her toes.
He lazed on bench across from her as if it were as comfortable as a throne, legs sprawled open at the knees and expensive jacket undone. The threads of his trousers molded to long, powerful thighs, calling attention to an indecent bulge at their apex.
“I’ll say what I like you—you—” If she wasn’t doing her best to avoid looking at it—at him—she would surely have delivered a most clever and scathing remark.
“Do not misunderstand me, mon chatton, I have no wish to censure you. It is only that I find your attempts at profanity relentlessly adorable and distracting. It is torture to be unable to do anything about it.” Beneath his charcoal suit, he lifted a helpless shoulder made no less broad for the captivity of his arms behind his back.
“The only thing you can do is to sod 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.
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 or something equally perturbing.
She was a woman.
And some part of her wanted him to know that. To acknowledge it.
No need to wonder why.
She’d never been a good liar, not even to herself.
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 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.
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-Monegasque, half-English leader of the fearsome Fauves—a French word meaning “wild beasts.” He and his brother, Gabriel, lay claim to the gold that had been stolen by Nora’s criminally atrocious first husband.
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.
Somehow her brothers-in-law Sir Carlton Morley and Dr. Titus Conleith had found out and come for them. And….instead of a war breaking out between the men, the Sauvageau brothers had relinquished their gold, 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. And trespasser. And he didn’t even know it.
Or