Silk Is For Seduction - Loretta Chase [100]
He looked about him. “I’m not sure it’s big enough. I’m not sure St. Paul’s Cathedral would be big enough to contain your ambition. Are there bounds to your ambition? Ordinary, mortal bounds, I mean?”
He knew her so well. She laughed. It hurt to laugh, but she did it.
He turned sharply toward her. “Noirot?”
“I was only thinking,” she said. “It’s all turned out as I’d imagined. No, better than I’d supposed. And yet . . . Oh, what a joke.”
She shook her head and moved away and sat on a chair and folded her hands and stared at the floor, at the rug he’d chosen. Crimson poppies intertwined among black tendrils and leaves on a background of pale gold . . . with a subtle pink undertone.
The colors of the dress she’d worn to the Comtesse de Chirac’s ball.
Then she realized: This home he’d created for them was his goodbye gift.
How ironic. How fitting.
She’d hunted him and she’d caught him and she’d got what she’d set out to get.
And she’d bollixed it up, after all.
What a joke.
She’d fallen in love.
And he was saying goodbye, in the time-honored fashion of men of his kind, with an extravagant gift.
“Noirot, are you unwell? It’s been a very long day, and we’re both overwrought, I daresay. It’s no small strain, even for you, trying to do the impossible—all this racing from one place to the next, buying, frantically buying. And I—shopping with a woman—it’s possible my sensibilities will never recover from the shock.”
She looked up at him.
They had no future.
Given who he was and what he was, she couldn’t be anything to him but a mistress. And that she couldn’t be. It wasn’t because of moral scruples. She barely understood what those were. It was for business reasons, for the business that supported her family, the business she loved, the great passion of her life.
She could keep her feelings to herself. She could suffer in silence. She could say thank you and goodbye, and really, there was nothing else to do.
The trouble was, being who she was and what she was, noble sacrifice was out of the question.
And the real trouble was, she loved him.
And so she made her plan, quickly. She saw it all at once in her mind’s eye, the way she saw all of her plans. She saw what she needed to do, the only thing to do.
She stood and walked to the bed and pointed. “I want you to sit there,” she said.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said.
She untied her bonnet ribbons.
“Noirot, maybe you failed to understand why I was in so great a hurry to have you out of my house,” he said. “I don’t care about talk, if it concerns only me. But you know the talk will hurt someone else.”
“You’re a man,” she said. “Men are readily forgiven what women are not.”
“I’ve promised myself I won’t do anything I’ll need to be forgiven for,” he said.
“You won’t be the first man to break a promise,” she said.
Still holding the bonnet by the strings, she looked at him, capturing his gaze. She hid nothing. All her heart was in her eyes and she didn’t care if he saw it.
She’d fallen in love, and she’d love for once, openly, without disguise or guile. That was the one last gift she’d give him, and herself.
He came to the bed and sat, his face taut.
She let the ribbons slide through her fingers. The bonnet dropped gently to the rug he’d chosen for her bedroom.
He watched it drop. “Damn you,” he said.
“It’s all right,” she said. “This is goodbye.”
“Noir—”
She set her index finger over his lips. “I thank you for all you’ve done,” she said. “I thank you from the very bottom of my cold, black heart. There are some things I can repay but more that I can never repay. I want my gratitude—its depth and breadth—to be clear, perfectly clear . . . because after tonight, you must never come back here. You must never come to my shop. When your lady wife or your mistress comes to Maison Noirot, you’ll stay far away. You will not speak to me in the street or anywhere else. After this night,