Silk Is For Seduction - Loretta Chase [116]
“That doesn’t say much for the Season.”
“What is the matter with you?” she said. “I know you like to dance.”
“In Paris,” he said. “In Vienna. In Venice.”
“Do you know how many men and women would give a vital organ to be invited to that ball?” she said.
“You?” he said. “Wouldn’t you like to be there, showing off one of your creations?” A smile caught at the corner of his mouth and devilment danced in his eyes. “I should like to see you get into that party, uninvited.”
She wanted to scream.
“Are you not paying attention?” she said. “You need to court Lady Clara. What you don’t need is the woman everybody thinks is your latest liaison calling attention to herself. And what I don’t need is to alienate precisely the people I want to come into my shop. How many times must I explain this to you? How can you be so thick?”
He looked away. “I was picturing you at the ball, and it amused me. Well, I’ll imagine it while I’m there. That should allay the tedium.”
She could picture herself there, too—not the self she was, but the self she might have been, a gentleman’s daughter. But then, if she’d been welcome to that ball, she wouldn’t have Lucie. She would never have learned how to make clothes. She would never have truly found herself.
Not to mention she’d look like the rest of them.
Her life wouldn’t be so hard but it wouldn’t be nearly so much fun. One need only consider how bored he was, the great, spoiled numskull! Lady Brownlow had recently been elected a patroness of Almack’s. She was one of Society’s premier hostesses. Her parties were famous. And he acted as though he was forced to attend a lecture in calculus or one of those other horrible mathematical things.
“You will attend,” she said. “And you will not arrive late. You’ll make it clear that you want only to see Lady Clara, to be with Lady Clara. You’ll act as though no other woman in the place exists for you. You’ll act as though you haven’t known her for ages, but have only now truly discovered her. It will seem as though she has suddenly appeared to you, like a vision, like Venus rising from the sea.”
She wished Sophy were here to offer less clichéd dramatic imagery.
“You’ll sweep her off her feet,” she went on. “If the weather allows, you’ll lure her out onto the terrace or balcony or someplace private, and you’ll make it very romantic, and you’ll make it impossible for her to say anything but yes. It’s a seduction, Clevedon. Do keep that in mind. This isn’t your dear friend or your sister. This is a woman, a beautiful, desirable woman, and you are going to seduce her into becoming your duchess.”
Countess of Brownlow’s ball
Friday night
The Duke of Clevedon resolved to do exactly as Noirot advised. He refused to let himself think about what he was doing because, he told himself, there was nothing to think about. He wanted Clara to marry him. She’d always been meant for him. He’d always loved her.
Like a sister.
He crushed the thought the instant it popped into his mind. He went to Lady Brownlow’s ball. He followed Noirot’s instructions to the letter. He arrived not too early, because that would be gauche, but in good time. And he hunted Clara as he would have hunted a popular demimondaine or a dashing matron.
He exerted himself to amuse her, whispering witty remarks into her shell-shaped ear whenever he could get close enough. She was looking quite handsome this evening, and the sodding idiot beaux couldn’t keep away.
Noirot had dressed Clara in rose crepe, one of those robe sort of things. The front opening of this one revealed a white satin under-dress. Some ribbons crisscrossed the deep white V of the bodice, calling attention to her décolletage, while the bodice itself was shaped in diagonal folds that emphasized her voluptuous figure.
The men were almost visibly drooling and the women were almost visibly green.
He led her out to dance, aware that he was the luckiest man at the ball.
And he loved her.
Like a sister.
He strangled the thought while they danced, and it lay lifeless and forgotten in a dark, cobwebbed