Page 44 of The Traitor
And she’d pawned each bracelet, tiara, and ring at Sebastian’s express instruction.
Miss Danforth considered her letters, her expression similar to when she critiqued a bouquet.
“You were off making war, you mean. Freezing in the winters, starving year ’round, earning the hatred of your countrymen on both sides of the Channel. The English considered you a traitor, while the French resented your competence.”
Damn the woman and her casual insights. “More or less. What are you doing there, Miss Danforth? Waltzing about the page unsupervised, hmm?”
As he closed the distance toward the desk, Sebastian saw that she’d known exactly what he was about, stalking her, and she’d feigned ignorance of his aims adroitly enough to keep him coming closer.
“I’m practicing. Would you like to see?”
Such boldness. He liked her boldness, but the real problem was that she trusted him. Millicent Danforth trusted him bodily, morally, logistically, every way a woman could trust a man, and her trust was a strong aphrodisiac to someone who’d arguably committed treason.
He came around the desk and sat back against it without glancing down at her writing. “Millicent, this will not do.”
“You should go to bed, then.”
“I want to take you to bed with me. I want to keep you in my bed and make passionate love to you until exhaustion claims us both, then rut on you some more when we’ve caught a decent nap.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You won’t, though. Why not?”
Damnation was too mild a fate for such a woman. “You want me to say that a gentleman’s honor forbids it. You are longing for me to give you that lie, but I am not honorable, my dear. I am the Traitor Baron, my days are numbered, and those whose loyalty I claim are put in danger.”
“Everybody’s days are numbered.” He heard her aunts speaking, heard the toughness and scorn of old women in her tones, and wanted to scare her out of her complaisance.
“I have been challenged four times in the last six months, Milly. Poison was attempted before that, and recently my horse’s bridle was tampered with. Somebody badly wants me dead. So I take you to bed and romp away a few hours with you and get a child on you. Then we must marry, and you become not the discreet dalliance of a disgraced baron, but his widow. Your social doom is sealed by that fate, and I cannot abide such a thought.”
Because she deserved better, and because Sebastian could not bear the weight of even one more regret on his heart.
***
His lordship was trying desperately to shock her, while Milly wanted desperately to impress him with her letters.
“I will not marry you,” she said. Not for all thee’s,o’s,l’s, and evenv’s would she worry him like that. “I am not of an appropriate station, for one thing, and I expect somewhere there’s a rule about baronesses being able to read and write. I confess the romping part piques my curiosity.”
He swore softly in French but remained close to her, half leaning, half sitting on the desk. This late, his scent was softer, more spice, less sandalwood, and Milly had all she could do to keep her eyes open and not breathe too obviously through her nose.
“The romping part would be the ruin of you.” The way he said it suggested romping might be the ruin of him as well, which notion both intrigued and saddened.
“You lecture me when you could be kissing me, and then tell me you have no honor. There’s an inconsistency in your actions, my lord—or in your kisses. But no matter. I can find kisses and romping aplenty. I suspect your Mr. Brodie would oblige me easily enough were I simply plagued by curiosity.”
She’d shockedhim, which gave her no satisfaction at all, when she’d been trying to make a point.
“You will not torment Michael the way you are tormenting me, Millicent, and we will not romp.”
She tossed the pen aside and moved the inkwell to the corner of the blotter.
“You dratted man, I could not care less about the romping. It’syouwho plagues me. When Vincent kissed me, I wanted to wipe my mouth with my handkerchief. When you kiss me, I want to take my clothes off, and your clothes off too.”
He studied his hands, and by firelight, his expression was long-suffering to the point of martyrdom. Milly heard Shakespeare whispering from the shadows,WillallgreatNeptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hands?
“There will be no taking off of clothes, Miss Danforth. You are merely inquisitive, reckless, befuddled by your curiosity, and quite possibly by grief and”—his expression grew a trifle mean—“loneliness. Many a proper English lady has propositioned me, and do you know what they wanted, Miss Danforth?”
He was near shaking with the force of his ire. “Those gentle flowers of English womanhood wanted me to bind them and beat them. To blindfold them andplayat being the French colonel. They would offer me the cut direct should I ask them to dance, but they wanted me for their toy in private. I understand the need to use any means available to win a war, but I do not understand this depravity.”
Milly perceived that more than outraged, St. Clair was sickened by the propositions he’d received—genuinely shocked and bewildered.
“They did not see you as a person, just as you could not afford to see the English officers as people, but rather, as pawns on a chessboard.”
