Pleasure for Pleasure

Page 22

“Precisely.” Mayne reached down and grabbed her discarded dress. He gave it a speculative shake.
“What on earth are you doing?” she asked. He was wrenching off his coat. “Why are you undressing?” She might have been naive, but even she could tell that this was no scene of seduction, in which he managed to take off her clothes under a ruse, only to strip himself naked.
“I think I could show you best if I put the dress on,” he said, frowning in an adorable fashion. “Thank goodness, it has short sleeves. I’m afraid my arms are unfashionably burly from working with horses.”
And before she could say anything, he stripped off his shirt as well. He wasn’t even looking at her, so Josie just sat, transfixed. He would never be able to put her dress on, any more than she could. He was all smooth, sharp-cut muscle, beautifully defined. She thought men had mats of hair on their chest; she’d seen hair curling from the shirts of men working in her father’s stables. But Mayne was smooth, smooth except for the muscles standing out under his skin.
Now he looked utterly unfamiliar. The sleek, exquisitely groomed Mayne, in the moonlight filtering through those small overhead windows, looked wild, like Bacchus, the god of wine. He would be perfectly at home in a shadowy wood, vines wound in that mop of curls, a sleek mat of hair beginning at his waist.
Without noticing, Josie had frozen in her chair, not making a sound, as if a wild animal stalked her chamber without seeing her. She felt a blend of attraction and fear, of amazement and shock.
A second later the attraction turned to helpless laughter.
Mayne picked up her pink dress and in one swift movement ripped it down the back. Then, before she could utter a protest—one of Madame Badeau’s special creations! Made of the finest silk, with an overskirt of rose gauze and trimmed everywhere in tiny white glass beads!—he pulled the sleeves briskly up his arms. She could hear a faint ripping sound, but really, did it matter at this point?
“Now,” he said, stopping to have a swallow of wine. “Here I am.”
“There you are,” she said, laughing helplessly. His muscled arms stuck out of her little pink cap sleeves with all the incongruity of a tiger wearing an apron.
“Pay attention,” he said severely. “As I said, here I am. Miss Lucy Debutante.”
Josie leaped to her feet and dropped into a curtsy. “What a pleasure to meet you, Miss Lucy.” She couldn’t help noticing how much easier it was to curtsy when you were wearing a dressing gown, and had no corset to poke you in the back of the legs.
Mayne dropped a very credible curtsy as well. Then he strode to the side of the room. “All right,” he said. “Now watch me carefully. Lucy is young and unknowing, but she’s been a coquette from birth. That means that she instinctively knows that men wish to see a woman’s hips sway when she walks. Do you understand?”
“No,” Josie said. “My governess, Miss Flecknoe, taught me to walk with a book on my head.” She put on Miss Flecknoe’s mincing voice. “Ladies must walk upright, without unnecessary wiggling of the torso.”
“Miss Flecknoe is an idiot,” Mayne said. “Wiggling is precisely what you do, in a refined manner, you understand.” He put a hand on his pink-clothed hip and began to walk across the room toward her. Somehow, like magic, his walk took on the sleek stroll of a female predator, a woman so confident of her appeal that her hips swayed like a ship encountering a swell of water.
He turned around and giggles burst from her mouth. Of course her poor dress came nowhere near meeting in the back. In between the gaping seams was a broad expanse of smooth skin.
“Stop chortling, witch,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s your turn.”
“My turn?”
Somehow Josie found herself next to him. “Let your hips sway,” he said. “You have lovely hips; I could see them even when you turned yourself into a sausage.”
“I don’t—” Josie said, but weakly. Perhaps the corset would have to go.
She walked beside him, across the room, but it didn’t work. She didn’t feel like a coquette, for all she put a hand on her hips and swayed. She was trying not to think about how wide her hips would look, going back and forth like that. And then she realized that what she’d really like would be Mayne’s body in a female form, because his hips were absolutely flat and of course that was why he looked so sensual when he pretended to be a woman.
He stopped short with a little exclamation. “You’re not giving this your attention, Josie!”
“I am,” she protested. “I really am. I’ll try again.” And she ran back to the wall and, under his gaze, walked toward him, trying to waddle from side to side. Because that’s how she felt about it: as if she were waddling. If waddling would make men slaver, or even ask her for a dance that hadn’t been arranged by one of her sisters, she was eager to do it.
Mayne’s eyes narrowed and she could read failure there.
“Maybe I simply…” her voice trailed away.
“You’re not feeling it. Have you ever kissed anyone, Josie?”
“Of course I have!” And then she realized what he meant. “You mean, kiss a boy?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of kissing a man,” he answered, amused.
She shook her head. Who would want to kiss her? Was he blind? He must have read that in her face.
“There’s the problem. You don’t have any sense of yourself because you—you don’t have any sense of yourself. Have you—” But he checked himself. Whatever that question was, it clearly couldn’t be asked, even under the influence of far too much champagne and moonlight.
Then he was there, in front of her. He was wearing a pink dress with cap sleeves. The glass beads painstakingly sewn on by Madame Badeau’s seamstresses glittered in the moonlight. He should have looked absurd, but instead, Josie felt as if Bacchus himself had indeed wandered into this strange little turret room and was there, with a deep wild invitation in his eyes.
Although what he was saying didn’t sound inviting.
“I’m going to kiss you,” he said briskly. “Someone has to do it the first time, and it might as well be me because I’m very good at it. But Josie—” He caught her around the shoulders.
“Yes?” She knew her eyes were round.
“I’m in love with Sylvie, you know that.”
She scowled at him. “I take it you think I might fall in love with you because of a kiss.”
His smile was crooked.
“Don’t worry. Since we are being frank, I shall tell you that I have no intention of falling in love with anyone who is as old as you are.” His smile disappeared. “My sisters have done nothing but throw men of your age at me since the season began, and while it was most kind of them to dance with me, I…”
Her voice trailed off. He actually looked a little hurt, but perhaps that was just her imagination, because he said easily, “You want to marry someone your own age, which is absolutely appropriate. Although I would recommend that you look for someone who has actually reached their majority.”
“I have a list,” she told him.
He grinned at that. “What’s on your list?”