A Bride by Moonlight

Author:Liz Carlyle [Carlyle, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Historical Romance, Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9780062097576
Publisher: Avon Books
Published: 2013-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Every True and Perfect Thing

“All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare once wrote, “and all the men and women merely players.” And in Royden Napier’s estimation, no one embraced that concept more thoroughly than his temporary fiancée. Even he, long hardened by skepticism, could at times believe the infernal woman half in love with him.

The resulting emotions left him feeling perplexed and oddly thwarted.

Over tea at Squire Tafton’s tidy manor on a graying afternoon, Elizabeth played the doting wife-to-be to perfection, tucking close against him on Mrs. Tafton’s snug camel-backed settee, and gazing adoringly up at him at every opportunity.

With her warm scent wafting up to tease at his nostrils, Elizabeth regaled their hosts with hilarious anecdotes from his childhood—made entirely of whole cloth, but gleaned, she glibly lied, from his dear old nanny. Then she explained in dramatic detail how her eyes had first met Napier’s across a crowded drawing room. She had known at once, Elizabeth declared on a breathless sigh, that he was The One.

The squire smiled, and declared Napier the most fortunate of men.

Napier thought he was instead the most stupid—and perhaps the most besotted—for listening to Elizabeth’s tales even a tiny bit wistfully. She was patently dangerous. And he—well, when in God’s name had he turned starry-eyed?

He was the last man on earth who should have done so. As a child, he’d never even read fairy tales, let alone believed them. In his work at Number Four, he dealt on a daily basis with the darkest deeds a man’s soul could conceal. Oh, he had known women—delightful, deeply desirable women, some of them—and had the honor of bedding a few. But not a one had made him feel a hearts-and-flowers sort of longing.

And he didn’t feel it now, damn it.

What he felt was lust, he assured himself. A burning, seething lust for a woman who was a near stranger to veracity—a lust he’d half a notion to put to an end in that most expedient and effective of ways: by taking the red-haired vixen up on the suggestion that sometimes lingered in her eyes.

Suddenly, Napier realized that, for decency’s sake, he needed to shift a little bit away from said vixen.

He forced his focus mind back to his hosts and imagined them naked in bed. It was an effective countermeasure, his burgeoning erection shriveling at once. Missing several teeth, Tafton was a lanky, sprawling, good-natured fellow who took his tea with more enthusiasm than grace.

His wife was round and plump, and almost shyly bedazzled by her guests. Unaccustomed as he was to blinding anyone with his charm, Napier tried not to snort out loud.

As to Elizabeth, she quickly set Mrs. Tafton at ease. Too much at ease, perhaps, for Napier’s comfort, because as soon as the tea tray was removed, Mrs. Tafton asked a little wistfully if Miss Colburne would care to see the newest little Tafton?

For the first time, Napier saw a look of grave uncertainty dash across Elizabeth’s face. But it was quickly veiled.

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