Free Ways to Be Wicked by Julie Anne Long Page A

order to earn my keep.”
    She hoped, hoped, hoped he wouldn’t interpret this question pruriently.
    She needn’t have worried. “Perhaps you sing?” he asked, his mind clearly ticking away.
    “Well—” Sylvie could carry a tune, but more often than not, the tune carried her. It was her body, not her voice, which understood music so well. “Yes.” Which was merely a short version of the truth.
    “Do you sing...well?” He sounded troubled by the very idea. “You see, we don’t want to frighten the audience with...exquisite singing. Most of these men can hear a soprano in any drawing room, you see. They come here to get
away
from sopranos in the drawing room. Sopranos remind them of long evenings with their wives.”
    “No one will ever invite me to sing in a drawing room,” Sylvie told him quite truthfully.
    “Would you be willing to sing a bawdy song then?”
    She blinked. “A baw—” The words began as a choked laugh and stopped when she noticed there was absolutely nothing of humor in his face. It had been a flat question.
    He was a businessman deciding how to deploy an asset, and she was the asset.
    “A bawdy song,” he reiterated impatiently. “Such as...” Tom paused in thought, and then tilted his head back and in a surprisingly decent tenor sang:
    “Nell was a young woman so young and so fair
    Who cherished her virtue ’til she met Lord Adair
    Who took her for a ride in the warm summer air
    And gave her a necklace of baubles to wear
    Of baubles, of baubles, of baubles to wear,
    Oh!
    He gave her a necklace of baubles to wear!
    He looked at her. “A bawdy song,” he concluded briskly.
    And now the expression on his face was so distinctly at odds with the content of his song that incredulity warred with hilarity as she decided what to say next.
    “Pretty song,” she finally said, solemnly. “Perhaps
you
should sing it, instead.”
    “Oh, I would,” Tom assured her in all seriousness, “if I thought anyone would pay to see
me
rouged, or in a shift.”
    “And are you certain no one would?”
    The words were out before she could stop them, because it was precisely the thing any accomplished coquette would have been unable to resist saying in similar circumstances. She regretted them for an instant.
    In the next instant, she was surprised to find herself rather breathlessly looking forward to what Tom Shaughnessy might say.
    Nothing, as it turned out—for a time, anyway. He regarded her instead, eyes aglow in pure pleasure—he was utterly pleased with
her
—the corner of his mouth quirked upward speculatively, as if deciding what to say next.
    “I can sing the French version, too,” he said suddenly. “My friend Henri taught the words to me. Would you like to hear it?”
    “Have I a choice?”
    He ignored her question, and squeezed his eyes closed for a moment in thought, apparently scanning his memory for the lyrics.
    At last he opened his eyes, and opened his mouth, and—
    Well, the language he used was certainly French.
    But the song suddenly had nothing at all to do with Nell and Lord Adair.
    Instead, it was all about what a certain man would like to do to a certain woman and what position he’d like to do it
in,
and how certain he was that the woman would enjoy it. Baubles
did
play a role—though they were called something else entirely in this version of the song, as this was French—and the chorus was sung just as enthusiastically.
    Perhaps most shockingly, it all rhymed beautifully.
    And as he sang: heat. In her cheeks, in the pit of her stomach, sweeping up her arms.
Everywhere
as he sang, the song creating the most specific pictures in her head.
    She was certain the bloody man had made the lyrics up on the spot.
    For heaven’s sake, she’d danced for kings; she couldn’t recall the last time she’d conjured a genuine blush. But this man had sent her composure scattering as surely as a cue dashed into a triangle of billiard balls.
    When he was done, silence dropped with