“The man with whom you said you saw my fiancée engaged in that highly compromising embrace.” Braden regarded her seriously from across his great expanse of desktop. “I am afraid he might be in a good deal of danger.”
Her small mouth dropped open, and her eyes, above the rims of her spectacles, widened perceptibly. “From whom?” she demanded, with a good deal of suspicion, when her astonishment had ebbed enough to allow her to speak. “I thought I made it clear to you that I would not tolerate—”
“Not from myself,” Braden hastened to assure her. “I don’t even know who he is.”
“Then how do you know he’s in danger?”
“Because I’ve been having Lady Jacquelyn’s household watched,” Braden explained, a bit sheepishly— though why he should feel sheepish in front of her, he could not fathom. She was all too well acquainted with his romantic troubles. “And last night, the man I had stationed there was viciously attacked by another man, a man whom it seems was following . . . your friend.”
“My friend,” Caroline repeated. “A man whom you sent to spy on your fiancée was attacked by another man, whom you say was following my friend . . . the man with whom your fiancée is having an illicit affair.”
“Yes,” Braden said. “That’s precisely it. So you might want to tell your . . . friend to have a care. Especially if he is at all dear to you.”
The eyes, appearing larger than ever behind the magnifying lenses of the spectacles, regarded him archly. “Dear to me?” she echoed.
“Yes,” he said. “If, for instance, he is your. . . .” Was it his imagination, or did those eyes grow larger yet? “. . . brother?”
She erupted in peals of laughter. “You think my
brother
is having an affair with your fiancée?”
“Well,” he said, with some asperity. “You did mention he’d been shot before—”
“By footpads,” she said. “Oh, Mr. Granville. You could not be more wrong. My brother quite worships the ground on which you walk. Besides, Jacquelyn would
never
—”
He held up a hand to keep her from finishing. What she said was entirely true. It had been only a fleeting suspicion, but still, one he’d felt compelled to mention.
“Well, in any case,” he went on, “this fellow seems to mean business. I am calling off my own men, for the sake of their safety. Not,” Braden added, on a lighter note, “that I imagine your friend should have any difficulties dealing with him. Your friend does seem to possess an uncanny ability to evade detection. My men are convinced he doesn’t exist at all, but is some sort of phantom, the way he darts in and out of shadows, disappearing at will.”
Caroline’s stare, he thought, had gotten rather incredulous, so he wasn’t surprised when she said, “My friend. You mean the man I saw with Lady Jacquelyn?”
“Yes. That’s precisely who I mean.”
“The man I saw with her at Dame Ashforth’s?
That
man?”
A little impatiently, he nodded. “Yes. That man.”
To his utter astonishment, Lady Caroline burst out laughing again.
“I find it hard to believe,” Braden said, after listening to her helpless giggles for a minute or so—this was, he knew, his punishment for agreeing to do business with a virgin—“that this man is such a great friend of yours, if you find the idea that his life might be in mortal danger by a hired assassin so amusing.”
“Assassin!” This sent Lady Caroline into another fit of the giggles, until she was obliged to lift off her spectacles in order to dash tears of laughter away from her eyes. “Oh, God,” she said again, panting from her humorous outburst. “I’m sorry. But the thought . . . the thought of anyone calling him a
phantom
—”
Fearing that she was going to burst into a fresh batch of giggles, Braden said, hastily, “Well, I felt it only fair to let you know. Whether or not you choose to relay the information to your friend is your business, of course—”
“I don’t think I shall,” Caroline said, still smiling. “It seems highly unlikely that your phantom and my friend are one in the same man. Has it ever occurred to you that Jacquelyn might have more than one lover?”
“Thank you for the suggestion,” Braden said, unable to keep a hint of dryness from creeping into his tone.
All of the laughter was immediately wiped clean from Caroline Linford’s face. She said, looking guilt stricken, “Oh, I did not mean . . . I did not mean to suggest that Lady Jacquelyn is . . . oh, dear. I
am
sorry.”
He waved away her apology impatiently. “Never mind,” he said. “We both know what my fiancée is. It’s why we’re here. I am afraid I have no other option now, Lady Caroline, than to accept your proposal. While I do not like the idea of you involving yourself in my affairs, I am afraid I can no longer risk the lives of my men trying to ascertain for myself the identity of my fiancée’s lover.”
He glanced at her, suddenly fearful that the excuse sounded as false to her ears as it did to his own. But if she thought he might have any other motive in accepting her offer—such as, say, a chance to spend more time in her intoxicating presence—she gave no sign.
And why should she suspect him of any such thing? He had, as he knew only too well, made it quite clear he was not interested in girls of her ilk.
More fool he.
“Well, then,” he said, clearing his throat. “I take it I am to proceed with, um, a lecture of some sort?”
Caroline, her glasses settled back over her nose, nodded vigorously. “Yes, please.”
He cleared his throat. “And just precisely how many . . . lessons do you think you are going to require, Lady Caroline, in return for your testimony?”
Caroline looked a little dismayed. “Oh,” she said. “Well, I suppose that depends. How many do you think it will take before I am fully . . . versed?”
“That depends, I suppose,” he said, slowly. Inwardly, however, his thoughts were moving without a hint of the sluggishness. What, he was thinking, if I were to rip those spectacles from her nose, toss them to the floor, pull her from that chair, and kiss her? What then? Would she storm from the room? Slap me? Or kiss me back?
“Well,” Caroline said, interrupting his frantic internal monologue. “Why don’t you simply begin, and we’ll go from there.”
“All right,” he agreed, reluctantly. And he cleared his throat again.
He had, of course, prepared a lecture for the occasion. An elegant lecture, quite well thought out. He’d come up with it during the opera the night before. Well, he’d needed something to keep him from spending the whole of the evening staring at Caroline.
