“So it is,” he said, and fell silent for a long moment before asking the question around which he’d been dancing. “There are other dowries, Lady Georgiana,” he said. “Why yours?”
She stilled. Answered, perhaps too truthfully. “There are none as large as mine. And none that come with such freedom.”
One golden brow rose. “Freedom?”
A thread of discomfort curled through her. “I do not have expectations for the marriage.”
“No dreams of a marriage of convenience turning into to a love match?”
She laughed. “None.”
“You’re awfully young to be so cynical.”
“I am six and twenty. And it’s not cynicism. It’s intelligence. Love is for poets and imbeciles. I am neither. The marriage comes with freedom. The purest, basest, best kind.”
“It comes with a daughter, as well.” The words weren’t meant to sting, but they did, and Georgiana stiffened. He had the grace to look apologetic. “I am sorry.”
She shook her head. “It is the truth, is it not? You know that better than anyone.”
The cartoon again.
“You should be pleased,” she offered. “My brother has been trying to bring me back to Society for years – if he’d only known that a ridiculous cartoon would be so motivating.”
He smiled, and there was a boyish charm in the expression. “You suggest I do not know my own strength.”
She matched his expression. “On the contrary, I think you know it all too well. It is only unfortunate that I do not have another newspaper on hand to reverse the spell your Scandal Sheet has cast.”
He met her gaze. “I have another.” Her heart began to race, and though she was desperate to speak, she kept silent, knowing that if she let him talk, she might get what it was she wanted.
And he might think it was his idea.
“I’ve four others, and I know what men search for.”
“Besides a massive dowry?”
“Besides that.” He stepped closer. “More than that.”
“I don’t have much else.” Not anything she could admit to, at least.
He lifted one hand, and her breath caught. He was going to touch her. He was going to touch her, and she was going to like it.
Except he didn’t. Instead, she felt a little tug at her coif, and his hand came away, a snowy white egret feather in his grasp. He ran it between his fingers. “I think you have more than you can imagine.”
Somehow, the cold March night became hot as the sun. “It sounds as though you are offering me an alliance.”
“Perhaps I am,” he said.
She narrowed her gaze. “Why?”
“Guilt, probably.”
She laughed. “I cannot imagine that is it.”
“Perhaps not.” He reached for her hand and she stretched her arm out to him as though she were a puppet on strings. As though she did not have control over herself. “Why worry about the reason?”
The feather painted its way over the soft skin above her glove and below her sleeve, at the inside her elbow. She caught her breath at the delicate, wonderful touch. Duncan West was a dangerous man.
She snatched her hand back. “Why trust you when you’ve just admitted you’re in this to sell newspapers?”
That handsome mouth curved in wicked temptation. “Wouldn’t you rather know precisely with whom you are dealing?”
She smiled at that. “Surely this is the best fortune a girl on a dark balcony has ever had.”
“Fortune has nothing to do with it.” He paused, then added, “There’s little love lost between me and Society.”
“They adore you,” she said.
“They adore the way I keep them entertained.”
There was a long moment as Georgiana considered his offer. “And me?”
That smile flashed again, sending a thread of excitement pooling in her stomach. “The entertainment in question.”
“And how do I benefit?”
“The husband you wish. The father you desire for your daughter.”
“You will tell them I am reformed.”
“I’ve seen no evidence that you are not.”
“You saw me goad a girl into insulting me. You saw me threaten her family. Force her friends to desert her.” She looked into the darkness. “I am not certain what I have is desirable.”
His lips curved in a knowing smile. “I saw you protect yourself. Your child. I saw a lioness.”
She did not miss the fact that he’d been a lion mere minutes earlier. “Every tale has two tellers.”
He opened his coat and inserted the feather in the inside pocket, before buttoning the coat once more. She could no longer see the plume, but she felt it there nonetheless, trapped against his warmth, against the place where his heart beat in strong, sure rhythm. Trapped against him.
He was a very dangerous man.
He grinned, all wolf, this powerful man who owned London’s most-read papers. The man who could raise or ruin with the ink of his printing press. The man she needed to believe her lies. To perpetuate them.
“There you are wrong,” he said, the words threading through her like sin. “Every tale worth telling has only one teller.”
“And who is that?”
“Me.”
Chapter 3
He should not have flirted with the girl.
West stood on the edge of the Worthington ballroom, watching Lady Georgiana dance across the room on the arm of the Marquess of Ralston. The man was rarely seen in the company of any but his wife, but there was no doubt that the Duke of Leighton had called in all of his chips – including his brother-in-law – that evening, in the hopes that the combined wealth and power of the Ralston and Leighton clans would blind Society into forgetting the lady’s past.