The Regency Season: Wicked Rakes: How to Disgrace a Lady / How to Ruin a Reputation

‘This attempt to be invisible, not to mention unattractive. It will take more than that to get me to beg your father to reconsider, or to send me running back to London, refusing to honour my agreement.’

‘Perhaps I like this habit. Perhaps you err by insulting a lady’s dress.’

Merrick laughed out loud. ‘You forget I saw your evening gown a few nights back. At least one item in your wardrobe suggests you have some sense of fashion. As for your “liking” the habit, I do think you like that riding habit. I think you like being invisible. It gives you permission to sail through life without being noticed and that makes you unaccountable. People can only talk about things they see.’

That made her head swivel in his direction. ‘How dare you?’ Now she was angry. The earlier cool hauteur had melted under the rising heat of her temper.

‘How dare I do what?’ Merrick stoked the coals a little more. He liked her better this way—she was real when she was angry.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I do and I want to be sure you know what I mean. I want you to say it.’ The real Lady Alixe didn’t think about what she was going to say or do, she just did it, like kicking him under the table. Such a quality would make her unique, set her apart from the pattern-card women of the ton. Well, maybe not the kicking part, but there was a certain appeal in her freshness. The real Lady Alixe had a natural wit and a sharp understanding of human nature. The masked Lady Alixe was prim and invisible and quite the stick-in-the-mud. That Lady Alixe thought too much and acted upon too little, tried too hard to be something she wasn’t—a woman devoid of any feeling.

Merrick took in the smooth profile of her jaw, the firm set of her mouth. There was plenty of feeling in Lady Alixe. She’d simply chosen to stifle it. It would certainly help his cause if he could work out why. Then he could coax it back to life.

She wasn’t going to answer his question. ‘It’s not in your best interest to ignore me, Alixe,’ he prodded.

‘I know. Don’t remind me. If I ignore you now, I’ll spend the rest of my life ignoring you as my husband.’ She rolled her eyes in exasperation. If the road had allowed room for it, Merrick was sure she’d like to have trotted on ahead. But she couldn’t keep running from this; surely she knew it.

Just when he thought he’d made her squirm a bit mentally, forced her to face the reality of her situation, she startled him. ‘You are quite the hypocrite, St Magnus. How dare you accuse me of being invisible for the sake of unaccountability when you’ve made yourself flagrantly visible for the same reason. Don’t look so surprised, St Magnus. I warned you I knew men like yourself.’

‘I warned you I knew women like you.’

‘So you did. I suppose that gives us something in common.’

* * *

Merrick gave her the space of silence. He wasn’t impervious to her feelings. He understood she was angry and he was the only available outlet for that anger. He also understood he was the only one with a chance of truly emerging victorious from this snare. He could turn her into London’s Toast and walk away. He’d still be free to go about his usual ambling through society. But Lady Alixe’s days of freedom would be over whether he succeeded or not. He did feel sorry for her, but he could not say it or show it. She would not want pity, least of all his. Honestly, though, she had to help him a bit with this or they would end up leg-shackled and her chance to choose her fate would be sealed. She was too intelligent to be blind to that most obvious outcome.

* * *

Alixe kept her eyes fixed on the road ahead. St Magnus’s silence was far worse than the light humour of his conversation. His silence left her plenty of time to be embarrassed. She wanted to take back her hot words. They’d been mean and cruel and entirely presumptuous. She still could not believe they’d tumbled out of her mouth. She wasn’t even sure she truly thought them, believed them. She’d known St Magnus for a handful of hours, far too little time to make such a damning judgement. It might have been the unkindest thing she’d ever said.

She snuck a sideways look at him in the periphery of her vision. Thankfully, he did not look affected by her harsh words. Instead, he looked confident and at ease. He’d chosen to ride without a hat and now the sun played through his hair, turning it a lovely white-blonde shade aspiring debutantes would envy. Buttermilk. That was it. His hair reminded her of fresh buttermilk.

‘Yes?’

Oh, dear. He’d caught her staring—gawking, really—like a schoolroom miss. But his remarkable blue eyes were friendly, warm even. ‘I’m terribly sorry. I spoke out of turn. It wasn’t well done of me,’ Alixe managed to stammer. It wasn’t the most elegant of apologies; needless to say she had had very little practise apologising to extraordinarily handsome men with buttermilk hair and sharp blue eyes that could look right through her if they so chose.

He gave her a half-grin. ‘Don’t apologise, Lady Alixe. I know what I am.’ That only made her feel worse.

Now she’d really have to make it up to him—as if someone like her could ever make anything up to someone like him. But her conscience demanded she try.

* * *

She started by giving him a tour of the ruins. The ruins were in two parts. There was an old Roman fort and the villa. Since the fort was closer to the space the group had appropriated as the picnic grounds, she started with that. Afterwards, they joined the other guests on blankets strewn on the ground, where she promptly began a polite but boring conversation about the state of food being served.

‘Why is it, Lady Alixe, that people talk about food or the weather when they really want to talk about something else,’ St Magnus murmured when she stopped speaking long enough to take a bite of strawberry tart.

‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,’ Alixe said after she swallowed. She did know what he meant. People had the most ridiculous conversations about absolutely nothing because saying what one honestly felt was impolite. But she’d quickly discovered that when conversing with St Magnus, the conversation grew more interesting when he expounded.

