Mercy blinked at him, certain she misunderstood his meaning. He was casual but serious. Relaxed, but intense. Surely, he wasn’t asking if she would—
“Would you let me fuck you, Mercy Goode?”
Her mouth went slack, and she lost whatever substance held her bones together. She wished for a chair, a couch, a bench. Anything upon which to sink.
She looked around at the people. The families. This place that was so bustling and wholesome. Where propositions like his simply didn’t belong.
Oh my. Mercy wanted to check her burning face for fever, but she didn’t dare.
What was she right now? Upset? Insulted?
Enticed?
His eyes were searingly tender as he searched her face for an answer. “You are not slapping me. Or screaming at me. So, am I to imagine you are considering it?”
“You—were Mathilde’s lover.” And she was only deceased for a day’s time.
At that, his features became impossibly kinder, his gaze containing admiration. “I have touched no other woman since the night I gifted your sister with my gold.”
“But that was...months ago,” she marveled, doing her best to remember that she could not believe a word from his mouth.
He shrugged. “So it was.”
“Mathilde made it seem as though she’d been with you not so long ago.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Did she say that? That she and I had been lovers recently?”
“Come to think of it... no.” She examined her reaction to that.
Her heart felt one thing.
Her body another.
His muscles remained lax, even though he allowed her to witness the uncontested hope radiating from him. “I assure you, Miss Goode, Mathilde and I did not share an understanding of any kind. Not in that way. There was nothing like romance between us, do you understand? I am doing her memory no disservice by propositioning you. I will be working harder to find her killer than the police. She will be avenged; you have my word. But I will be too distracted by my obsession with your lips to be of much use, unless you yield to me.”
Swallowing around a sandpaper tongue, Mercy could only blink up at him.
For once in her life, she had nothing to say.
Because she was captured in the culmination of her eternal struggle.
The one between what she should do.
And what she wanted to do.
She might die an old maid, but she certainly didn’t plan on being a virgin.
Suddenly, everything Mathilde told her about him spun through her mind, sped through her blood, and landed in her loins.
The rapture he was capable of imparting. The pleasure. The desire. The stamina.
The sin.
He stepped closer, watching the war play out on her face, and spoke to tip the scales in his favor. “If you are to never take a husband, at least let me give you the knowledge of what to expect from a lover. Though I pity the man who next attempts to follow me.”
The sheer arrogance in his claim should have turned her off of him instantly.
And yet, he said this with an odd sort of darkness. Like he pitied her next lover because he was already considering doing him violence.
“Let me have you tonight.” His whisper sizzled through her.
“T-tonight?” she gasped out.
He made a gesture both helpless and sanguine. “I am a man for whom tomorrow is never a certainty, and so I live every night as if it were my last.”
“How wondrous and terrible to not worry for tomorrow,” she murmured.
“Wonderous and terrible. That is my existence in two words.”
One of the wolves howled in the distance, a wild, mournful sound so foreign in the city.
Mercy turned toward it, needing not to look at him for a moment.
To catch her breath.
Was she truly considering this madness?
His breath was a warm caress against her ear as the clean masculine scent of him enveloped her. “Tonight, mon chaton,” he purred from behind her, his finger skimming her shoulder blades so lightly. “Let me stroke you until you are exhausted with pleasure. Demand what you want from me, I do not mind. Let me teach you what you deserve to know. What you should always expect. What your body is capable of.”
Yes.
Mercy couldn’t say the word, so she nodded.
She felt rather than saw him smile, even as he stepped back, granting her some space so she could finally breathe.
Pressing her fingers to her lips, she couldn’t stop thinking about his tongue. Inside her mouth, it’d been warm and slick and tasted like depravity.
She’d been surprised it wasn’t forked, devil that he was.
How would it be on other parts of her?
All her life, she’d hated the story of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. The allegory for temptation in the face of consequences.
She’d never understood why Eve bit into the apple.
Not until this very moment.
Not until this man with shining hazel eyes and a voice made of velvet and vice, tempted her beyond reason.
Trying to string her thoughts together, she stammered, “How would we...? Where will we? I mean...”
Her questions never found him she realized, as she turned back to clarify.
He’d disappeared.
Chapter 7
Mercy had often thought that for such a fair-complected man, Chief Inspector Carlton Morley was a bit of a dark horse.
Even as he paced the plush Persian carpets of her parents’ solarium, his every movement was measured and controlled.
Carefully contained.
He was more compelling than handsome, she thought. His brow stern and the set of his jaw arrogant.
No, authoritarian. That was it.
A man who expected to be obeyed without question, likely because he was in charge of the entire London Metropolitan Police.
Which was why his choice of wife was so confounding. Her elder sister Prudence was ironically impetuous. But, Mercy supposed, her habitual imprudence accompanied a beauty of demeanor only matched by that of her soul, so it was impossible not to love her.
At least, in Morley’s case.
They were ridiculously—disgustingly—happy.
For her part, Mercy couldn’t begin to imagine being in love with a fellow who rarely relaxed and was always right.
And not in the way that most men assumed they were always right based on little more than their hubris and trumped-up opinions.
Morley was unfailingly well-informed and infuriatingly correct, more often than not. When he spoke, people leaned in to mark him because he was possessed of both power and practicality.
And that, Mercy was given to understand, was a rare combination of virtues.
Objectively, she supposed she understood why Prudence found him attractive, what with his corona of elegantly styled pale hair and eyes so cold and blue they might have been chipped from a glacier.
They only melted for Pru and the twins, becoming liquid and warm.
Mercy liked to watch the transformation her sister brought about in him, how his wide shoulders peeled away from his ears and every part of him seemed to exhale.
With his family, he could be charming. Cavalier, even.
He was protective and useful, honorable to a fault, and Mercy knew that beneath the furrow of disapproval on his brow was a wrinkle of worry for her. He watched them with the passionate overprotectiveness belonging to a man who’d once lost his own sister to tragedy.