A Masquerade in the Moonlight(63)
“I’m not going to stand here for another instant and listen to this nonsense,” Marguerite declared feelingly. “Obviously you’ve taken some maggot into your shallow brain, and I would find it impossible to reach you with any application of common sense. The men you’re speaking of are all my friends, my very good friends since my childhood. Why, knowing I’m an orphan, they’ve gone out of their way to ease my entry into society. I would never wish harm to any of them.”
Thomas grinned and spread his arms wide. “Your friends. Judas once said that of Jesus, or so I was taught—not that I’d compare any of the five with anything vaguely holy or deserving of respect. I’ll admit it, aingeal, you’re a riddle to me. A curious, bewitching riddle. You’re up to mischief—I’d bet Paddy’s new cane on it—but for the life of me I can’t understand just what it is. I’ve only been unlucky enough to have stumbled into the middle of it.”
Marguerite was silent for some moments before she smiled back at him, approaching him slowly until she could lay her fingers on the folds of his cravat. “What would it take, Donovan,” she asked, her voice low and sultry, “for you to stumble out again?”
His heart lurched in his chest, partly from her proximity, partly from her thinly veiled offer, but mostly from disgust, both with her and with himself for wanting to tell her just what it would take. Her lips, pressed against his. Her arms, holding him tightly. Her body, soft and willing beneath his hands.
“They hurt you somehow, didn’t they, Marguerite?” he questioned her quietly, searching her face for some sign of pain, some inkling of what drove her. “You’re too proud to do what you’re doing now, to offer your innocence for my silence, unless these men did something unforgivable. What did they do?”
Her fingers tangled deeper in the folds of his cravat. He could feel the heat of her through the fine lawn of his shirt. “I have better questions, Donovan. What are they to you? Why are you so persistently seeking them out when there are much more important lords and ministers lying thick on the ground all over London who might better assist you in your mission of peace between our two countries? Why, Stinky isn’t involved in government at all. What do you have to gain that you’re so worried for the welfare of these five men? What secrets do you wish to keep hidden?”
He slid his hands onto her waist, slowly drawing her closer against him, his passions fueled by this game of cat and mouse they were playing, the realization that, in this one young woman, he perhaps had met his match in the fine art of the double-deal. “I give up, Marguerite. You keep your secrets, and I’ll hold fast to mine. Just, please, have a care before you go too far.”
She released her hold on his cravat and slipped from his grasp before he could respond. “Agreed! And now, Donovan—if you don’t mind—I will leave you, and this time I have no intention of being distracted. You may merely bow to me in passing if we should happen to meet again, but it will not be necessary for us to converse. Do you understand?”
“You’d like me to pretend you don’t exist,” Thomas answered quietly, recovering his composure as rapidly as she. “Somehow, as we’re both moving in the same very limited circle, I believe your request impossible. Besides,” he added, winking at her, “you don’t want me to, do you? You can deny it, you can even shout from the rooftops how much you loathe me, but your heart won’t be in it. Will it, Marguerite?”
She drew the hood back up over her hair, the material throwing her face into shadow. “Again you’re wrong, Thomas Joseph Donovan. You see, I have no heart. I did once, but it was broken some time ago and proved impossible to repair. Perhaps, if we had met at some other time, some other place? Well, it might have proved interesting.”
Thomas slowly advanced toward her, one small step at a time, unwilling to let her leave him, unwilling to lose what he had not yet quite found. “Interesting? Oh, yes, my little Marguerite. And exciting. And pleasurable. Meaningful. Even lasting.”
“No more lasting than a spring snow.”
“Ah, aingeal, how you wound me. Aren’t you the least bit curious?”
“Not in the slightest.” She backed up another pace.
“Really? Haven’t you lain awake, like I have, wondering what we would be like, you and I? Two rogues, who might tame each other.”
“Heyday. Listen to the man. He calls himself a rogue. I call him a cork-headed, delusional blockhead.”