Free Silk Is For Seduction by Loretta Chase

awake. Meanwhile Marcelline needed to scrub away the smell of the gambling houses. That was easy enough.
    The taste and smell of one gentleman wouldn’t be eradicated so easily. She could wash her face and clean her teeth but her body and mind remembered: Clevedon’s surprise, his quick heat, the bold response of his mouth and tongue, and the thrumming need he’d awakened with the simple motion of his hand sliding down her back.
    Kissing him had not been the wisest move a woman could make, but really, what was the alternative? Slap him? A cliché. Punch him? That hard body? That stubborn jaw? She’d only hurt her hand—and make him laugh.
    She doubted he was laughing now.
    He was thinking, and he would need to be thinking very hard. Harder, probably, than he’d done before in all his life.
    She felt certain he wouldn’t back down from the challenge. He was too proud and too determined to have the upper hand—of her, certainly, and probably the world.
    It would be entertaining, indeed, to see how he managed her entrée into the comtesse’s party. If it ended in humiliation for him, maybe he’d learn from the experience. On the other hand, he might come to hate Marcelline instead, and forbid his wife to darken the door of Maison Noirot.
    But Marcelline’s instincts told her otherwise. Whatever his faults—and they were not few—this was not a mean-spirited man or the sort who held grudges.
    “Go to bed,” she told Jeffreys. “We’ve a busy time ahead of us, preparing for the party. Everything must be perfect .”
    And it would be. She’d make sure of it, one way or another.
    Awaiting her was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, nearly as important as stealing the about-to-be Duchess of Clevedon from Dowdy’s.
    Clevedon had complicated what ought to have been a straightforward business. On her own, getting in would have merely demanded expert camouflage, evasive maneuvers, and, of course, thorough self-assurance. But no matter. Life had a way of wrecking her careful plans, again and again. Roulette was more predictable than life. Small wonder she was so lucky at it.
    Life was not a wheel going round and round. It never, ever, returned to the same place. It didn’t stick to simple red and black and a certain array of numbers. It laughed at logic.
    Beneath its pretty overdress of man-imposed order, life was anarchy.
    All the same, every time life had knocked her plans awry, she’d made a new plan and salvaged something. Sometimes she even triumphed. She was nothing if not resilient.
    Whatever happened this night, she’d make the most of it.
    That night
     
    I t would have served the insolent dressmaker right had Clevedon made her wait. He was not accustomed to taking orders from anybody, let alone a conceited little shopkeeper. Nine o’clock sharp , she’d said, as though he was her lackey.
    But that was a childish reaction, and he preferred she not add childishness to the list of character flaws she seemed to be compiling. She was sure to ascribe any delays to cowardly heel-dragging. She’d already as much as called him a coward, in offering to release him from the wager.
    He arrived promptly at nine o’clock. When the carriage door opened, he saw her outside at one of the tables under the portico. A gentleman, whose manner and dress proclaimed him English, was bent over her, talking.
    Clevedon had planned so carefully: what to wear to the ball and what to say to his hostess and what expression to wear when he said it. He had taken up and discarded half a dozen waistcoats and left his valet, Saunders, a heap of crumpled neckcloths to tend to. He had composed and rejected scores of clever speeches. He was, in short, wound up exceedingly tight.
    She, on the other hand, could not have appeared more at ease, lounging under the portico, flirting with any fellow who happened along. One would think she’d no more on her mind than an idle conversation with yet another potential payer of dressmakers’ bills.
    And