Page 55 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
“I quite like Phoebe, you know,” she said. “You could have done so much worse for yourself.” She took a sip of her liquor and added, without spite or malice, “Probably she could have done better.”
That was the damned truth, but a mistress wasn’t meant to say such things. Although he supposed she wasn’t his mistress any longer, so she was entitled to speak her mind. “I told her she wasn’t to make friends with you,” he grumbled, and she tippedback her head and laughed.
“Men always imagine they can tell women what to do,” she said, “as if they might stuff our heads so full of their thoughts that only their own words will pour out when we speak. In fact, women have long perfected the art of smiling, nodding…and doing exactly as we please anyway. She invited me back, you know,” she said, with a sly little smile.
“And you’re going?”
“Of course. As I said, I liked her.” A sigh, a slow shake of her head. “I’ll expect the apartment,” she said. “As you can see, I’ve made it my own over the years.”
It would probably cost him more to return it to the state in which he’d left it than he would lose in its value if he simply signed it over to her. “Done,” he said.
“And the sapphire necklace and bracelet,” she said. “You’ve already promised me those.”
“I’ll make good on it.”
“And some earbobs wouldn’t go amiss,” she added cannily.
“Hell, no,” he said. “I denied you that when you refused to tell me what you conversed about.”
She rose to her feet once more in a magnificent swish of amber silk and sashayed across the floor toward him with that seductive roll to her hips that had made her so highly sought-after as a mistress, and bent at last to murmur in his ear. “The earbobs,” she cooed sweetly, “or your wife and I will be comparing notes.”
Fucking hell. “All right,” he sighed. “The earbobs, too.”
The joyful laugh she gave made him wonder whether or not she’d been in earnest. “It has been a pleasure, darling—and I do mean that. But I think we both know it was bound to end eventually, and you’ve left me lonely for far too long.”
He had, at that. Even if it hadn’t been intentional until just recently. “I will miss you,” he said. They’d had a good go of it, thetwo of them. He would still consider her a friend of sorts. “I’ll send my key back round to you.”
“See that you do,” she said, with a fond smile and a pat of his cheek. “And do tell dear Phoebe that I’ll bring the tea next time. She’ll know what I mean.”
Chapter Sixteen
What the hell are you doing in here?”
Phoebe jerked at the gruff sound of Chris’ voice, nearly pitching over in surprise. “Careful,” she said irritably. “I almost dropped Hieronymus.” Carefully, she set the turtle down within the confines of the nearest wooden box, from which sprouted an orange tree, its branches heavily laden with fruit.
“What the hell ishedoing in here?” he asked, and there came the tap of his cane upon the floor, growing louder as he approached.
“He likes it,” she said. “At least, I think he does. Probably he enjoys the heat.” And itwashot. And humid. By design, she knew. The orangery was meant to keep the citrus trees warm throughout the winter, but in the late summer now it was fairly sweltering. Already her skin felt as if it had been misted with a fine layer of sweat.
“He doesn’t like oranges,” Chris said, though he moved closer to watch Hieronymus strutting in his plodding turtle way within the box planter in which Phoebe had set him. “You weren’t at dinner,” he said. “Why?”
Briefly, Phoebe considered a polite prevarication. But Chris was not capable of appreciating such a thing, at least at present.And so she admitted: “I couldn’t do it without shouting at you. So I elected not to come at all.”
“Shoutingat me?”
“As I recall, I have taken you to task for it before,” she said. “It seemed only fair that I should absent myself until I could restrain myself from the same.” And if her voice was even now a little short, a little clipped—well, then, he could blame himself for that. She had not sought him out, after all.
“I mean to say, why should you have shouted at me?”
Phoebe flexed her hands at her sides to keep her fingers from clenching. The murder of one’s father, she knew, was patricide. One’s mother, matricide. Brother, fratricide; sister, sororicide. What was it called when one murdered one’s spouse? She knew there was a word, but she could not call it to mind. “Brooks told me you left the house today,” she said, and each syllable dropped like a stone between them.
“That disloyal arse,” he said. “I ought to have known he would—”
“Did you eventhinkfor a single second that it could have cost you your life?” There was an itch between her shoulder blades, a prickle of heat that washed up her throat that had nothing to do with the humidity within the orangery and everything to do with the fires of fury. “There is someone out there trying to kill you!”
Had he had any less control of himself, she suspected his jaw would have dropped open. “There is always someone trying to kill me,” he said. “One learns to live with it when one has as many enemies as I have.”
“Or die with it,” she sniffed.