Unfortunately, he had not truly believed she would show up this afternoon, and so he had left his program from the opera, on which were penciled his notes, on his bedside table.
“All right,” he said, again. He felt unaccountably nervous, though why this should be so, he could not think. Unless it was the fact that he had never imagined himself in this position, explaining something so . . . well, intimate, to a young lady who’d been so gently and carefully reared.
And to whom he was finding himself more and more attracted.
Fortunately, the subject he’d picked for his first lesson was fairly impersonal.
“Well, you see, Lady Caroline,” he began, “the intimacies which occur between a man and a woman in the privacy of the bedroom cannot adequately be described in a setting such as this one. We are, as you’re undoubtedly aware, in an office, an atmosphere hardly conducive to romance.”
That sounded good. He decided to expound upon that theme.
“I cannot stress enough the importance of atmosphere to the romantic liaison. There are those who say that love should not be made during the daylight hours, as sunlight is not conducive to appropriately romantic feelings. And while I’ve found that this proves true with some women, who are perhaps timid about their shape, I’ve also found that there is nothing more liberating than the shedding of clothing, as well as inhibitions, in the bright light of day—”
“Pardon me,” Caroline interrupted, her pencil stilling on the page.
He paused, and eyed her. Curse him if she didn’t look as fetching as a naiad on a riverbank, with her golden hair and fresh-skinned beauty. Well, a naiad in spectacles.
“Yes?” he said.
She smiled politely. “As I said before, I only have an hour. Could we perhaps save this discussion on atmosphere—which is fascinating, believe me—for another time, and go straight into kissing?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Kissing?”
“Yes,” Caroline said. “Kissing. And then I should like to discuss that thing you did last night, with your finger.”
He coughed. So much for impersonal.
Well, he’d brought it upon himself. Think of Jacquelyn’s face, he thought. Think of how she’s going to look when Lady Caroline Linford appears as a witness upon his behalf. . . .
He could, he felt, keep control over his baser instincts for the pleasure of seeing that.
“All right, then,” he said. “Kissing. Very well. One hears, of course, about kissing all the time, but what one may not know is that kissing is a very important part of the—”
Lady Caroline interrupted him. “There is a particular
kind
of kiss I’d like to discuss, one that I’ve had occasion to observe. It is the kind in which the persons engaged in it stick their tongues into one another’s mouth.”
He could not help staring at her own mouth as she said this. It was a very pretty mouth, rosebud pink and imminently kissable. He dragged his gaze from it with an effort. “You’ve observed this.”
She nodded emphatically. “Oh, yes. There is certainly such a thing. I’ve seen it done.”
He wondered if he had ever, even in his childhood, been as absurdly innocent, and then decided that it was unlikely.
He cleared his throat. “Yes. Well, that particular kind of kissing you’ve described is rather . . .”
“Disgusting,” she finished for him, with a knowing look.
Braden blinked at her. He couldn’t help it. Really, what was wrong with that fiancé of hers? Was he more than just a fop? Was he, Braden couldn’t help wondering, one of
those?
Braden had always rather thought he might be. It was certainly the only reason he could think of why the fellow had yet to bed Lady Caroline. He was either fey or a fool, or possibly some combination of both.
“It isn’t disgusting,” he said, keeping his tone impersonal with an effort. “It isn’t disgusting at all.”
“Well,” she said. “I don’t see what could be pleasurable about it. Having someone ram his tongue into my mouth, I mean.”
“No one should be
ramming
his tongue anywhere,” Braden said, impatiently. “If that’s how Slater goes about kissing you, I shouldn’t wonder you find it disgusting.”
Caroline looked prim—a look which wasn’t hard for her to accomplish in those spectacles. “If by Slater,” she said, “you mean my fiancé, the Marquis of Winchilsea, then the answer is no, Mr. Granville. He has never kissed me like that.”
Well, that was certainly unsurprising. What did surprise him, a little, was the wistfulness in her voice as she made the confession.
“Well,” he said, quickly. “One day he doubtlessly will, and it would be good for you to be prepared. That type of kiss, Lady Caroline, is known by the French as the soul kiss, because it is thought that by engaging in it, a couple passes their souls back and forth to one another.”
Caroline’s mouth dropped open. “How perfectly morbid,” she said.
He shrugged. “The French,” he said, with an apologetic shrug. “Now, I ought to warn you, this kind of kissing has quite caught on in this country, and I’m afraid if you are sincere about your desire to be both wife and mistress to your husband, you will have to learn it.”
Caroline sighed resignedly, turned the page of her notebook, and readied her pencil. “Very well. How is it done?”
From any other woman, it would have been an invitation. It certainly affected him as such. He was seized by such a sudden and powerful desire to kiss Lady Caroline that his arms seemed to shake with the effort to keep them at his sides. He did not make a habit of going about, snatching up girls who had made their disinterest in him very clear indeed, and kissing them.
And yet there it was. He wanted to kiss her, in spite of the fact that kissing her was undoubtedly one of the most ill-considered ideas he had ever had.
Still, he fought it.
“Perhaps,” he said, in a voice that he hoped she wouldn’t notice did not sound at all like his own, “we ought to return to the subject of creating a romantic atmosphere.”
“Kissing, please,” Caroline said, tapping her pencil impatiently against her book.
Good Lord. This wouldn’t do at all. Even the way she said the words—
Kissing, please
—in that bored tone was arousing him.
Well, and so what if it was? What harm would one little-kiss do? Really, what harm?
“It isn’t the sort of thing one can describe,” he said, his gaze on her mouth once more. It was a mouth completely bare of any sort of cosmetic rouge, quite unlike any of the mouths he remembered kissing in the past few years. “Perhaps it would be better if I showed you.”