Drat. She’d gone too easy. Everyone knew Shakespeare.
Something he’d said tugged at her. “You don’t speak of your parents often,” she observed. “And when you do mention your mother, it’s most unfavorably.” She didn’t follow her observation with a question, but he replied as though she had.
“My mother was cruel and my father was weak. They made each other miserable. My mother chipped away at his heart—his soul—with broken vows, frivolous flirtations, and callous dalliances until there was nothing left. Until he’d become such an empty husk of a man, he ended his own life.”
“I’m sorry. How awful.” Alexandra fought to school the pity from her gaze, sensing it had no place in this conversation. But her heart ached for him. For his distraught father.
“It was a long time ago.” His tone remained impassive. Lighthearted, even. But he sawed at his food, stabbing at it as though it’d disrespected him most egregiously.
“They say time heals all wounds, don’t they?” She expelled a caustic breath, her own fork idly scraping across the plate. “And I suppose that’s true to a point. But there is no mistaking the scars…”
She searched his face, his sinister, scarred face, thinking that perhaps his own heart bore the remnants of unseen wounds just as grievous.
Was it any wonder he was so cynical? So distrustful of women. He’d watched his mother destroy a kind and beloved father, and subsequently fell in love with a woman just as faithless as she had been.
“I’d rather not speak of parents and the past.” He waved his hand, brushing the distasteful subject aside.
“Now let me see…” He considered her for a moment. “I must ponder when and where it pleases me most to kiss you next, as I’ve won the first prize of three.”
“Kiss me where on my person … or where geographically?” she asked, pressing her hands to cheeks that were flushed and hot even through the silk of her gloves.
“An excellent question,” he purred.
Alexandra glared at him, taking extra time with her next bite as she contemplated her next quote.
“Consider that you might want me to win this, wife.” Sin colored the timbre of his voice in decadent, velvet notes, seeming to even darken the candles flickering over their feast.
Did she?
It was a dangerous thing, she was beginning to realize, to underestimate the Terror of Torcliff in any arena, physical or otherwise.
“Tell me,” he continued, covering the hand she’d rested on the table. “Does the thought of being at my mercy entice you?”
Alexandra froze. How could she say yes? The thought of being at his mercy terrified her, as he was a man most famously without mercy.
And yet. How could she say no?
Because she’d be that much more a liar.
Locking eyes with his, she said, “‘Teach me to feel another’s woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.’”
His eyes narrowed, darted this way and that, as though grappling with his own memory behind them.
She had him, she thought triumphantly. She’d bested him.
“You are confounded, my lord?” she teased.
“A bit,” he confessed, almost sheepishly. “It bemuses me that a scientist should have quoted such a religious poet as Alexander Pope.”
Alexandra gaped at her husband. Not sheepish at all! Rather, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. She should have known.
And now … she would answer for her hubris by allowing him unrestricted access to her body.
To do with as he wished.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Piers tried, and failed, to remember when victory had ever been so delicious.
He’d many to choose from.
Even as he appreciated a bite of his sumptuous dinner, he savored the delectable tinge of peach and pink rising from beneath his wife’s bodice to splash over the creamy skin of her chest.
When was the last time he’d enjoyed a conversation so much? When had he been so intellectually challenged, and at the same time, so at ease in someone’s company?
Once again, he failed to call such an interaction to mind.
Never had he delighted in something so ubiquitous as a woman’s blush. Never had he wanted to collect his prize so desperately as in this moment.
But despite the fact that the table hid his body’s reaction to the wicked reward he’d been promised, he hadn’t lost enough of his civility to drag his wife from a crowded room in order to ravish her.
Besides, he wasn’t ready to be done teasing her. Playing with his prey.
There was, after all, one more question. But at least now, her body was his, if not for the taking, at least for the tasting. He kept a tight grip on his fork, forcing himself to appear unaffected. To maintain their conversation, and to keep up with her quick mind.
“Your selection of quotes makes me wonder about you,” he drawled around another bite. “Are you a pious or God-fearing woman?”
For a woman with a tendency to let whatever thought skipped through her mind fall from her mouth, she gave this question a great deal of consideration. With her bow lips pursed in contemplation, she took the opportunity to study the view beyond him rather than his features.
“I do not live in fear of any particular God, and neither do I know which one to believe in,” she finally answered gravely. “I’ve studied so many of them, enough to know that it is more reasonable to live in fear of man than God. Of what man makes of this world. For we are capable of enough evil without a god or a devil to influence us one way or the other.”
Piers absorbed her words, studying a bleakness in the depths of her burnt-whisky eyes. What had she seen, he wondered, that put in her the fear of man? He’d picked up rather similar ideals in his lifetime and in his travels. He’d seen too much blood shed in the name of one God or another to ascribe his faith to any of them. Strange, that he would have found a spouse who felt the same. Who’d seen similar corners of the earth and lingered in the shadows of gods more ancient than their Anglican one.
“What about death?” he queried. “Do you fear existential judgment after this life?”
“I used to,” she murmured. “I used to worry about it obsessively. Perhaps it is why I study those who have already passed on. I learn what I can from them. I honor their journey through this world, and hope they have found peace in the next. That … I might also find peace.” She studied the napkin in her lap. “Sometimes, though, I fear the weight of my sins will pull me into the abyss. I hope if God exists, if we are to stand judgment, that justice is more compassion than vengeance.”
Piers studied her, noting the weight of which she spoke curling her shoulders forward in a self-protective posture most ladies wouldn’t indulge in public. The sadness emanating from her permeated the fortifications he’d erected around his heart.
“What sins could you possibly have committed—?”
The unmistakable sound of silver tapping against crystal evoked a pall of silence among the attendees as Forsythe called them to attention.
Piers glared over Alexandra’s bare, smooth shoulder at him, wishing fervently the crystal would break and slit the man’s wrists.