Proof by Seduction (Carhart #1)(33)

“If I wanted to be a mistress, I’d never have gone to all the trouble of creating Madame Esmerelda. I’m not interested.”

“You wouldn’t be just any man’s mistress. You’d be mine.”

She shook her head. “I told you long ago why I wouldn’t back down. You prod. You poke. You proposition me with a logical weighing of costs and benefits. Do you know, I believe the only emotions you allow yourself to show are pride, anger and disdain? Not a hint of amusement or enjoyment. No sadness. No despair.”

“Just because I don’t choose to show my every thought—”

“You don’t choose to show particular types of feelings,” Madame Esmerelda said. “Why not smile?”

“Why not hang my head in abject humiliation? Why not tear my hair out in sorrow? Why not slobber like an affectionate dog over everyone who takes my fancy? I have my pride, Meg.”

“Most people do. But they don’t hold on to it at the expense of their humanity. Or that of those around them.”

She thought him inhuman? “I see,” he said. He pushed all the coldness that clenched his heart into his voice. “You dislike me.”

She tipped her head back and looked Gareth in the eyes. Once again, lust struck him—a deep, piercing blow to his groin. She’d whetted his appetite over and over. Kisses. Touches. God, he wanted her, skin against skin. He wanted to feel her hair, now pinned up, spilling over his bare chest.

“No. I rather dislike Lord Blakely. I wonder why you play the marquess so often.”

“Play the marquess? I am the marquess.”

“And I am Madame Esmerelda. And Mrs. Margaret Barnard. Do you think I don’t recognize a facade when I see it?”

Gareth swallowed. “A facade? What do you suppose I am hiding?”

She put her head to one side and studied him. “You have all the marks of a man who was once an extremely awkward child. A boy who lived on the edge of his parents’ life. Quiet. Studious. Too quiet, perhaps, and a little too interested in natural science, and inexplicably bored by sport. When you met other children your age, you no doubt found them baffling. And when they massed in groups, as children are wont to do, you feared, deep down, that they were all laughing at you.”

“An interesting theory. A shame you lack evidence for it.” Gareth struggled to maintain the coldness in his voice. His hands were trembling. He had not thought of those first horrible years at Harrow in an age. He’d buried them in his mind. But her words brought them all back, right down to that nauseous feel in the pit of his stomach.

Let lust remain ascendant. Let him think of sliding inside her, of her gasp of sweet surrender. He held on to those heated thoughts to dispel the other images she conjured.

But she would not let him hide. “You were right. They were all laughing at you.”

They had been. His hands clenched in remembered helplessness.

“Then you discovered you could make them stop. They couldn’t laugh at a man made of stone. And they were all afraid of your position in society.”

“None of this is relevant to my offer. You tell Ned you are a fraud. I take you to bed.”

“But that is not what either of us wants, your lordship. You don’t want Lord Blakely to take me to bed, either. And yet I think you’ve forgotten how to be Gareth—just Gareth—altogether. And everyone suffers. I suffer. Ned suffers.” She paused. “Even your staff suffers. How ever did you train them all not to laugh?”

“I don’t take responsibility for the expressions on their faces.”

“Really? Name one you’ve seen smiling.”

Name? To the best of Gareth’s knowledge, the vast majority of his servants were nameless. To the extent that they came to his attention at all, it had better be hiding behind a feather duster. Servants were supposed to blend into the background. Gareth was aware that his servants were real people. They undoubtedly had real emotions to go along with that status. That didn’t mean he needed to familiarize himself with those details.

Madame Esmerelda frowned at him.

“There’s White,” he finally offered.

“White is…”

“My man of business.”

“Excellent,” Madame Esmerelda said. “Make friends with him.”

“What? Friends?”

“Friends,” she affirmed.

“Insupportable. I’d rather take you to bed.”

It was the most terrible task she had set to date. The worst part was that some treasonous organ deep within him—perhaps his liver—wanted to comply. He wanted to talk to the man, as if it were perfectly normal.

“I can’t make friends with him.”

“Why ever not?”

“He’s in service,” Gareth protested. “Think what his origins must be. Madame Esmerelda, I am a marquess.” He folded his arms and nodded. “Surely you must see I cannot go about making friends of all and sundry.” He was arguing with himself as much as her.

“One man,” Madame Esmerelda said, “hardly constitutes ‘all.’ Nor is the man you yourself hired properly cast as ‘sundry.’”

It wasn’t the prospect of having friends that bothered him; it was the process of making them. Gareth remembered those first years at Harrow. He hadn’t been able to do it then. He’d tried, those first, tentative efforts so painstakingly slow. But the others his age formed their little groups so quickly, he’d been left on the margin. He wasn’t bullied, like some—his lineage had made sure of that—but he had been isolated. Two years of hesitant advances, gently rebuffed; two years standing silently, only thinking how to add to the conversation long after the moment passed.