A Week to Be Wicked (Spindle Cove #2)(48)
Author: Tessa Dare

So wretchedly unfair. Thirty seconds’ toilette, and he looked better than she could have managed with hot tongs, curling papers, and the assistance of two French lady’s maids.

“Am I presentable?” he asked.

“You’re every bit as unjustly handsome as always.”

He cocked his head and peered at her. “Now, what can we do about you?”

She snorted. What indeed. “Likely nothing, my lord,” she said acidly.

“Well, you can’t go in looking like that—all pinned and laced and buttoned up. Not if you’re meant to pass as my mistress.”

“Your . . .” She lowered her voice, as though the cypresses had ears. “Your mistress?”

“How else am I to explain your presence? I’ve been friends with the Duke of Halford for years. I can’t tell him you’re my sister. He knows very well I have none.” His hands went to the buttons of her traveling spencer. Beginning at the one nearest her throat, he slipped them loose, one by one. “First, we need to do away with this.” When he had the two sides divided, he pushed the garment from her shoulders and shook loose the sleeves. All the while, Minerva stood there numbly, not even knowing how to protest.

He folded her jacket and tossed it aside. “This won’t do either,” he grumbled, eyeing her shot-silk traveling gown. “You should have worn the red today.”

Minerva bristled. “What’s wrong with this gown?” She liked this gown. It was one of her best. The peacock blue suited her coloring, or so she’d been told.

“It’s too modest by far,” he said. “You look like a governess, not a mistress.”

Modest? She stared down at the silk. The bodice fit close across her bosom, and the empire waist cinched her tight around the ribs, flaring to a full, draped skirt. It was a form-fitting, curve-emphasizing silhouette—one that had felt positively daring, in the seamstress’s fitting. The sleeves, especially. They puffed a bit at the shoulder, then gathered with a ribbon garter just at the top of the arm. From there, they hugged her arms tight, all the way down to the wrist.

He reached for one of those ribbon bows, worrying the lace between his fingertips before skimming a light touch all the way down to her cuff. A heady sensation slid through her, coasting on the sheen of silk.

See? These sleeves were cunning, sensual sheaths of fabric. Nothing modest about them at all.

“Perhaps this will help.” He closed his fingers about the cuff and gave it a ruthless yank.

“No, don’t!”

And just like that, the cunning sleeve was gone. His sharp tug made a rent in the seam below her ribbon ties, and he frayed the rest of it loose with devious fingers. Within moments, he had the entire sleeve destroyed and he’d set to work on the other.

In the end, he left her with abbreviated puffs of fabric covering her shoulders. Two little apostrophes of silk, where full parentheses had been.

After standing back a moment to look at her, he untied one of the ribbon bows and left its ends dangling.

“Why would you do that?”

His eyebrow arched. “It makes a suggestion.”

“The suggestion being that I’m loose?”

“Your words, not mine.” He framed her waist in his hands, and spun her around—so that she faced away. His hands went to the row of hooks down the back of her dress. Beginning at the base of her neck, he undid them one by one.

“Now this is too much,” she protested, trying to wriggle away. “I won’t be made to look slatternly.”

He held her tight. His breath fell hot and rough on her neck. “You’ll be made to look the way I wish you to look. That’s the point of a mistress, after all. No doubt Sir Alisdair Kent likes his women looking prim and demure, but you chose me as your travel partner. I have a reputation to maintain.”

He unhooked her dress to the midpoint of her back, just between her shoulder blades. Then he worked the widened neckline over the slopes of her shoulders, shimmying it down to a most indecent latitude. The edge of her chemise was exposed, making a lacy ruff of white to frame her exposed cle**age.

After whirling her back to face him, he surveyed his handiwork. Minerva flushed with shame. He’d taken her perfectly respectable traveling gown and turned it into an off-the-shoulder ensemble befitting a pirate wench.

And he wasn’t through with her yet. He lifted his hands to her hair and began plucking the pins from her failing chignon. If she weren’t faint with hunger and terrified of being stranded penniless in the Midlands, she would not have stood for such treatment.

This went beyond teasing. Could he . . . could he possibly be envious?

“Really, Colin. I’m sorry if you resent my regard for Sir Alisdair. But humiliating me this way is hardly going to earn you my good opinion.”

“Perhaps not.” He pulled the last of the pins free and shook her hair loose about her face. “But I’m convinced it will add greatly to my personal satisfaction. And it will save us both a great many prying questions.”

He removed the spectacles from her face and folded them, tucking them inside his breast pocket.

“I need those.” She reached for them.

He caught her wrist. “No, you don’t. From the moment we walk through those doors, you’re not leaving my side, do you hear? Believe me, you don’t want any of Halford’s guests thinking I mean to share you.”

Share her? What sort of den of iniquity were they entering?

“For my part,” he said, “I’ll behave as if I’m your slavish, besotted, jealous protector.”

She bit back an unladylike laugh. “Now that will be the role of a lifetime.”

“And you . . .” He tipped her chin with a single fingertip. “You had better play your part to perfection, my pet.”

“My part? I don’t know how to be a mistress.” Certainly not among dukes. She became an absolute pudding around powerful men.

“Oh, don’t sell yourself short. I think you’ll do very well indeed. You see, a mistress is a sharp, savage little creature. When it suits her, she can make a man feel as though he’s irresistible, desirable, endlessly fascinating. The only man in the world.” He leaned closer, lowered his voice to a dark whisper. He was too near for comfort or clarity, just a blur of male ferocity. “She moans as if she means it. And when she’s got what she wanted, she’ll make it bitingly clear that the man means nothing—absolutely nothing—to her at all. I think you were born to that role. Don’t you?”