“This is an agreeable room.” She pulled the green dress over her head and smoothed it down her hips. It fit well. His woman friend was almost precisely of a size with her, except with a larger bosom. A lovely and womanly bosom. “I notice it contains a great many deadly things. I would not trust me here if I were you. I would keep me in your dungeon, which you insist you do not have.”
“No dungeons. I have a comfortable, boring room I put dangerous people in. I won’t show it to you because I don’t want to frighten you out of your wits. I promised Galba you’d behave sensibly.”
“At least I shall not attack you with any of these tempting objects you have left strewn about. Not at this moment.” She tried to reach the buttons on her back, but he nudged her gently around and did them up for her. “Thank you. It is difficult to dress in fashionable clothing, unaided. One would expect life to be better managed.”
He watched her as if he were trying to take her heart apart like a puzzle box. As he was her interrogator, it would be his task, for a time, to take her apart piece by piece. It is inexpressibly frightening to be the puzzle box in these cases.
He did the last button. “Maggie bought a comb. It’s on the dresser.”
“The Maggie of Doyle? Do you tell me these are her clothings? I am very surprised.” She thought about Doyle, who had been to Cambridge and bought his wife such dresses. And such underthings. “I think she is not at all as I pictured her.”
Grey did not wait for her to take the comb but picked it up himself and began to use it in her hair. He combed and smoothed after it with his hand. It was a common action, strong and simple as a sunset or standing in the sea. A man did such things for a woman who belonged to him.
In the mirror, her mouth was ripe as fruit, and her eyes were soft and foolish. She looked altogether like a woman who had just given her virginity to someone. The bathtub part of it was no longer obvious, since she was not dressed in a long white robe. Grey had transformed himself into a gentleman, here in the heart of his power. He wore an evening jacket that was the blue black of midnight and a waistcoat with thin stripes of burgundy and white. A heavy signet ring gleamed dull gold as it slid in and out of her hair with each stroke of the comb. He was not handsome. Men such as Grey ate handsome dandies for breakfast twice a week. If she had been a foolish young girl, she would have been dazzled.
“When I escape from this prison,” she said, “I shall find a boy of the Rom, younger and darker and handsomer than you. I shall make love to him in barns and haystacks until I do not feel this way for you.” She said it to hurt him and to free herself from him. She did not like what she saw in her own eyes in the mirror.
“I hope you enjoy yourself. You won’t change what’s between us, Annique, not with fifty Gypsy boys.”
She wished he did not speak so many excellent truths to her. She stepped from his hold and began to straighten the clutter upon his dresser, lining everything up. “One does not love one’s jailer. It is a fallacy jailers have, that their prisoners like them, but it is never true. If you had not trapped me, I would have walked away by now. In a week I would have forgotten you altogether.” Or in a month, or a year. Or never. “There is nothing between us except a hunger of bodies.”
“There’s that, too.”
“I do not want to feel anything for you. Do you understand? Can you imagine what it is to have not even a shift to wear? To be so dependent upon a man that I must ask him for clothing? This is not a good basis for friendship.”
“I know. It makes it harder. Will you sleep with me tonight?”
He would ask. Not demand. Just ask. She did not know how to fight such cunning. “Can I say no?”
“Of course you can. There are five or six empty bedrooms, one right across the hall. I can put you in there.” He took back the space between them till they were almost touching. “I’ll leave my door unlocked. Will you come to me?”
“I am very stupid.”
“I think that means yes.” He was smiling.
She gave him his victory. “I would come to you sometime in the night, tiptoeing down the hall, and open the door and crawl in beside you. Already, I am listening to the argument your body makes to mine. If you carried me to that bed, even without taking a moment to be persuasive, I would want you like flames.”
“The hall gets chilly. Sleep with me tonight, in that bed.”
He cradled her cheek into the warm hardness of his palm. He was so aware of her…even the infinitesimal nod of her head, he felt.
“You have to say it.”
“Yes.” She was without shame.
“I’ll hold you to that.” He drew her against him, body to body, and nuzzled into her hair, breathing the scent, making a growl deep in his throat. It grappled at her heart, that he desired even her smell.
His hands also hungered for her. They molded the soft dress to her buttocks, stroking, taking pleasure in the shape of her body. She closed her eyes to be in the darkness with the strength of him, and his hunger, and the massive beating heart. There was nothing but sensation. Heat ignited between her legs and spread sweetly. She glowed inside her skin, in ripples. She was drunk with it. She was…
She was Annique Villiers, and this man was her enemy.
She pushed away from him, breathing hard. She had been moaning little noises and not realized. Truly, she was a fool.
“I make…” She had to start again. “I make mistakes with you. I lose myself.”
“You’re not used to being confused.”
“Do not patronize me, monsieur. I have gone ever so slightly mad where you are concerned. It could happen to anyone.” She stomped across the room, barefoot, to sit on the edge of the chair. The Maggie of Doyle had provided her silk stockings with a white pattern. Exquisite. She would wear exquisite stockings to go mad in. “Perhaps I shall regain my senses and sleep alone tonight. Who knows? You cannot bemuse me and entangle me forever.”
“We’re entangling each other.”
“But one of us is the jailer. You want me to forget that. That is why you are so gentle. Me, I would rather you were sincere and badgered me with questions. Then I would remember I am a prisoner. If I had any pride, I would not crawl into your bed and play the whore.”
Silence struck, forceful as any bolt of lightning. Tension crackled in the air between them. She felt his anger like hot sparks on her skin. “Is that what you’re doing? Playing the whore?”
She would not look at him. “I have been taught to do that, if captured.”
The man who gazed down at her was entirely Grey. Not one speck of Robert. “Prisoner and jailer? If that’s all we are, then let’s get down to a little badgering. Tell me about the Albion plans. Who gave them to you? Ah. That’s almost perfect. You look surprised and offended. Very good.”
Chill wrapped her suddenly, because he was angry at her and because he was a man who could see through lies. She had nothing, really, that belonged to her now but her lies. She tied her garter and secured the stocking into place. “I have never seen these plans everyone is so fond of believing I carry around with me like a cat her kittens. I do not know why—”
“You carry them in your head.”
Cold covered her. Froze her heart. She could not move. He cannot know that. He cannot. No one knows that. “I do not understand what you mean.”
“Every page, every list, every map. It’s all in there in your memory, knocking up against Racine and Voltaire and Tacitus. That’s why Leblanc’s never going to find them. He doesn’t know where to look.”
Slowly, she slipped on the shoes he had brought for her from somewhere. She must keep moving. Her brain would not work, not even one tiny bit. He knows. He knows. How can he know?
He studied her and waited. “I didn’t mean to strike you dumb.”