Good intentions forgotten, she snapped. "How nice. But I'm afraid I can't excuse you any."
"Ouch," he said, though he looked unmoved. "What sharp little claws you have. Perhaps you would like to try them out on me sometime—preferably soon," he suggested.
Clair ground her teeth, wanting to slap the fur from out beneath his skin. Years of her aunt's training, however, came to her rescue. "I must politely decline," was all she said.
Slyly, she dropped her silver charm bracelet on the floor by the earl's shiny boots. "How clumsy of me. Would you mind picking that up for me?"
Asher chuckled. "It appears closer to you than me. I must politely decline."
Just as she had surmised, he wouldn't touch the silver. Another piece of wolfish evidence. "Aha!" Clair retrieved the bracelet herself, hiding her smug smile. "If your august personage won't mind, I really will be taking my leave."
Asher grabbed her arm in a lightning-quick move. "My, my, you are a surprise. You have me all aquake with desire to see what you'll do next."
Clair looked pointedly at her arm. Slowly the earl released it, haughtily tilted his chin, and held his hands up in the air in a placating gesture, silently commanding her to stay. It didn't work.
"I think, my lord, you indulge your desires overmuch. It reminds me of a pig feeding at a trough," she retorted.
He laughed in spite of the insult. "You do me injury. But I must reply that desire is what separates us from lower beings."
Clair's early desire to flee fled. The earl had presented too good an opening to let her temper get the better of her. He was talking about being a werewolf, she felt certain. "Please, do go on."
"I am a something of a scientist myself. I believe in survival of the fittest. Those who lead in the world are born to do so. Those who are less superior and can't keep up are useless and disposable. After all, they are of no account in the grand scheme. This is a brutal world, where the elite are masters as they should be."
Of course! Clair reasoned that a werewolf would consider itself at the top of any food chain. That the earl was so open with his malevolent remarks surprised her. She wondered if he'd had too much to drink. Then she pondered if werewolves could get drunk. She contemplated: if a werewolf ate a human who was drunk, could that werewolf end up foxed?
"And you, being a noble, are part of this elite membership?"
Asher flicked a piece of lint from the cuff of his midnight blue jacket. "But of course, my child. I'm an earl. Centuries of good breeding—superlative breeding—are in my blood."
His tone was matter-of-fact, which was so much more than Clair Frankenstein had dreamed. In this man's heart lay a great darkness, where killing was no more immoral than eating an apple. Civilization and the centuries had reduced him to only feeding until his thirst was lessened, but it was never quenched. It didn't seem fair for a creature such as himself, a creature of unbridled passions and hunger, a species so savage few would knowingly dare cross him, and none of those would live to tell the tale. But this new century was very modern, and he was obviously too much the gentleman to kill for sport or for dinner. Otherwise she would know something of his crimes.
"How fortunate to be so far above us all," Clair remarked coolly.
After giving her a thoroughly dressing down with his eyes, Asher glanced around at the other members of society. He chuckled. "Without qualification."
Motioning to all the members of the ton, he added, "Look around you. These are cattle, existing merely for the sake of their own existence. They eat, drink, and seek their guilty pleasures, living and dying fast and furious. At the moment of their deaths they cry out for forgiveness, though the only regret most have is when they are caught raiding the cookie jar. I'll make no bloody bones about it. They're freaks in the circus of the damned."
"And you, my lord, are different? Don't you seek these same guilty pleasures for yourself?"
"Definitely," he professed, sending a heated glance at her breasts. "Would you care to help me obtain them?"
She cocked her chin and gave him an icy stare. His forwardness was not to be believed. "Again, I must decline. You are out of my league," she demurred frostily, feeling very much the fly to his spider.
"But Huntsley isn't," he said, an odd look in his eye.
"I fear you are too perceptive." She turned away, wondering what web he was spinning and how intricate the design.
"My pretty, don't play the blushing miss with me! You and Huntsley have become grist for the gossip mill."
She raised a dramatic hand to her breast and looked back. "I can't believe you would condescend to listen. You with your earldom and superior mind."
"Tsk, tsk. Such a sharp tongue. I wonder if your baron will be able to dull it. Well, he is an enterprising man, especially when he is on the hunt."
Clair smiled coolly. "You make me sound like a fox to be run to ground."
"And torn apart, depending on who catches you. Take my advice, my dear: Huntsley is a law unto himself. He's devoured more elusive prey than you before, and will most undoubtedly do so again." Asher wanted to toy with her, subtly coax her, wanted to poison her good thoughts of the baron.
"He has been all that is gentlemanly," she retorted, her eyes flashing. This puffed-up earl had no right to decry her Ian!
"Huntsley will do or say whatever to whomever in order to gain whatever his heart desires," Asher went on.
"And you know this how? He's never named you friend in my hearing."
"Nor would he. We are mere acquaintances who met by chance—competitors, if you will, at cards or in conquests of a more, shall I say, carnal nature?"
"Then you know him little."
Asher chuckled, shaking his head. "I know the type. Too well, I know what Huntsley is capable of to gain his ends. Right now he's playing a waiting game, cat to your mouse. In fact, he is playing the oldest game in the book."
"And what, pray tell, is that?" Her scorn was obvious. Clair didn't like what the earl was saying about Ian. She didn't like the earl's snobbish philosophy. Mainly, she didn't like the earl.
Although, in all fairness, before she met him, she had been prepared to give the earl the benefit of the doubt, since he was a werewolf. In her logical manner, Clair had diagnosed that it must be a difficult life as a wolf-man: never eating apricot tarts; always having to watch out for steel traps: always having to keep wolfhounds rather than her personal favorite, the spaniel. And then there was being genetically disposed to such big teeth, which would cause a person to bite their tongue a great deal whenever they shape-shifted. Or having to bear the indignity of ending up naked as the day they were born after shifting, and having to constantly hide clothes all over God-knew-where to prevent any tricky nude situations from occurring.
However, now that she had met the toplofty earl, she decided he was a dog of a different color.
"The oldest game besides 'hunt or be hunted' is much the same—the game between man and woman. Woman and man. The same game I'm playing now. I want you," Asher stated boldly, his chilly blue eyes appraising Clair hungrily.
"Then you're a muttonhead, even if you are an earl and one of your supercilious few. I know you're quite accustomed to getting everything your heart desires, but this time you're off the mark."
Asher shook his head, a lazy grin on his face. "Nothing is beyond my grasp, nothing in this whole bloody world." Amusement was clear on his cold but magnificent visage. He knew he had scored a hit or two with his poisoned-dart comments on Hunstley He had also enraged Clair Frankenstein enough to make sure the fiery lady would remember and think of him.
"I am," she remarked adamantly. Then she strode off regally, leaving him to his own company.
Clair Frankenstein was much more complex than he had first thought, Asher realized. She was also a stunningly beautiful woman with a voluptuous body and a spirit to match. A female who was indifferent to his regard, which set Asher's predatory instincts into overload. And to make matters even more interesting, Huntsley owed him a lover, for stealing that opera singer out from underneath his nose. Yes, Huntsley owed him that dark debt.