Seducing an Angel by Mary Balogh Page B

and go away. She almost hastened him on his way by telling him to leave.
    She did not fear what he would say to others after he had left. He was a gentleman, she believed. Besides, he would not wish openly to admit to anyone that he had been lured into the bed of a notorious murderer.
    He lifted his head again, and it seemed to her as his eyes met hers in the growing light of day that he was paler than he had been, that his eyes were bluer. And very intense.
    “You have nothing?” he asked her.
    She raised her eyebrows.
    “I have enough,” she lied. “But if you are to be my lover, Lord Merton, you are also to be my protector. You will pay me for services rendered. You will pay me as you would the most celebrated of courtesans. Very well indeed, that is. And I will render services that will be ten times more satisfying than any courtesan would offer. Tonight was a mere pale sampling.”
    It sounded like a foolish boast. She almost expected him to laugh at her.
    “You were not attracted to me at all, were you?” he said. “You came uninvited to Meg’s ball in order to find a protector.”
    She smiled at him—and her slipper finally fell off her foot and landed on the floor with a soft thump.
    “A lady does, Lord Merton,” she said, her voice low, “what a lady must.”
    Go , she told him silently. Please go. Go away and never let me have to see you again .
    There was rather a lengthy silence during which they continued to stare at each other. She would not look away, she decided. Neither would she say anything more before he did. She certainly would not jerk to her feet and rush inside her dressing room and slam the door and press her body back against it until he had gone.
    “I will pay you weekly, Lady Paget,” he said at last, “in advance. Beginning today. I will send a package as soon as I return home—or at the earliest respectable hour, anyway.”
    And he named a weekly sum that had her heart thumping in amazement. Could courtesans possibly earn that much?
    “That will be satisfactory,” she said coolly. He had stopped calling her Cassandra , she noticed. “You will not be sorry, Lord Merton. I will service you very well indeed.”
    A light flashed deep inside his eyes.
    “I do not wish to be serviced , ma’am,” he said, getting to his feet, “as if I were some sort of animal that functioned on blind lust alone. I doubt there are such animals, anyway, except those of the human variety. I will be your protector. Technically you will be my mistress. But I will bed you when our desire is mutual. I will bed you when you wish to be bedded and desist when you do not. We will be lovers or we will be nothing. Your weekly salary will not depend upon the number of times you make your body available to me upon that bed or any other. Is that clear to you?”
    She gazed at him in some surprise. She found herself almost afraid of him. Not afraid in any physical sense. She was reasonably sure that he would never hurt her. But he was … She did not even know what he was, what it was about him that had made her suddenly afraid.
    Was it the fear that she could not manipulate him as she had expected to do? He was young and good-natured and gentlemanly—and there was a definite air of innocence about him. She had expected him also to be rather weak, or meek anyway—to be easily controlled by the power of sex.
    She might have misjudged him.
    It was a ghastly possibility.
    But he had agreed to be her protector for an indeterminate length of time. And he was paying her more than handsomely. She had been planning to demand a little more than half what he had offered.
    “Oh, very clear,” she said, standing up after kicking off the otherslipper, and stepping closer to him. She lifted her arms and busied herself with straightening his neckcloth and restoring some of its intricate folds. “We have an agreement, then, Lord Merton.”
    “We do,” he said, and he lifted his hands to take her by the wrists.
    She raised