St Magnus had finished eating and taken the opportunity to stretch his long form out on the blanket, propping himself up on one arm, a casual vision of indolence and sin in the early summer sun. He lowered his voice slightly above a whisper just loud enough for her to hear. ‘Do you truly believe everyone here wants to talk about the ham sandwiches and jugs of lemonade? Yet everyone’s conversations are the same if you listen.’

‘The ham is rather fine and the lemonade is especially cold,’ Alixe dared to tease.

St Magnus laughed. ‘I’d wager William Barrington over there with Miss Julianne Wood isn’t thinking about the ham and tarts.’

‘What is he thinking about?’ The words were entirely spontaneous and entirely too curious, hardly the right sort of conversational banter for a proper miss. A proper young lady would never encourage what was likely to be an improper avenue of discussion. But St Magnus had a way of encouraging precisely that. She was under the impression that no conversation with him would ever be completely proper.

St Magnus gave a wicked smile. ‘He’s probably thinking how he’d like to lick that smear of strawberry off her lips.’ He gave his eyebrows a meaningful arch. ‘Shocked? Don’t be. They’re all thinking roughly the same thing. Perhaps the place they want to lick varies.’

She was indeed shocked. No one had ever said anything quite so outrageous to her. Ever. But she would not retreat from it. She was fast discovering that being shocked did not have to be the same as being appalled. Since she’d met St Magnus, shock had only increased her curiosity. What else was out there to discover? She’d always thought there was more to life than the veneer society put on its surface. Now, she was starting to discover it, one shocking conversation at a time. Shocking, yes, but intoxicating, too. And, yes, even a little bit empowering, a boost of courage to be the woman in her mind who said witty things, who made challenging statements of her own.

She met his blue eyes squarely, a little smile hovering on her lips. ‘I don’t know what shocks me more: what you said or how you said it with such nonchalance as if you were indeed discussing something as mundane as the weather.’

‘Why not treat it with nonchalance?’ St Magnus gave an elegant lift of his shoulder and reached for a last berry. ‘It shouldn’t be a secret that all men really think about is sex.’

Had he just said ‘sex’? In the presence of an unmarried female?

‘Oh, yes, Lady Alixe. Males are not complex creatures when you get right down to it. Why not be honest about it? Consider this your first lesson in becoming London’s Toast. The sooner you embrace the fact as common knowledge, the sooner you can successfully cater to it.’

‘How ironic that you’ve used a food-related term. We’re right back to where we started. Food, the subject people talk about when they’re really thinking about licking people’s lips for them.’ Oh my, oh my. Now was the time to be appalled. She ought to be horrifically shocked by what had come out of her mouth, but she wasn’t. It seemed the natural response to St Magnus’s comment.

‘You can be a rare treat when you decide to employ that tongue of yours for good and not evil, Lady Alixe.’ St Magnus was laughing outright now.

‘People are starting to look,’ Alixe said through the gritted teeth of a forced smile. She was not so given over to the levity of their conversation that she was oblivious to the conditions of their surroundings.

‘We want them to look, don’t we? We want them to wonder what Lady Alixe has said that has St Magnus so captivated. They’re conversational voyeurs. They’re only looking because we’re having more fun than they are.’ He winked a blue eye. ‘And do you know why?’

‘Because we’re not talking about food,’ Alixe replied smartly, thoroughly enjoying herself.

‘Precisely, Lady Alixe. We’re talking about what we want to talk about.’

‘Are you always like this?’ she asked before she lost her courage, before ‘sophisticated woman with witty things to say’ retreated. She’d never let that part of her out to play before. She had no idea how long it would last before she stumbled or ran out of things to say.

Something like solemnity settled between them; a little of the hilarity of the previous conversation receded. His eyes were serious now. ‘I am always myself, Lady Alixe. It’s the one thing I can’t run away from.’

She sensed a reprimand in there somewhere, whether for himself or for her she could not tell. Perhaps she’d crossed an invisible line in her heady excitement. She seemed to be an expert at doing that today. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve been too forward. I don’t know what’s wrong with my mouth today.’

‘Nothing’s wrong with your mouth except maybe a smudge of strawberry tart, just here.’ He gestured to a corner on his own mouth. Alixe’s pulse ratcheted up

a notch. He was going to do it. Merrick St Magnus was going to lick her lips. Perhaps the most irrational and wicked thought she’d ever had, but it was a day for all those types of firsts. She took a deep breath, her lips parting ever so slightly in anticipation, her stomach fluttering with curiosity.

He leaned forwards, closing the gap between them...and most disappointingly reached for a napkin.

He dabbed it against her lips, gently wiping away the stain. She knew it was bold. No man had ever touched her mouth before, not even with a napkin. Yet she couldn’t help but feel it wasn’t bold enough. After all their talk of mouths and food and what men were really thinking, a napkin seemed far too tame.

There could only be one awful truth. He hadn’t wanted to. She’d let herself get carried away. In the end, he was Merrick St Magnus, man about town who could have any woman he wanted any time he wanted her, and she was plain Alixe Burke, with an emphasis on the plain. He didn’t want to lick her lips any more than he wanted to marry her, which, of course, was why he was trying so hard so he wouldn’t have to.