didn’t. She couldn’t. This hadn’t been the plan—there had been no plan.
His hand stilled. “You wish to stop?” He sounded fairly calm, for a man aching to take his pleasure.
Help. She had recklessly unleashed him, and now female instincts battled, the urge to assuage his need, and deeper fears, and then, the obvious—to not look like a complete trollop.
“I can’t,” she whispered, the beginnings of a panic washing over her. “Not . . . like this.”
Not up against a door. Not in any location, had she been thinking at all.
Montgomery’s chest tensed beneath her palms. “Of course,” he murmured. “Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” A frisson of foreboding raised the hair on her nape.
“I will have put everything in writing, whatever your terms,” he said. “You have my word.”
Terms?
He made to kiss her again. Something in her expression stopped him. He eased back, adjusting the front of his trousers, his lips twisting with discomfort. “Well, I won’t get a hold of my solicitor now,” he said.
Her blood ran cold. So she had understood him right. He thought she wanted to negotiate an arrangement.
“You thought I meant to negotiate an arrangement,” she said out loud.
He frowned at the flat tone of her voice. “You did not?”
He was still breathing hard. He looked oddly boyish, with his cravat rumpled and his hair mussed from her greedy hands, and God knew what she looked like.
Who would try to talk terms on the brink of lovemaking, when a man was half crazed and prone to promise anything? A calculating courtesan, that’s who.
Nausea welled in her stomach.
“And you’d sign whatever my terms?” she heard herself say. “How about a yacht, Your Grace?”
He tilted his head. “If you need one.”
She gave a small, ugly laugh.
He had not seen her at all.
Never mind their talks and walks and breathless kisses, all along, he had clearly never stopped thinking of her as a woman who’d bargain her favors for money. He’d have hardly propositioned a respectable woman for a knee-trembler in his library in the first place.
She smoothed her hands over her skirts. “I told you that I wasn’t in the market for such a thing.”
There was a pause. When he spoke next, his voice was cool. “What do you want, Annabelle?”
You.
At some point, she must have begun feeling, wanting, impossible things. “I don’t want to be your mistress.”
His eyes raked over her, his incredulity palpable, and she knew what he saw, a disheveled female who had brazenly put her hand on his cock.
Her heart crumpled. She felt naked, and utterly foolish.
She was as deluded and impulsive at twenty-and-five as when she’d been a girl.
She turned abruptly and felt for the key in the door lock.
A beat later, he was behind her, his hand staying her frantic efforts.
“Annabelle.”
She shook her head.
“I feel I have offended you, which was never my intention,” he said.
“Please,” she said, “I gave you the wrong impression, which I regret. But I won’t be your mistress. I won’t.”
He hesitated, for two heartbeats, perhaps three. Then his hand fell away and he stepped back, taking the warmth of his body with him. “As you wish.”
His tone was formal. Impersonal, even. Not unlike how he had sounded during their very first meeting in this library.
She unlocked the door and hurried into the night. From afar, she heard the pops and explosions of yet another firework display she didn’t see.
Chapter 19
Dawn had barely dragged itself over the horizon, but the coach to his weekly London appointment was ready for departure.
Sebastian halted in the entrance hall halfway to the doors. “Bonville,” he barked.
The man seemed to materialize from thin air. “Your Grace?”
“Something is wrong with the lighting.”
The butler cast a quick assessing glance around, at the plaster work above, the chandelier, the French seating arrangement before the fireplace, and a touch of panic rose in his eyes. Clearly, Bonville did not find anything wrong with the lighting situation.
“The lamps,” Sebastian said impatiently, starting for the entrance again. “They seem to have dimmed. I reckon the circuit has been overburdened during the house party.”
Granted. It was a subtle thing, but it made the house feel unacceptably dull.
Bonville was all business now. “I will have the gas specialists called in to examine the pipes and every single bulb, Your Grace.”
Sebastian gave a curt nod.
The footmen swung open the double doors for him, and a blast of cold morning air made his eyes water. He briskly stamped down the slippery stairs to the carriage. The light cover of snow that had made Claremont look pristine