Regency Rogues and Rakes: Silk is for Seduction / Scandal Wears Satin / Vixen in Velvet / Seven Nights in a Rogue's Bed / A Rake's Midnight Kiss / What a Duke Dares. Loretta Chase
I’m going to the Palais Royal.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Aronduille. “Let’s see if the others wish to join us.”
The others had moved to the roulette table.
She was there still, in the crimson silk one could not ignore. The marquis remained at her side. In the same moment Clevedon was telling himself to look away, she looked up. Her gaze locked with his. An endless time seemed to pass before she beckoned with her fan.
He would have come whether or not he’d expected to find her here, he assured himself. He’d come, and found another man glued to her side. It was nothing to him. Paris abounded in fascinating women. He could have simply nodded or bowed or smiled an acknowledgment and left the hotel.
But there, she was, Sin Incarnate, daring him.
And there was Émilien.
The Duke of Clevedon had never yet yielded a woman he wanted to another man.
He joined them.
“Ah, Clevedon, you know Madame Noirot, I understand,” said Émilien.
“I have that honor, yes,” Clevedon said, sending her his sweetest smile.
“She has emptied my pockets,” said Émilien.
“The roulette wheel emptied your pockets,” she said.
“No, it is you. You look at the wheel, and it stops where you choose.”
She dismissed this with a wave of her fan. “It’s no use arguing with him,” she said to Clevedon. “I’ve promised to give him a chance to win back his money. We go to play cards.”
“Perhaps you will be so good as to join us,” said Émilien. “And your friends as well?”
They went to one of Paris’s more discreet and exclusive card salons, in a private house. When Clevedon arrived with the marquis’s party, several games were in progress in the large room.
By three o’clock in the morning, the greater part of the company had departed. In the small but luxurious antechamber to which the marquis eventually retired with a select group of friends, the players had dwindled to Émilien, a handsome blonde named Madame Jolivel, Madame Noirot, and Clevedon.
About them lay the bodies of those who’d succumbed to drink and fatigue. Some had been playing for days and nights on end.
At roulette, where skill and experience meant nothing, Noirot had won more often than not. At cards, where skill made a difference, her luck, oddly enough, was not nearly as good. The marquis’s luck had run out in the last half hour, and he was sinking in his chair. Clevedon was on a winning streak.
“This is enough for me,” said Madame Jolivel. She rose, and the men did as well.
“For me, too,” Émilien muttered. He pushed his cards to the center of the table and dragged himself out of the room after the blonde.
Clevedon remained standing, waiting for the dressmaker to rise. He had her to himself at last, and he was looking forward to escorting her elsewhere. Any elsewhere.
“It seems the party is over,” he said.
Noirot gazed up at him, dark eyes gleaming. “I thought it was only beginning,” she said. She took up the cards and shuffled.
He sat down again.
They played the basic game of Vingt et Un, without variations.
It was one of his favorite card games. He liked its simplicity. With two people, he found, it was a good deal more interesting than with several.
For one thing, he could no longer read her. No wry curve of her mouth when her cards displeased her. No agitated tap of her fingers when she’d drawn a strong card. When they’d played with the others, she’d exhibited all these little cues, and her play had struck him as reckless besides. This time was altogether different. By the time they’d played through the deck twice, he felt as though he played with another woman entirely.
He won the first deal and the second and the third.
After that, she won steadily, the pile of coins in front of her growing while his diminished.
As she passed the cards to him to deal, he said, “My luck seems to be turning.”
“So it does,” she said.
“Or perhaps you’ve been playing with me, madame, in more ways than one.”
“I’m paying closer attention to the game,” she said. “You won a great deal from me before. My resources, unlike yours, are limited. I only want to win my money back.”
He dealt. She looked at her card and pushed a stack of coins to one side of it.
He looked at his card. Nine of hearts. “Double,” he said.
She nodded for another card, glanced at it.
Nothing. No visible sign of whether the card was good or bad. He’d had to practice to conceal his small giveaway signs. How had she learned to reveal or conceal them at will? Or had Dame Fortune simply smiled on her this night? She’d won at roulette, a game, as she’d said, of pure chance, though men never gave up trying to devise systems for winning.
She won again.
And again.
This time, when they’d gone through the pack, she swept her coins toward her. “I’m not used to such late hours,” she said. “It’s time for me to go.”
“You play differently with me than you did with the others,” he said.
“Do I?” She brushed a stray curl back from her eyebrow.
“I can’t decide whether you’ve the devil’s own luck or there’s something more to you than meets the eye,” he said.
She settled back in her chair and smiled at him. “I’m observant,” she said. “I watched you play before.”
“Yet you lost.”
“Your beauty must have distracted me,” she said. “Now I’ve grown used to it. Now I can discern the ways you signal whether it’s going well or badly for you.”
“I thought I gave no signals,” he said.
She waved a hand. “You nearly don’t. It was very hard for me to decipher you—and I’ve been playing cards since I was a child.”
“Have you, indeed?” he said. “I’ve always thought of shopkeepers as respectable citizens, not much given to vices, especially gambling.”
“Then you haven’t been paying attention,” she said. “Frascati’s teemed with ordinary citizen-clerks and tradesmen. But to men like you and Émilien, they’re invisible.”
“The one thing you are not is invisible.”
“There you’re wrong,” she said. “I’ve passed within a few yards of you, on more than one occasion, and you didn’t look twice.”
He sat up straighter. “That’s impossible.”
She took up the cards and shuffled them, her hands quick, smooth, expert. “Let me see. On Sunday at about four o’clock, you were riding with a handsome lady in the Bois de Boulogne. On Monday at seven o’clock, you were in one of the latticed boxes at the Académie Royale de Musique. On Tuesday shortly after noon, you were strolling through the galleries of the Palais Royal.”
“You said I wasn’t your sole purpose for coming to Paris,” he said. “Yet you’ve been following me. Or should I say stalking me?”
“I’ve been stalking fashionable people. They all go to the same places. And you’re hard to miss.”
“So are you.”
“That depends on whether I wish to be noticed or not,” she