Free Ways to Be Wicked by Julie Anne Long Page B

the ceremony of that great heavy velvet curtain. Tom’s face was solemn as a vicar’s, but his eyes glinted like the very devil’s. He clasped his hands behind his back and waited with wide eyes for her to comment.
    Sylvie could not recall words ever deserting her; the traitors, they were doing it now.
    “That . . .” Her voice was a little hoarse. She cleared her throat. “That wasn’t the same song, Mr. Shaughnessy.”
    “No? Wasn’t it?” All innocence. “Bother. Henri must have misled me. I’ll have a word with him. Perhaps my French is not quite so good as I thought.”
    She paused. “No,” she agreed slowly. “‘Good’ is not the word I would have chosen to describe your French, Mr. Shaughnessy.” She waited, and her heart beat just a little more quickly in anticipation.
    “Wicked, then?” he suggested quickly. “Would you perhaps use ‘wicked,’ instead?” He sounded as earnest as a schoolboy making a guess at an arithmetic problem.
    She couldn’t help it; it burbled out of her, a vein of humor struck. She laughed. He’d said precisely what he should have said next in the dance of flirtation, and it delighted her more than it should have, made her breathless the way a well-executed
pas de deux
did.
    The laughter, of course, only encouraged him; the wicked grin flashed. “Which part of the song did you like best, Miss Chapeau?”
    “The ending,” she said quickly, recovering.
    He looked at her again, speculatively. “Mmmm,” he said, considering this. “That might very well be true, but”—he reached out one finger and dragged it lightly along her flaming jaw—“you should see how attractively pink the
rest
of the song has made you.”
    She froze. Of all the bold, presumptuous—
    He took his hand away and glanced down at it briefly; confusion flickered, his brows dived a little.
    And even as outrage flamed in her eyes, even after he took his finger away, his touch echoed through her unnervingly.
    An odd silence followed.
    “A thought-provoking song, nevertheless, wouldn’t you say, Miss Chapeau?” he said, finally.
    “It provoked only a longing to hear a
good
tenor, Mr. Shaughnessy.” A tart and scrambling effort to impose a distance and gather the shreds of her composure.
    Up went his brows. “Did it? My apologies.” He sounded genuinely disappointed. “I thought perhaps you understood the lyrics. Clearly you did not, and I have misjudged you, and you are a mere innocent after all.”
    “I’m not a
mere
—”
    White teeth and that crescent-shaped dimple came into view again. “Yes?”
    She realized too late how ludicrous it was to defend her honor by declaring she was
not
innocent. Funny, but it had been the word “mere” her temper had reared up against. Sylvie had never been “mere” in any way.
    And as she wasn’t certain how to ease her way out of this particular corner, she remained silent.
    “Mmm. I didn’t think you were, somehow,” he said idly, and dipped a hand into his pocket and retrieved a watch; it glowed like a tiny planet in the dim theater. He nudged it open with his thumb, and when he saw the time, everything about him became brisk.
    “To the subject at hand, Miss Chapeau. I do not operate a charity.”
    She blinked. It was as though he’d finished a quick afternoon snack and was now pushing himself away from the table to get on with the rest of his day.
    “I beg your pardon?” she said.
    “It’s simple, you see. You may sing a bawdy song of my choosing, or you may dance with the other girls, or you may leave. Those are your choices. And yes, you are passing fair, but you may have noticed beauty is not a rarity, but a requirement, here at the White Lily. Had you been any plainer, I would have sent you packing much earlier. As I said, I cannot afford to offer charity.”
    Sylvie was speechless.
Passing fair?
When earlier she had been “beautiful”?
    “It’s called work, Miss Chapeau.
Travailler,
I believe they call it in your language.