The Problem with Seduction - By Emma Locke Page 0,29
trust her not to think up something worse.
He glanced at the window. The last of the sun’s rays were about to seep into the earth. Still too early to sleep, for a London man-about-town like himself.
“If I don’t tell you now,” he grumbled, “you’ll wait until the wine has had its effects and ask again. I won’t be able to explain it in a way that makes sense, and you’ll come to believe I’m the greatest buffoon. There is nothing for it, then, but to tell you that my situation is terribly embarrassing to me and I hope that what I’m about to reveal will remain a confidence kept between us.”
She leaned forward, and he was finally able to see a hint of cleavage. “I would not divulge it for the world,” she replied dramatically.
A knock at the door seemed fortuitously timed to the precise moment Con required the aforementioned wine. It would be easier to explain his situation with a bit of warmth in his veins.
He rose and returned with a tray bearing two glasses and a decanter. After sitting again on the mattress and tipping the spout over each of their glasses, he said, “I made a few bad investments.”
Her brow arched. “To the tune of—”
“Not ten thousand pounds. God, no.”
She sat back, taking with that his opportunity to look down her gown. “That’s quite the mistake.”
He couldn’t keep sarcasm from his voice. “Yes, thank you. Being moments away from being hauled off to the gaol did nothing to apprise me of that.”
She ignored his acerbity. “What were they?”
He shrugged and studied the imprint curling across the back of the cards without seeing it. Now that she had him thinking about it, he actually had made ten thousand pounds’ worth of bad investments. Dare was a god-awful investment. But a few thousand of those quid had been his own choices. Terrible ones, as it turned out. “A few different interests,” he hedged. “There’s a project in Devon that the Grand Canal Company can’t be bothered to complete; that’s the main one. Luddites destroyed a cotton mill in Lancashire several months ago. That cost me a pretty penny. My schools were never intended to be profitable, but other investments aren’t providing the returns I’d anticipated and children are confoundedly expensive creatures.” And his twin brother was just one more child to care for. A spoiled one. He looked up from the cards. “It adds up monstrously fast.”
Her lips were parted just enough that he could see the pink of her tongue, as if she wanted to say something but it hadn’t quite rolled off yet.
“What?” he asked, feeling very sure now that he shouldn’t have told her. Women pitied men who floundered.
“Schools? As in, more than one?”
Her odd little puckered brow wasn’t about his failings? He felt a bit better.
“I had no idea you were involved in anything so noble as the upkeep of schools,” she explained. “Whenever anyone speaks of your debts, it’s assumed you’re a gambler or a womanizer or both.”
He was careful to keep a smile pasted on his face. “No, just a poor capitalist.” He wouldn’t tell her twice how discomfited it made him to know he’d chosen his investments so poorly time and time again. Keeping his brother and himself out of the clink was starting to cripple him. At some point, shouldn’t he learn what constituted a worthwhile venture?
No, he needed a subject that might hold her interest without making him deuced uncomfortable. “I wonder where those rumors originated,” he mused, keeping his voice charmingly light. “Shouldn’t there be witnesses? Men who have sat at the tables with me and women who can tell stories about my prowess in bed?”
She laughed despite his crass language. “There are always women willing to lie for the honor of claiming to have seduced you,” she replied sagely, proving he needn’t mind his tongue with a woman as worldly as her.
“Do I have a lover, then?” he asked with a wolfish smile. “Is she beautiful?”
She glanced at the bed behind him. As though she couldn’t help but connect their conversation to their current, intimate situation.
His body hardened in response. She was supposedly his mistress. The idea wasn’t as far-fetched now as it had been when he’d blurted it out earlier.
His gaze caught hers. A pink flush stained her cheeks. Her gaze dipped and she reached for her wine. “Surely gentlemen do not invest in schools often, though. That can’t be a regular interest.”