Page 45 of One Night with a Prince
“Are you forgetting that I shot at you? If I came to care for you, and you treated me as you do your other women, I don’t know what I might do. As I said, it’s not in my nature to fall in and out of a man’s bed without a thought.”
His fingers dug into her thighs. “So you mean to remain celibate all your life? No marriage, no lover, no one but your aging father to keep you company?”
She swallowed. In typical Byrne fashion, he’d left out the most important thing—no children. Since she was probably barren, a new marriage would be difficult. Most men wanted women who could bear them sons.
With a sigh, she pushed his hands from her thighs and slid off the table. “I haven’t thought that far.”
“And no wonder.” Refusing to move away, he planted his hands on the table on either side of her to keep her trapped there. He bent his head, his mouth brushing her ear as he lowered his voice to an achingly seductive whisper. “Until tonight, you didn’t know what pleasure was. But now that you know—”
“I must be even more cautious.” Drawing back, she managed a smile. “Besides, you don’t want a jealous mistress who will demand to know where you’ve been, complain when you ignore her, and beg you to share only her bed. That’s precisely the sort I’d be. I drove my own husband to gamble and drink and…who knows what.” She couldn’t keep the pain from her voice. “Only imagine what I’d drive a debaucher like you to do—commit murder, probably.”
Anger flared in his face. “You didn’t drive that fool Haversham into anything, damn it. From the momentGenerated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlI met him, I recognized him as one of those thoughtless arses whose thirst for the tables blots out any other consideration in his life. That isn’t your fault.”
His words were like a surgeon’s knife probing flesh for a bullet. “Isn’t it? If I had made him happy at home—”
“Did you ever refuse to let the selfish idiot bed you?”
“No, but—”
“Did you make sure he was well fed?”
“Of course.”
“Did you plaguehim about where he’d been and what he was doing?”
“Not at first. To be honest, I was relieved not to have to play the marchioness in society when I didn’t know the role.”
“So he found you someone to instruct you, did he? Reassured you that you could learn those things? Did his best to help you feel comfortable accompanying him into society?”
His rather pompous dissertation began to annoy her. “Not exactly, but—”
“As I said, a selfish, thoughtless arse. Tell me, Christabel, when you first met him, was your husband a gambler?”
She stuck out her chin. “Moderately so.”
“How do you know he was moderate? Did he ever promise to be somewhere and then not appear, pleading headache or some other nonsense? Was he always the one to suggest cards as the evening’s entertainment? Did his pay often mysteriously disappear—”
“Stop it!” She shoved his arm aside to escape his too-accurate description of a man whose proclivity for gambling even her father had questioned. Once she’d put some distance between them, she faced him.
“You have the audacity to call him selfish and thoughtless when you daily show a complete lack of feeling for the women you bed—”
“The women I bed are as uninterested in my feelings as I am in theirs.” Eyes glittering, he stalked up to her, apparently unconcerned that he was stark naked. “They want the same thing I want from them—pleasure and nothing more.”
“Are you sure? Is that why Lady Jenner went out of her way to provoke me this evening? She was halfway to scratching my eyes out.”
He went rigid. “Her pride was wounded, that’s all.”
“Perhaps. But even if you’re right about her and the others, even if they did want only one thing from you, I can’t be like them. So we’re back to where we started. I simply can’t be the sort of mistress you want. I know my own nature well enough for that.”
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlA muttered oath escaped his lips. “Fine. Then perhaps we shouldn’t play Whist for the Wicked anymore.”
“And perhaps you should stop trying to seduce me.”
He arched one eyebrow. “That, my sweet, is not inmy nature.”
Coloring, she bent to pick up his drawers where he’d left them on the floor. “Then perhaps you should go. Here, take these.”
With a glance that would have frozen ice, he walked past her without taking them, headed for the door.
