“The only thing you can do is to sod right off,” she snipped. “They’re going to put you to death, how can you be so calm?”
That Gallic shrug again. “I have many reasons not to panic, not the least of which is that I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing they ruffled my feathers.” He raised one dark, expressive eyebrow at her.
Mercy felt her frown turn into a scowl. Every person in a five-city-block radius categorically understood the current state of her feathers. They hadn’t been merely ruffled. But plucked.
Fit to be tied, she was.
Drat.
Mercy sagged back and let her head fall against the wall, squeezing her eyes shut.
She didn’t want to look at him.
What was he about calling her adorable? Had he meant it as a slight? A condescending jab at her youth? She was only all of twenty, but she was well educated. Well read.
Not to mention...one just didn’t go around calling people adorable, did one? Not unless they were your nine-year-old niece or something equally perturbing.
She was a woman.
And some part of her wanted him to know that. To acknowledge it.
Raphael Sauvageau was pure, unmitigated male. His voice deep. His manner predatory. His gaze unapologetically lustful.
When he spoke, his voice purred against her skin.
And yet, he could seduce a woman without saying a word. Make her aware of all the deep, empty places she ignored.
He was wickedly, no, ruthlessly attractive. Roguish and virile with sharp bones that cut a portrait of indolent cruelty.
That was why she refused to open her eyes, because sometimes, looking at him made her brain turn to a puddle of useless, feminine liquid that threatened to leak out her ears, leaving her with no wits at all.
With no logic. No reason to resist...
Regardless of her attempt to ignore him, she could feel his eyes upon her like the gaze of some ancient divinity. Pulling at her sinew and bone. Sucking at her veins as if he could drink her in.
What was he?
How many women were charred in the combustible heat of such a gaze?
She didn’t want to know.
Furthermore, she refused to be one of them.
Their first and only previous encounter had been the summer before. She’d gone with her eldest sister, Honoria—whom they called Nora—and Felicity in search of a missing fortune to save the man Nora had loved her entire life.
When they’d found the fortune in gold, they’d also found Raphael Sauvageau, the half-Monégasque, half-English leader of the fearsome Fauves—a French word meaning “wild beasts.” He and his brother, Gabriel, laid claim to the gold that had been stolen by Nora’s criminally atrocious first husband, the Viscount Woodhaven.
Their meeting had been fraught with intensity and the suggestion of threat.
Mercy and Raphael had sparred verbally, and she’d gone away with the feeling that he’d enjoyed it.
Or perhaps that she had.
Mercy’s brothers-in-law, Chief Inspector Carlton Morley and Dr. Titus Conleith, had found out and come for the sisters, confronting the Sauvageau brothers.
Instead of a war breaking out between the men, Raphael and Gabriel had relinquished their gold to Titus and Honoria, which had been a substantial amount, with a promise to return for some mysterious future medical procedure.
According to Titus, he’d not heard from the Sauvageau brothers in the months since.
None of them had.
And yet, the rogue had often intruded, unbidden and unwanted, into Mercy’s thoughts. She’d remember how he looked in the dim light of the lone lantern the night they’d met. All lean muscle and vibrating intimidation subdued by a veneer of cunning, charisma and undeniable intelligence.
He lurked always in the periphery of her silent moments. Like a serpent in the shadows, deceptively calm, coiled to strike.
He was an invasion. A trespasser. And he didn’t even know it.
Or maybe he did.
Maybe...he’d done it on purpose. Some sort of serpentine mesmerism that had nothing to do with her unruly thoughts and desires, and everything to do with his villainy.
Yes, that must be it.
The fault was his, obviously.
Had he worked the same sort of magic on Mathilde?
That thought sobered her enough to redirect her panic into rage.
“May the devil fetch you if you hurt Mathilde.” Though her eyes remained closed, she injected as much virulence into her words as she could summon.
“He’ll fetch me regardless, but I... cared for her.”
Despite herself, the veracity in his voice drew Mercy’s lids open so she could study him for other signs of deceit.
His expression was drawn and serious.
Lethally so.
Daylight slanted in through the bars, making his eyes glint like polished steel. Motes of dust frenzied in his atmosphere as if drawing energy from the electric force of his presence. A thin ring of gold glinted in his left ear, and sharp cheekbones underscored an arrogant brow.
He’d look stern but for his mouth, which was not so severe. It bowed with a fullness she might have called feminine if the rest of his face wasn’t so brutally cast.
Mercy hadn’t realized she’d been staring at his lips, gripped with a queer sort of fascination, until they parted and he spoke.
“You were quite impressive back there.”
“What?” Mercy shook her head dumbly. Had he just complimented her? Had they just been through the same scene? She’d never been less impressed with herself in her entire life.
Would that she could have been like him. Smooth and unaffected. Infuriatingly self-assured.
And yet...he’d only been that way after breaking the nose of the officer that had struck her, and possibly his jaw.
Lord but she’d never seen a man move like that before.
“I listened to your deductions,” he explained.
“From where you were hiding in the closet?” she quipped, rather unwisely.
Something flickered in his eyes, and yet again she was left to guess if she’d angered or amused him.
“From where I was hiding in the closet,” he said with a droll sigh as he shifted, seeming to find a more comfortable position for his bound hands. “You’re obviously cleverer than the detectives. How do you know so much about murder scenes?”
Mercy warned herself not to preen. She stomped on the lush warmth threatening to spread from her chest at his encouragement, and thrust her nose in the air, perhaps a little too high. “I am one of only three female members of the Detective Eddard Sharpe Society of Homicidal Mystery Analysis. As penned by the noted novelist J. Francis Morgan, whom I suspect is a woman.”
“Why do you suspect that?” His lip twitched, as if he also battled to suppress his own expression.
“Because men tend to write female characters terribly, don’t they? But J. Francis Morgan is a master of character and often, the mystery is even solved by a woman rather than Detective Sharpe. His heroines are not needlessly weak or stupid or simpering. They’re strong. Dangerous. Powerful. Sometimes even villainous and complicated. That is good literature, I say. Because it’s true to life.”
He’d ceased fighting his smile and allowed his lip to quirk up in a half-smile as he regarded her from beneath his dark brow. “Mathilde’s murderer now has one more person they’d do well to fear in you.”
She leveled him a sour look. “Does that mean you fear me?”