Page 29 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
Delicately, Charity inquired, “Are you? Or have you simply let your temper get the better of you?”
Above his fingertips, Chris produced a glare and accompanied it with a scowl. “What the hell are you trying to imply?”
“That you’ve always had a quick-fire temper, darling. And perhaps that you might’ve been too hasty with the use of it.” She gave his leg a gentle pat. “A viscount’s daughter, is that not correct? She’s doing exactly as she’s meant to do. Precisely what a well-born woman would, once she is a wife.”
“She’s a judgmental harpy,” he complained, sliding his shoulders down into a sulk. “Kept picking at me over dinner. Shouted at me. Stormed off in a snit.” Although in retrospect, he’d hardly behaved better. Probably worse, even.
“Did she? Jolly good for her. I should hate to see you paired off with some spiritless little thing. You’d have crushed her down to nothing in the space of a week.” With a sly smile, Charity set her empty glass aside. “Come, now,” she said. “You must have liked her enough to marry her.”
He’d liked her well enough from the other side of the wall. He’d liked her well enough last evening as they had sat upon the stone bench and talked. He’d liked watching her watch Hieronymus, first warily, and then with a reluctant interest.
He’d liked her well enough in Emma’s garden.
Fuck.
“I didn’t come here to discuss Phoebe with you,” he said. He’d come here to forget about her for an hour or so, to relieve the anger that clawed at his gut the best way he knew how. To sate the lust he could not alleviate with his damnedwife.
Which was just fucking fine and dandy with him. For such needs, he had Charity—and she was a woman who enjoyed sex, reveled in pleasure and sensuality. She sighed into his mouth as he fisted one hand in her hair and kissed her, and her breath waswarm and sweet, her tongue tasting of the brandy she’d imbibed. With a little wiggle, her dressing gown slid off her shoulders, baring her ample breasts.
Her nimble fingers pinched at the material of his shirt, drawing it free from where it had been tucked into his trousers, and he—
He’d forgotten his waistcoat.Hell. He was meant to have worn one. But he’d turned up at the dinner table without one.
Damn it all, he was not going to think of that now. Not when Charity had straddled his lap, when she traced the line of his jaw in a series of featherlight kisses, though the stubble he’d failed to shave off when he’d risen this afternoon had to have abraded her lips—
Bloody damned hell.
He wrapped his arms around Charity’s narrow waist, slid his palms down the small of her back to cup her bottom in his hands, and she felt—
Wrong. Perfectly proportioned, as ever. And still fucking wrong.
He’d been served salad this evening. For the first time in memory, he’d had a meal that had not consisted of a single course, which was inevitably some sort of meat baked into some sort of crust. There had been five forks set out, and he’d gone through all of them after Phoebe had stormed out. How long had it taken for her to construct the menu? To have the staff procure the ingredients, and make the preparations?
“Chris,” Charity murmured against his lips. “Your heart’s not in this.”
“Hm.” Never had been, but then he thought they’d both preferred it that way. Pleasure without any of the tedious bits that emotion might have tainted it.
“Neither is your cock.” She rubbed her palm over the placket of his trousers, where he had failed to rise to the occasion.
Christ. He should have been embarrassed, but instead he was just…tired. And angry. And mildly ashamed. “It’s not you,” he said. And to save face, he added, “It’s my fucking knee. Aches like the devil.”
With a plaintive sigh, Charity extracted herself from his lap and folded her arms over her breasts. “You’ve never disappointed me before,” she said. “I shall forgive you just this once. So long as you bring me sapphires next time.”
Chris managed a rough chuckle. “You’re a treasure,” he said as he climbed to his feet and reached for his coat. “I’ll bring the sapphires when next I see you.”
In the meantime, there was one other way to work off his frustrations—and his fists hadn’t failed him yet.
Chapter Nine
Phoebe took a sort of perverse pleasure in the fracas that had arisen within the household sometime just after midnight. She hadn’t intended, exactly, to be the cause of it, but then neither had she expected Chris to come back from wherever it was he had gone when he had stormed out of the house just after that disastrous dinner and immediately set about searching for her.
And then bellowing for her. Slamming doors, rousing servants, and sending the household, which had long since settled for the night, into abrupt chaos. All while she sat upon the bench at the garden wall, feeding Hieronymus from her hand and enjoying the ever-increasing panic from within the house.
Finally, perhaps half an hour after the outset of the commotion, the terrace door opened, and Chris came stalking out into the night, his shoulders slumping in relief to find her at last. His shirt was half-unbuttoned, his cravat missing entirely. “Didn’t you hear me calling?” he asked, his voice inflected with frustration.
“Of course. I imagine the whole street heard you.” But it had not created any sense of obligation within her to answer.
“I thought you had gone,” he said, and a muscle jumped in his jaw. “I was near to banging upon your parents’ door.”
