the present, however, he intended to make the most of every minute of these last weeks of freedom. Thus, the letter to Clara wasn’t his only business for the night.
He’d come in pursuit of Madame St. Pierre, who sat in a nearby box with her friends, occasionally casting not-unfriendly glances his way. He’d wagered Gaspard Aronduille two hundred pounds that Madame would invite him to her post-opera soirée whence Clevedon fully expected to make his way to her bed.
But the mysterious brunette…
Every man in the opera house was aware of her.
None of them was paying the slightest attention to the opera.
French audiences, unlike the English or Italians, attended performances in respectful silence. But his companions were whispering frantically, demanding to know who she was, “that magnificent creature” sitting with the actress Sylvie Fontenay.
He glanced at Madame St. Pierre, then across the opera house at the brunette.
Shortly thereafter, while his friends continued to speculate and argue, the Duke of Clevedon left his seat and went out.
“That was quick work,” Sylvie murmured behind her fan.
“Reconnaissance pays,” Marcelline said. She’d spent a week learning the Duke of Clevedon’s habits and haunts. Invisible to him and everyone else, though she stood in plain sight, she’d followed him about Paris, day and night.
Like the rest of her misbegotten family, she could make herself noticed or not noticed.
Tonight she’d stepped out of the background. Tonight every eye in the theater was on her. This was unfortunate for the performers, but they had not earned her sympathy. Unlike her, they had not put forth their best effort. Rosina was wobbling on the high notes, and Figaro lacked joie de vivre.
“He wastes not a moment,” said Sylvie, her gaze ostensibly upon the doings on stage. “He wants an introduction, so what does he do? Straight he goes to the box of Paris’s greatest gossips, my old friend the Comte d’Orefeur and his mistress, Madame Ironde. That, my dear, is an expert hunter of women.”
Marcelline was well aware of this. His grace was not only an expert seducer but one of refined taste. He did not chase every attractive woman who crossed his path. He did not slink into brothels—even the finest—as so many visiting foreigners did. He didn’t run after maids and milliners. For all his wild reputation, he was not a typical libertine. He hunted only Paris’s greatest aristocratic beauties and the crème de la crème of the demimonde.
While this meant her virtue—such as it was—was safe from him, it did present the challenge of keeping his attention long enough for her purposes. And so her heart beat faster, the way it did when she watched the roulette wheel go round. This time, though, the stakes were much higher than mere money. The outcome of this game would determine her family’s future.
Outwardly, she was calm and confident. “How much will you wager that he and monsieur le comte enter this box at precisely the moment the interval begins?” she said.
“I know better than to wager with you,” said Sylvie.
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 said to Mademoiselle Fontenay all that good manners required, 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 neckcloth. “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.