Page 40 of Pride, Prejudice, & Pretense

"Can I take you somewhere for a nightcap?"

Lizzy shook her head. "I'm sorry, George, I'm just too full. I need to go home and recover a bit before bed."

He let both corners of his mouth lift when she saidbed."Can I tuck you in?"

"No," Lizzy said, chuckling, Fanny treating the request as a joke. But then she met his eyes. "Not tonight."

"Miss Fanny's apartment, Rook," Wickham said, and the car began to move.

He put his arm around her again and, since she had chosen to sit closer, it was fully around her. She gazed up at him as the passing streetlights created a strobe light effect in the back of the car.

He lowered his head to hers, his lips to hers. The pathway had been created and cleared by Fanny in Alinea. He kissed her. He turned, reached across with his other arm, and put his hand on her bare knee. Lizzy did not open her lips, but she let Fanny melt against Wickham. He slid his hand up her knee toward her thigh, then onto it. She reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. He slid his hand to the edge, the very edge, of her short skirt.

It had been a long time since any man's hand had touched her like that. Against her will, her body responded with an immediate damp warmth. This was the danger about which Darcy warned her, about which her instructors at the Farmwarned her.Shifting sandbars in a strong river.She willed her legs closed.

It was not that she wanted Wickham. She didn't, despite his elegance and charm. He was an evil man. But the evening, the champagne, the wine, the food, the overstimulation of her senses, the length of time since a man had touched her with such pleasurable intention, arrived so close to his destination, the Gregory Peck comparison?it all affected her.

"No, George," she whispered as she shut her legs, trapping his hand. "Ican't. This was wonderful, you're wonderful, but I can't.Ned." She un-trapped his hand, placing her hand on his wrist and removing it from her, but gently.

"Have you been faithful to him?"

She nodded. "Of course. From our first date."

He placed a finger under her chin and tipped her head up so she would look into his eyes. "I can do things to you, Fanny, things Ned has never dreamed of…thingsyou'venever dreamed of. Teach your body to know itself, its possibilities," He said this close to her ear in a hot whisper.

Lizzy trembled. "Don't, George. I need time. Time. To think."

He nodded and smiled, his smile disappointed but pleased at the same time. "Don't take too long, Fanny. I won't be in Chicago forever. And what Ned doesn't know…"

They were silent the rest of the way to her apartment and parted with only a quick, awkward hug.

Chapter Ten: Criminal Conversation

Lizzy hurried across the lobby to the elevator, her pink heels loud both in color and on the floor. As she reached the elevator, she took off her jacket. The activity in the back of the limousine had created residual heat, and she did not want to seem heated to Darcy during the debriefing. From the periphery of her vision, she saw the security guard at the desk drinking in her fuchsia dress with a long visual swallow. She dropped her eyes as she waited for the elevator doors to close, not wanting to meet his gaze.

No additional flustering was desired.

The door slid closed with a softswish.When they met, Lizzy allowed herself to slump against the elevator's back wall. Though she hadn't spent much of the evening on her feet, her pink heels were hurting her, too tight.The heels…and the mission.

The Farm instructor who trained students in seduction—manipulation, pretense—had a mantra:Pretense is founded on fact.

Lizzy had raised an eyebrow (to herself) in the first class session when he first began to repeat it, amused by and a bit contemptuous of the alliterative Fs. In a rare instance of ribald mischief, out one night at a nearby dive bar with classmates, she had called the classthe threeFs, and it caught on among the other students.

However, as the class unfolded?and later, when Lizzy began working as an agent, especially after her first honeypot assignment?she began to appreciate the wisdom of the mantra.

The instructor had explained, "Pretending for this job may always end up requiring that you be present on the scene while pretending and that you give a current personalperformance. For example, imagine you are an agent on a so-called seduction mission, sometimes called a 'honeypot' mission. You have done various things to convince your mark that you are interested?for instance, sending suggestive emails. This is something that does not require you to be present on the scene and requires no currentpersonalperformance. The email's easy. It requires only basic computer skills and a bit of…erotic literary panache."

The instructor, a tall, gaunt man, leaned forward, finger up, eyes bright. "But when the mark is with you, then the pretense becomes a current personal performance. In this situation, pretending successfully involves your body and bodily reactions. These are changes that cannot be easily faked, if at all. Blushes, dilated pupils, accelerated breathing, swelling of the lips—those are the most easily seen changes. There are, of course,others." The instructor nodded and raised one eyebrow, making sure everyone understood his implication, and they did.

"The goal in such a case is never—never—to have sex with a mark. The goal is to make the mark desire sex with you and to wield that desire against the mark.

"You can try to fake it all, and you might succeed, but often you won't. Luckily…or perhaps unluckily…your body has a mind of its own, as it were. It can provide thefoundation of factneeded. Being desired often has the effect of arousing desire, even against a person's will. That can be disconcerting. You need to know it happens and understand that, when it does happen, youcanresist it. You willhaveto do that—resist it!And it helps to be prepared for it. Otherwise, the seduction you intend to control may take control of you, and you will become what you intended merely to pretend to be."

Momentarily lost in her recollections, Lizzy realized the elevator was stopping. She blew out a breath as the elevatordoors slid open. Their opening felt like a release, a beckoning to escape.

She had never had that bodily reaction to a mark before. The two marks in her previous honeypot missions had both been easy to manipulate, albeit in different ways. Wickham was another sort of creature altogether. A master manipulator.

Lizzy had not been taught Darcy's Pauline Principle as such, as a philosophical principle, but she was no more willing than Darcy to treat ends as justifying means. She wanted to do her job and do it well, but she did not want to have to lose her soul doing it. If she allowed her integrity to be compromised, then who knew what other compromises might be in her future? Seductions reversed had been the origin story of many rogue agents, double agents, and traitors.

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