Temptation In Regency Society. Margaret McPhee

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СКАЧАТЬ measure so that she thought he meant to refuse her but, just as she thought it, she felt his grip loosen and drop away.

      She gathered up the black dress from where it lay on the floor and, turning her back to him, quickly garbed herself. She stretched around and tightened the laces of the bodice that she could reach, but had no other option than to leave the remainder loose. The dress gaped from the untied laces, revealing far too much of the pale swell of her bosom. It was the antithesis of respectable clothing, but it was better than facing him naked. She hoisted the neckline of the dress and clutched it in place. Dominic had finished his own dressing and now watched her with eyes burning with a shock that mirrored her own and an unmistakable anger.

      ‘I will ask you again, Arabella,’ he said with a quietness that was deadly, ‘what are you doing here?’

      ‘The same as any woman does in a place such as this.’ She faced him defiantly, and with a determination to hide the shame and wretchedness beneath that façade.

      ‘Whoring.’ His voice was harsh.

      ‘Surviving,’ she said with as much dignity as she could muster and stared down his contempt.

      ‘And where in damnation is Henry Marlbrook while you are “surviving” in a brothel? What manner of husband is he that you have been reduced to this?’ His voice changed, hardened, as he spoke Henry’s name and the word ‘husband.’

      ‘Do not dare to mention Henry’s name.’ Arabella would not stand here and hear it.

      ‘Why ever not?’ he threw back at her. ‘Frightened that I find him and run him through?’

      ‘Damn you, Dominic! He is dead!’

      ‘Then he has saved me the trouble,’ he said coldly.

      Arabella gasped at Dominic’s cruelty and then, before she could think better of it, she slapped him hard across his face. The crack resounded in the room around them and was followed by silence. Even in the soft flickering candlelight she could see the mark her palm had left upon his cheek.

      His eyes had been dark before, but now they appeared as black and deadly as the night that surrounded them. But Arabella would not back down.

      ‘You deserved that.’ For everything he had done. ‘Henry was a good man, a better man by far than you, Dominic Furneaux!’

      Henry had been kind.

      And Arabella had been grateful.

      She saw something flicker in the darkness of Dominic’s eyes.

      ‘Just as he was all those years ago,’ he said in a chilled voice. ‘I have not forgotten, Arabella, not for one single day.’

      Neither had she. With those few words all the past was back in an instant. Of the joy of losing her heart to Dominic, of her happiness and expectations for the future, of the lovemaking they had shared. Lies and illusions, all of it. It had meant nothing to him. She had meant nothing to him, other than another notch upon his bedpost. At nineteen she had not understood the base side of men and their desires. At four-and-twenty Arabella knew better.

      ‘You wasted no time in wedding him. Less than four months from what I hear.’

      She could hear the accusation in his voice, the jealousy, and it fanned the flames of her ire. ‘What on earth did you expect?’ she shouted.

      ‘I expected you to wait, Arabella!’

      ‘To wait?’ She stared at him in disbelief. ‘What manner of woman did you think me?’ Did he honestly think that she would have welcomed him back with open arms? That she would have given herself to him again after he had discarded her in such a humiliating way? ‘I could not wait, Dominic,’ she said harshly. ‘I was—’ Her eyes sought his.

      His gaze was dark and angry and arrogant, every inch the hard, ruthless nobleman she knew him to be.

      ‘You were …?’

      She hesitated and felt the pulse in her throat beat a warning tattoo.

      ‘A fool,’ she finished. A fool to have believed his lies. A fool to have trusted him. ‘You have what you came here for, Dominic. Now be gone and leave me alone.’

      ‘So that you might rush down to Mrs Silver’s drawing room to offer a “glass of champagne” to the next gentleman who is doubtless already waiting there.’ Contempt dripped from his every word. ‘I do not think so.’

      How dare he? she thought. How damnably dare he stand there and judge me after what he has done? And in that moment she hated him with a passion that was in danger of driving every last vestige of control from her head. She wanted to scream at him and hit him and unleash all of her anger, for all that he had done then, and for all that he had done now. But she hung on to her self-control by the finest of threads.

      His eyes held hers for a moment longer and the very air seemed to hiss between them. Then he walked over to stand behind one of the two black armchairs by the fireplace.

      ‘Sit down, Arabella. We need to talk.’

      She gave a shake of her head. ‘I think not, your Grace,’ she said and she was proud that her voice came out as cold and unemotional as his, for beneath it she was shaking like a leaf.

      ‘If it is the money you are concerned over, rest assured that I have paid for the whole night through.’ He looked at her with flint in his eyes.

      There was a lump the size of a boulder in her throat that no amount of swallowing would shift. She faced him squarely, pretending she was not ravaged with shame, pretending that she was standing there completely untouched by the fury of emotion that roared and clashed between them.

      Pretending that she had no secrets to hide.

      He gestured to the armchair before him. ‘Come, Arabella, sit. After what has just passed between us there is no room for coyness.’ His voice was harsh and his face was set harder, more handsome, more resolute than ever she had seen it. And she knew that he would not change his mind.

      ‘Damn you,’ she whispered and the scars throbbed as if they had never healed and his reappearance, after all these years when Arabella had thought never to see him again, sparked fears that she was only just beginning to grasp.

      Only once Arabella was seated did Dominic take the chair opposite hers.

      ‘Did you know it was me from the start?’

      ‘Of course I did not!’ The fury he felt for both her and himself made his voice harsh. It did not matter what she had done, he would never have taken her out of vengeance.

      ‘Then how did you realise?’

      ‘How did I not realise sooner?’ he demanded, but the question was not really for her but, rather, for himself. ‘Me, who has known every inch of your body, Arabella.’ One flimsy black-feathered mask alone had been enough to fool him, he thought bitterly, and knew that was not quite true. It was the fact that this, a bordello, a bawdy house, a brothel, was the last place on earth he would have ever thought of finding her.

      The thought of what she had become shocked him to the core. The thought that СКАЧАТЬ