Free How To Tempt a Viscount by Margaret McPhee Page A

returning to London.’
    So you could ensure that you had rearranged your engagements to minimize the time you must spend in my company? She had not spoken the words to him before out of timidity. She did not speak them now because they were contrary to the purpose she had in mind.
    ‘I wanted to surprise you, Marcus.’ Most certainly she wanted to do that. She curved her lips and looked at him with that heat in her eyes, just the way Kitty had shown her, and held his gaze for precisely three seconds before she released it.
    ‘I am most certainly surprised.’ He was looking at her in a way that he had never looked at her before.
    Her smile was almost genuine this time. Emboldened by success, she threw him a flirtatious glance up through her lashes before pretending to turn her attention back to the stage; as if that were possible with Marcus present. He took the seat by her side, yet she did not look around. A small silence opened up, different from all the silences that had been between them before. This silence was not strained or awkward. She did not twist the fingers of her gloves out of nervousness, or attempt to raise inconsequential small talk that he would ignore. This time she let the silence stretch, as if she had forgotten that he were there, although awareness of his very proximity tingled through her and the whole side of her body closest to him warmed from the heat and masculinity of his aura. And all the while she did not let her gaze leave the stage.

    ‘How were your parents?’
    ‘They were very well.’ And relieved that their daughter had gone back to her husband. Had they known of what she had planned and plotted all these months past they would have felt nothing of that relief.
    ‘And Southampton?’
    ‘Most educational.’ In more ways than he could possibly imagine.
    His attention was not elsewhere, cool and oblivious of her presence, and always with that underlying edge of resentment. She could feel the intensity of his stare, the full weight of his focus, and with it, for the very first time, came a sense of power, and the feeling was a balm to the rawness in Ellen’s heart.
    ‘You seem…different. I barely recognised you.’
    She barely recognised herself when she looked in the peering glass. Her hair had been washed in beer to make it shine, then curled and pinned and dressed for hours. Her freckles were covered with a fine dusting of rice powder and her lips were stained with the smallest hint of carmine before a smear of gloss. The corsets and dresses revealed her body in a way it had never been revealed before. And then there was her posture and her way of moving. Ellen had been a diligent pupil. On the outside, the plain mousy girl was gone, and on the inside, determination seemed to have obliterated all of her fears and anxieties.
    ‘Different?’ She looked at him then, with raised eyebrows that had been perfectly plucked and shaped and combed, her expression all feigned innocence. ‘How so?’
    His gaze moved over her hair, down over the line of her throat, to linger upon her breasts, which were in danger of escaping the bodice of her dress, before coming back up to study her face. Ellen quashed her embarrassment, quelled that instinct to look down at her lap and fidget.
    ‘Your dress…’ There was nothing of the usual barely veiled disinterest in his tone, nothing of that strained reserve. Indeed, he was looking at her, really looking at her for the first time. She saw the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed.
    ‘I have found myself a new dressmaker.’ She leaned ever so slightly towards him, lowering her voice to a husky whisper as if they were conspirators, and presenting him with a more impressive view of her cleavage. ‘Do you like it?’ His eyes dropped to her breasts, just as Kitty had said they would, before he dragged them back to her own.
    ‘Very much so.’
    She smiled invitingly before returning her view to the play. ‘ Romeo and Juliet. Did you know it