid his tongue along the delicate little curve.
But they were not in another place, and so they danced, round and round, and with every turn the familiar waltz grew darker and stranger and hotter.
With every turn he grew more intensely aware of the warmth of her waist under his gloved hand, of the way the heat made her creamy skin glow a tantalizing pink under the dewy sheen, and the way the heat enhanced her scent: the fragrance of her skin mingled with the jasmine she wore so lightly. It was a mere hint of scent in a warm and crowded room thick with them, but he was aware, keenly aware, only of hers.
In the same way he was distantly cognizant of dancers moving about them, a whirl of colors set off by the blacks and greys and whites of the men’s dress. But all this glorious color faded to a blur, while below him and about him was a swirl of pale gold, pink-tinged like desert sands at dawn, dotted with red bows trembling like poppies in a summer breeze. Nearer still was the black lace, wafting in the air with every movement.
At last she looked up at him. He saw the heat glowing in her face, the throb of the pulse at her neck, and he was aware, without needing to look precisely there, of the rapid rise and fall of her bosom.
“I’ll give you credit,” she said, her husky voice slightly breathless. “Of all the ruses you might have tried, that was one I never considered. But then, I’ve never thought of myself as anybody’s pet.”
“I presented you as an exotic,” he said.
“I take exception to the part about the leash,” she said.
“It would be an elegant leash, I assure you,” he said. “Studded with diamonds.”
“No, thank you,” she said. “I take exception as well to your behaving as though you won me in a wager, when in fact you lost—and not for the first time.” Her dark gaze swept up to the top of his head and down, pausing at his neckcloth, and leaving a wash of heat behind. “That’s a pretty emerald.”
“Which you shall not have,” he said. “No wagers with you this night. We may yet be cast out. The Vicomtesse de Montpellier showed me the business card you gave her. Did no one ever point out to you the difference between a social function and a business function? This is not an institutional banquet of the Merchant T
aylors’ Company.”
“I noticed that. The tailors would be better dressed.”
“Are you blind?” he said. “Look about you.”
She threw a bored glance about the room. “I saw it all before.”
“We’re in Paris.”
“I’m talking about the men, not the women.” Her gaze came back to him. “Of all the men here, you are the only one a London tailor would not be ashamed to acknowledge as his client.”
“How relieved I am to have your approval,” he said.
“I did not say I approve of you altogether,” she said.
“That’s right. I forgot. I’m a useless aristocrat.”
“You have some uses,” she said. “Otherwise I should not be courting you.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“You keep forgetting,” she said. “This party. You. This is all business to me.”
He had forgotten. She’d wanted to come to this ball to observe. She would have come without him but for their wager—though that had been less a wager than a war of wills.
“How could I forget?” he said. “I could scarcely believe my eyes when my friends showed me the business cards you handed out as though they were party favors.”
“Has your exotic pet embarrassed you, monsieur le duc? Does the odor of the shop offend your nostrils? How curious. As I recall, you were the one who insisted on bringing me. You taunted me with cowardice. Yet you—”
“It would be vulgar to strangle you on the dance floor,” he said. “Yet I am sorely tempted.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You haven’t had this much fun in an age. You told me, did you not, of the machinations the high and mighty employ to be invited to this exceedingly dull ball. You’ve done what scores of Parisians would give a vital organ to accomplish. You’ve achieved the social coup of the decade. In escorting me, you’ve broken a host of ancient, unbreakable rules. You’re thumbing your nose at Society, French and English. And you’re dancing with the most exciting woman in the room.”