Page 35 of The Spy and the Nightingale
“Do you require express permission to handle me rudely? Very well. I grant you carte blanche.” Truly, the particulars dictating this conversation were unreal.But I won’t back down from it now, nor from you.“I do not need to understand other men’s ways with their kept women, however. I need only understand howyouhandle yours.”
Something flared in his eyes. “I’ve never kept a woman,” he said curtly.
“You’ve had lovers.”
Her words hung in the space separating them.
Strong emotions chased themselves briefly across Nathaniel’s face, but she couldn’t have named them specifically.
“It is not at all the same.” His voice was still low, the rasp nearly tactile on her skin.
“ThatI do understand. But do you not see? I am willing to goto whatever lengths we must go, whether tonight or if I accompany you to Le Repaire, but I cannot go into it unprepared. Nothing you do will shatter me, if that is your hesitation. Not after all else I’ve lived these past months. Don’t you see? I’venothingleft to lose.I will do whatever I must.”
Admittedly she’d known Nathaniel only a short time, although long enough to recognize the intensity he kept carefully leashed.
She had not yet seen him angry.
“There is always something left to lose.” His voice was velvet soft, dangerous. His eyes urged her to step cautiously.
A warning she ignored. “Either we have faith in one another for this particular endeavor, or we do not. Either we agree here and now that we are equally committed to success, whatever that entails and by whatever means, or we must not do this at all.” She strove to keep her voice level. Failed utterly. “So which shall it be? I think you must decide that in this room. It must be now.” A sarcastic echo of his earlier words.
“Are you so certain”—his voice, gravel now—“thatIam not a danger to you? On only four days’ acquaintance?”
She was suddenly furious that he was trying this again, veiled intimidation to deflect her questions. She’d known him only four days, but she knew him far better now than during that fiacre ride.
“Should it win us our objectives, you may do your worst to me. You may act as base as any man may, and I absolve you now. Is that what you require me to say? There, I have said it.”
Nathaniel pushed himself off the table. There was nothing of kindness in his face, his eyes burning into hers. Had she misjudged after all what manner of man he was? Or in her anger goaded him beyond restraint? She did not after allknowhim, not really.
“Base, you said?” He stopped, too close to her; his nearnessbecame an assault on all her senses. “My worst? You don’t want that.”
Bravado could bolster her only so far, but rage was another matter. And itwasrage: rage at Lucy’s situation, at him, at her own helplessness to act alone in this shadow world where men called all the shots and women had none of the power.
That rage scorched clean through her.
“You do not get to decide what I want,” she snapped. “Perhaps I do.”
He reached out and tipped her chin up so that she had no choice but to meet his tiger’s-eyes. “Shall we test it, then?”
The air left the room.
He took hold of her by the waist and spun her so that she faced the mirror. He pulled her sharply back against an unyielding wall of muscle, one arm pinning her in place.
“If you are treated as an object only to serve a man’s pleasure... you will be on display, like so.” He drew one of her arms slowly, slowly upwards and around his neck, the intimate clasp of a lover. “You draw a man’s eye, with or without that gown. You did mine from the first,” he said low.
She clutched his forearm with her free hand, snared by the ferocity of his eyes in the mirror.
“You will be noticed.” His mouth was beside her ear. “If challenged, the man I am outside these rooms, Beaumont, won’t scruple to lay public claim to what is his—mine—alone.” He set his mouth, open, to the vulnerable spot where her neck and shoulder met.
Sensation skittered through her body at the edge of his teeth against her skin. She tracked his hand’s unhurried path sliding up her rib cage.
“You could yet walk away from this,” he murmured.
His knuckles, just brushing the underside of one breast. Histhighs, hard against her bottom. His thighs... and his cock. Anger lit his eyes, but oh, it was not only that, not nearly.
A wicked heat thrilled through her blood: Whatever else his motives, he desired her. She met his eyes. “I will not.”
His hand slipped higher, up over her breast. His palm passed lightly over her nipple, barely skimming it through the silk, just enough to sensitize it. His breath was hot on her neck.
