Free Your Scandalous Ways by Loretta Chase

hot fork.
    â€œGood heavens!” he said. “I do beg your pardon. Am I keeping you from your work?”
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    That did it, finally. She stared at James, the green eyes huge in her face, shadowed and so vulnerable. He knew it was simply the aftereffects of looking death in the eye, yet it angered him. Before this, she had been so confident, so arrogant—
    Then the too-fragile expression crumbled and she laughed, heartily and long.
    His heart skipped a beat and another and went on so, beating raggedly.
    He couldn’t help that. He couldn’t help smiling, either.
    She was good, very good, and at last he was beginning to understand—in his gut, not simply in his mind—why she was so deuced expensive and why the men who could afford her paid without the smallest hesitation. This was a rare beauty with a rare exuberance.
    She must be great fun in bed.
    Small wonder the notoriously fickle Bellaci had kept her for so long.
    â€œKeeping me from my work,” she said, her laughter subsiding to a soft chuckle while the naughty glint returned to her green eyes. “I must tell Giulietta. She’ll love that one. But no, Mr. Cordier, you are not keeping me from the streets, because I don’t walk them. Besides, you may have noticed that Venice hasn’t much in the way of streets. I’m the other kind of harlot. The excessively greedy kind. And I had planned to spend this night in bed—with a book. ”
    â€œThen it’s all too strange to me—at least to the Italian side of me,” he said. “I shouldn’t have imagined a woman of your quality would spend a night alone. But then, I’m still trying to imagine what would possess a man to divorce you. Was he enamored of his own sex perhaps? Or was it sheep he preferred?” He waved his hand, as though to dismiss the subject. “But it is none of my affair. I keep you from your book, and perhaps, after all, a book is preferable to a lover.”
    â€œSometimes,” she said, her mouth curving a little.
    It was only a teasing hint of the wicked smile that sent electric shocks of anticipation straight into a man’s bloodstream, to speed merrily to his reproductive organs.
    The tiny smile was a devilish glimpse of things to come. It might be an invitation. It might simply be teasing.
    Whatever it meant, it worked. His temperature was climbing and his brain was already turning over negotiations to his cock.
    Slow down, laddie, he told himself. You know better.
    He knew, far better than most men. He couldn’t succumb. He couldn’t let her have the upper hand. He’d already decided how he’d play this: hard to get.
    â€œHe divorced me for adultery,” she said.
    â€œShocking,” he said. “I should have thought he had a serious complaint: You’d put arsenic in his coffee or had his drawers starched or beat him at golf.”
    She shook her head. “I’m afraid not,” she said. “I only thought of the arsenic after—and then it was too late.”
    â€œIt’s never too late for arsenic,” he said. “What it is, is too slow. Unless you only want to make him desperately sick. Or to make sure he dies slowly and painfully. For fast work, I’d recommend prussic acid.”
    â€œYou seem to know a great deal about these matters.”
    He remembered that she’d watched him kill a man—or nearly kill him. James was acutely, embarrassingly aware that he’d been too enraged to pay attention to what he was doing. He’d no idea whether the pig had been breathing or not when dropped into the canal. An unconscious man sinks more or less the same way a dead one does.
    She was bound to wonder about a man who could incapacitate another with his bare hands. Clearly, she wasn’t the sort who was callous enough not to wonder. He’d met far too many women who wouldn’t wonder: Marta Fazi, most recently.
    â€œI do know a great