Silk Is For Seduction Read Online Free

what truth is. They can’t let anything alone. They must always put it under the microscope of philosophy. It’s rather endearing, but they’re so predictable in that regard. Everything must be anatomized and sorted. Rules. They need rules. They make so many.”
    “That wouldn’t be a wise speech, were I a Frenchwoman,” she said.
    “But you’re not. We’ve settled it.”
    “Have we?”
    He nodded.
    “You wagered in haste,” she said. “Are you always so rash?”
    “Sometimes, yes,” he said. “But you had me at a disadvantage. You’re like no one I’ve ever met before.”
    “Yet in some ways I am,” she said. “My parents were English.”
    “And a little French?” he said. Humor danced in his green eyes, and her cold, calculating heart gave a little skip in response.
    Damn, but he was good.
    “A very little,” she said. “One purely French great-grandfather. But he and his sons fancied Englishwomen.”
    “One great-grandfather is too little to count,” he said. “I’m stuck all over with French names, but I’m hopelessly English—and typically slow, except to jump to wrong conclusions. Ah, well. Farewell, my little pin.” He brought his hands up to remove it.
    He wore gloves, but she knew they didn’t hide calluses or broken nails. His hands would be typical of his class: smooth and neatly manicured. They were larger than was fashionable, though, the fingers long and graceful.
    Well, not so graceful at the moment. His valet had placed the pin firmly and precisely among the folds of his neckcloth, and he was struggling with it.
    Or seeming to.
    “You’d better let me,” she said. “You can’t see what you’re doing.”
    She moved his hands away, hers lightly brushing his. Glove against glove, that was all. Yet she felt the shock of contact as though skin had touched skin, and the sensation traveled the length of her body.
    She was acutely aware of the broad chest under the expensive layers of neckcloth and waistcoat and shirt. All the same, her hands neither faltered nor trembled. She’d had years of practice. Years of holding cards steady while her heart pounded. Years of bluffing, never letting so much as a flicker of an eye, a twitch of a facial muscle, betray her.
    The pin came free, winking in the light. She regarded the snowy linen she’d wrinkled.
    “How naked it looks,” she said. “Your neckcloth.”
    “What is this?” he said. “Remorse?”
    “Never,” she said, and that was pristine truth. “But the empty place offends my aesthetic sensibilities.”
    “In that case, I shall hasten to my hotel and have my valet replace it.”
    “You’re strangely eager to please,” she said.
    “There’s nothing strange about it.”
    “Be calm, your grace,” she said. “I have an exquisite solution.”
    She took a pin from her bodice and set his in its place. She set her pin into the neckcloth. Hers was nothing so magnificent as his, merely a smallish pearl. But it was a pretty one, of a fine luster. Softly it glowed in its snug place among the folds of his linen.
    She was aware of his gaze, so intent, and of the utter stillness with which he waited.
    She lightly smoothed the surrounding fabric, then stepped back and eyed her work critically. “That will do very well,” she said.
    “Will it?” He was looking at her, not the pearl.
    “Let the window be your looking glass,” she said.
    He was still watching her.
    “The glass, your grace. You might at least admire my handiwork.”
    “I do,” he said. “Very much.”
    But he turned away, wearing the faintest smile, and studied himself in the glass.
    “I see,” he said. “Your eye is as good as my valet’s—and that’s a compliment I don’t give lightly.”
    “My eye ought to be good,” she said. “I’m the greatest modiste in all the world.”
    H is heart beat erratically.
    With excitement, what else? And why not?
    Truly, she was like no one he’d ever met before.
    Paris was another world from London, and