Free How To Tempt a Viscount by Margaret McPhee Page B

is my favourite Shakespeare?’
    ‘I did not,’ she heard him say. ‘But then I am only just realising there is much I do not know about you, Ellen.’
    She watched the figures on the stage without seeing them, for she was trying too hard to keep the swell of emotion hidden. And she was too conscious of the tall, dark handsome man by her side, and of what she had come to London to do to him.
     
    How could a man fail to recognize his own wife? Marcus was still asking himself the question by the time they were travelling home in the carriage. She was his wife. He had known her in the most intimate of senses, yet, if he were honest, he did not know her at all. Not the girl who had stood so quietly by his side at the altar and lain beneath him so unresponsive in the marriage bed, nor the woman who sat opposite him in the shadowed light of the carriage now. In the glow of the street lamps his eye skimmed over her perfect face, down over the long black velvet cloak that he knew hid the perfect figure. His memory of his wife was of a timid girl, painfully shy and whom his company seemed to make nervous and uncomfortable. He wondered how he could have failed to notice the strong sensual woman who now sat opposite him. But then given the mess of his emotions at the time of his wedding he supposed it was possible. Simmering anger, betrayal and resentment had a way of blinding a man to all else.

    ‘What has prompted your return to London?’ he asked.
    ‘It is the start of the Little Season and what was it that Dr Johnson said…? “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life.” I wanted to visit the shops, the social scene, the theatre…and my husband, of course.’ He heard the small seductive smile more than saw it. ‘And then there are my duties as your wife—’ she smiled again and he felt his mouth go dry and his blood surge even though she finished it with words of innocence ‘—charitable works, entertaining, support and the like.’
    And then, while he watched in stunned fascination, she laid her head back against the squabs and closed her eyes. The rest of the journey was in silence.
     
    Ellen was too much on his mind. Marcus could not sleep that night nor could he concentrate the next day in critical discussions over his father’s Tollerton estate. There was a sensual tension between his wife and him that, by the time of Fallingham’s ball the following evening, seemed to be winding tighter with every hour that passed.
    Attraction. The very air seemed thick with it as he stood watching Arlesford partnering her upon the dance floor. She had barely noticed him all night, engaged as she was in having such a good time chatting and laughing and dancing with everyone except him. The steps she wove with Arlesford were those of a chaste cotillion yet Marcus found himself unable to take his eyes from her. And even though Arlesford was his friend and Ellen his wife, he found himself brooding with a possessiveness he had never previously felt. So that when the set and the music finished and the Volse began and Arlesford showed no sign of returning her, he found himself up on the floor cutting in on the duke. The Volse —hardly a dance of the Ton, but one that he had no intention of letting her dance with another.
    ‘My dance, I believe, old friend,’ he laughed, but there was steel behind the words and he knew that Arlesford heard it. And then she was in his arms and he thought no more about Arlesford.
    Twelve inches. A respectable enough distance between them in this rather risqué German dance. Her eyes met his and held. Storm grey eyes filled with such sensual promise, so that the crowd on Fallingham’s dance floor seemed to vanish. Attraction shimmered between them. Heated. Intimate. Shocking in its intensity. And then her lashes lowered and she was once again the demure and proper girl he had married. The contrast intrigued him. He studied the sweep of her lashes, the creamy curve of her cheek, the soft