Page 31 of Notorious

“Is she stupid—this Miss Clare?” Giselle’s voice pulled him from his thoughts.

“No, she is very clever.” Perhaps too clever.

Giselle brushed her lips over his knuckles yet again, her hot breath making his groin ache. “And she is rich, no?”

“Yes, she is very wealthy.” Gabriel had learned only a few hours earlier just how wealthy his new wife was.

“Mon dieu, Gabriel! I would marry her myself, if she would have me.”

He laughed. “Yes, Miss Clare is attractive, intelligent, and possessed of great wealth, Giselle. It is not the lady herself I have trouble with,” he lied, hardly wanting to cast aspersions on his wife-to-be. At least not anywhere but in the privacy of his own mind. “It is the institution of marriage I was hoping to avoid.”

She made a dismissive sound. “What a fib. You’ve been considering marriage—both Maria and I have heard people talk of you and the Kitten.”

“You never mentioned it,” he said, wishing to avoid the subject.

“Not around you.”

“Ah, so that’s how it is. I’m the one who is left out in the cold. I always suspected as much.”

Her eyelids lowered and her mouth curved into a wicked smile. “Maria and I would never leave you out in the cold.”

Gabriel tried to ignore the swelling brought on by her suggestive stare. He didn’t have time for such things today, no matter how much he might need such things.

He turned the subject. “Anything you heard—about any young lady—was just idle speculation by gossips. Trust me, I had no plans to marry anytime soon.”

“You men—you are all the same, behaving as if marriage is an appointment with the gibbet. I expected more from you.”

“Lord, Giselle, you sound just like my mother.”

“I will take that as a compliment—I understand she is a remarkable woman.”

Talking about his mistress with his mother had been bad enough; he did not want to talk about his mother with one of his mistresses. “Why do you expect more from me, Giselle?”

“Because you are not English. You are a man of the world.”

“I have lived in North Africa and England; that is hardly the world.”

“Yes, but you were raised to expect an early marriage from a young age, were you not?”

He had been, although that changed in an instant when his father died and his betrothed had married his brother. He shrugged, not wishing to discuss the complicated subject of Fatima.

“In any case,” she said, reading his mood correctly and leaving the topic behind, “your experience is enough to know there is more than one way to”—she hesitated—“to skin a cat. I believe that is the English saying?”

“How the devil would I know—it certainly sounds dreadful enough to be an English saying.”

Her hand tightened. “We’ve wandered from the point.”

“What was your point, cherie?”

“You know you are not my first male lover.”

“Nor are you my first female lover, Giselle. Come,” he said, pulling her closer, her lush, responsive body melting against his like hot wax from a candle. “Out with it, my dear. What is it you are trying to say?”

Her expression became serious. “You are the only man Maria and I have met who has accepted what we feel for each other without either being threatened, treating us as unthinking vessels for nothing but pleasure, or acting as if we were depraved.”

Gabriel had nothing to say to that—he had no idea how other men thought about their lovers or what they did with them. It was a private matter that he’d never had any interest in discussing with another man—even with somebody as close as his friend Byer; although he knew his friend was intensely curious about his arrangement with Giselle and Maria.

“I see you are looking skeptical, but it is true. Most men only want a woman like me to open her mouth if I use it for something other than talking. You—” She traced a fine scar on his chin. “Well, you are different, and for the life of me, I cannot understand why. After all, you are the son of a man who kept women by the hundreds sequestered for his pleasure.”