Silk Is For Seduction by Loretta Chase Page A

isn’t what happened,” he said.
    “That is exactly what happened,” she said.
    “What happened was, we waltzed, and it was plain to everyone what we were doing even though we had our clothes on,” he said.
    “Oh, that,” she said. “I have the same effect on every man I dance with.”
    “Don’t pretend you weren’t affected as well.”
    “Of course I was affected,” she said. “I never danced with a duke before. It was the most exciting thing that’s ever happened in my mediocre little bourgeois life.”
    “A pity I am not medieval,” he said. “In that case, I shouldn’t hesitate to make your mediocre little life even more exciting, and a good deal littler.”
    “Perhaps I ought to put it in an advertisement,” she said. “Ladies of distinction and fashion are invited to the showrooms of Mrs. Noirot, Fleet Street, West Chancery Lane, to inspect an assemblage of such elegant and truly nouvelle articles of dresses, mantles, and millinery, as in point of excellence, taste, and splendor, cannot be matched in any other house whatever. Often imitated but never surpassed, Mrs. Noirot alone can claim the distinction of having danced with a duke.”
    The carriage stopped.
    “Have we reached the hotel already?” she said. “How quickly the time flies in your company, your grace.” She started to rise.
    “We’re nowhere near your hotel,” he said. “We’ve stopped for an accident or a drunk in the street or some such. Everyone’s stopped.”
    She leaned forward, to look out of the window. It was hard to make out anything but the sheen of the rain where the lamp lights caught it.
    “I don’t see—”
    She felt rather than saw him move, but it was so quick and smooth that he took her off guard. At one moment she was leaning forward toward the door’s window. In the next, his hands were under her arms, and he was lifting her, as easily as if she’d been a hatbox, out of her seat and onto his lap.
    For an instant, she was too startled to react. It was only the briefest of moments, scarcely the blink of an eye. But when she started to push away from him, he caught one hand in the hair at the back of her head and brought her face close to his.
    “Speaking of business, which you do incessantly, we have some of our own,” he said, his voice low and dangerous. “That isn’t finished, madame. It hasn’t even begun.”
    “Don’t be stupid,” she said. Her voice was shaky. Her heart pumped wildly, as though she dangled from a ledge over an abyss.
    She told herself he was only a man, and she understood men through and through. But her reasoning self hadn’t a prayer of being listened to.
    He was strong and solid and warm. His size excited her. His beauty excited her. His power and arrogance excited her. That was the danger. She was weak in this way, her will and mind easily beaten down by the wantonness in her blood.
    She felt the heat of his muscled thighs through the layers of her dress and petticoats, and the heat sped through her, upward and downward, stirring cravings she was hopeless at stifling. “I don’t want you,” she lied. “I want your duch—”
    His mouth cut her off.
    It was warm and firm and determined. Centuries earlier, his ancestors had taken what they wanted: lands, riches, women. Called it “mine,” and it was.
    His mouth took hers in the same way, a siege of a kiss, single-minded, insistent, potent.
    His mouth was a hedonist’s dream, luscious carnal sin. The feel of it, the unyielding pressure—a saint might have withstood it, but she hadn’t a saintly bone in her body. She gave way instantly. Her mouth parted to take him in, to find the taste of him on her tongue and to relish it, as she hadn’t let herself do the last time. He tasted of a thousand sins, and those sins were like honey to her.
    Her hands, still braced on his chest to push away from him, now slid up, over the hard angles of the emerald and the crisp linen of his neckcloth and up. She pushed off his hat