Wicked in Your Arms (Forgotten Princesses #1)(71)

The instant the interval began—and before the other audience members had risen from their seats—Clevedon entered Mademoiselle Fontenay’s opera box with the Comte d’Orefeur.

The first thing he saw was the rear view of the brunette: smooth shoulders and back exposed a fraction of an inch beyond what most Parisian women dared, and the skin, pure cream. Disorderly dark curls dangled enticingly against the nape of her neck.

He looked at her neck and forgot about Clara and Madame St. Pierre and every other woman in the world.

A lifetime seemed to pass before he was standing in front of her, looking down into brilliant dark eyes, where laughter glinted . . . looking down at the ripe curve of her mouth, laughter, again, lurking at its corners. Then she moved a little, and it was only a little—the slightest shift of her shoulders—but she did it in the way of a lover turning in bed, or so his body believed, his groin tightening.

The light caught her hair and gilded her skin and danced in those laughing eyes. His gaze drifted lower, to the silken swell of her breasts . . . the sleek curve to her waist . . .

He was vaguely aware of the people about him talking, but he couldn’t concentrate on anyone else. Her voice was low, a contralto shaded with a slight huskiness.

Her name, he learned, was Noirot.

Fitting.

Having done the pretty by Mademoiselle Fontenay, he turned to the woman who’d disrupted the opera house. Heart racing, he bent over her gloved hand.

“Madame Noirot,” he said. “Enchanté.” He touched his lips to the soft kid. A light but exotic scent swam into his nostrils. Jasmine?

He lifted his head and met a gaze as deep as midnight. For a long, pulsing moment, their gazes held.

Then she waved her fan at the empty seat nearby. “It’s uncomfortable to converse with my head tipped back, Your Grace,” she said.

“Forgive me.” He sat. “How rude of me to loom over you in that way. But the view from above was . . .”

He trailed off as it belatedly dawned on him: She’d spoken in English, in the accents of his own class, no less. He’d answered automatically, taught from childhood to show his conversational partner the courtesy of responding in the latter’s language.

“But this is diabolical,” he said. “I should have wagered anything that you were French.” French, and a commoner. She had to be. He’d heard her speak to Orefeur in flawless Parisian French, superior to Clevedon’s, certainly. The accent was refined, but her friend—forty if she was a day—was an actress. Ladies of the upper ranks did not consort with actresses. He’d assumed she was an actress or courtesan.

Yet if he closed his eyes, he’d swear he conversed at present with an English aristocrat.

“You’d wager anything?” she said. Her dark gaze lifted to his head and slid down slowly, leaving a heat trail in its wake, and coming to rest at his neck cloth. “That pretty pin, for instance?”

The scent and the voice and the body were slowing his brain. “A wager?” he said blankly.

“Or we could discuss the merits of the present Figaro, or debate whether Rosina ought properly to be a contralto or a mezzo-soprano,” she said. “But I think you were not paying attention to the opera.” She plied her fan slowly. “Why should I think that, I wonder?”

He collected his wits. “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is how anyone could pay attention to the opera when you were in the place.”

“They’re French,” she said. “They take art seriously.”

“And you’re not French?”

She smiled. “That’s the question, it seems.”

“French,” he said. “You’re a brilliant mimic, but you’re French.”

“You’re so sure,” she said.

“I’m merely a thickheaded Englishman, I know,” he said. “But even I can tell French and English women apart. One might dress an Englishwoman in French fashion from head to toe and she’ll still look English. You . . .”

He trailed off, letting his gaze skim over her. Only consider her hair. It was as stylish as the precise coifs of other Frenchwomen . . . yet, no, not the same. Hers was more . . . something. It was as though she’d flung out of bed and thrown herself together in a hurry. Yet she wasn’t disheveled. She was . . . different.

“You’re French, through and through,” he said. “If I’m wrong, the stickpin is yours.”

“And if you’re right?” she said.

He thought quickly. “If I’m right, you’ll do me the honor of riding with me in the Bois de Boulogne tomorrow,” he said.

“That’s all?” she said, in French this time.

“It’s a great deal to me.”

She rose abruptly in a rustle of silk. Surprised—again—he was slow coming to his feet.

“I need air,” she said. “It grows warm in here.”

He opened the door to the corridor and she swept past him. He followed her out, his pulse racing.

Marcelline had seen him countless times, from as little as a few yards away. She’d observed a handsome, expensively elegant English aristocrat.

At close quarters . . .

She was still reeling.

The body first. She’d surreptitiously studied that while he made polite chitchat with Sylvie. The splendid physique was not, as she’d assumed, created or even assisted by fine tailoring, though the tailoring was exquisite. His broad shoulders were not padded, and his tapering torso wasn’t cinched in by anything but muscle.