Nicola Cornick - Unmasked

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Osborne,” Nick Falconer said, “but have we met before?”

Mari met his gaze. It was dark and direct. Suddenly she felt quite cut off from everyone but Nick himself, for his broad shoulders blocked out Hester and Charles and all the other guests. He had drawn a little closer to her as a group of people passed by, chattering and laughing, on their way to the refreshment room. One of his hands was holding her elbow, lightly, but with a touch that made her entire body tingle with awareness. She could smell the scent of him, a combination of summer nights, sandalwood cologne and something more personal and intimate. His clothes were creased and dusty from his journey but that did not detract one whit from his air of authority. Here was a man accustomed to taking what he wanted. She could tell. She doubted that many women would refuse him.

The awareness shivered between them, intense, compulsive. It felt as though he was conscious of every inch of her beneath the gray silk of her evening dress. Mari broke the contact only with difficulty.

“I am sure that we have never met,” she said.

He gave her the same slow smile that she remembered from that night at the tavern. “Would you have remembered me?”

Definitely. I could not forget you….

“I have a good memory,” Mari said coolly, “but you do not feature in it.”

He raised an eyebrow, completely unmoved at her set down. “Strange. You seem very familiar to me.”

Mari gave him a cold smile. “On the contrary, Major Falconer, you are the one who is overfamiliar—and not very original in your approach, either.”

He smiled again. It was devastating. “And yet for all your denials I am certain that I recognize you,” he said, “although you do look very different with your clothes on.”

Mari could feel herself clutching her reticule so tightly that the catch bit into her fingers. So he was going to be that direct. Not many men would be so blunt but she might have known that he would waste no time on courtesies. She knew he was deliberately provoking her, testing her to see what her reaction would be. No respectable woman, after all, would admit to swimming in the nude in a garden fountain. So if she did admit it, it would be tantamount to confessing that she was of easy virtue and then, well, judging by the look in his eyes, it would not be her planting schemes he would be interested in discussing…

Damn it all to hell and back. She admitted to herself that he had her trapped. What was to be done? It could be the ruin of her reputation if he spoke out about what he had seen. On the other hand, her indiscretion in the garden was not as damaging as those other, life-threatening secrets that she absolutely had to keep. She could admit to being the woman in the fountain but never, ever to being the harlot at the Hen and Vulture.

“I know it was you in the fountain,” he said softly, whilst her trapped mind ran back and forth over the possibilities. “You may protest if you wish but I believe I would recognize you anywhere.”

A shiver ran along Mari’s nerves and she drew the silver shawl more tightly around her shoulders. Oh, yes, he recognized her from the gardens but did he know her from the tavern, as well? It felt as though they were already deeply involved in a game of hunter and hunted and any admission she made could be so very dangerous.

Challenge him. See how far he will go, what he will give away….

She had always been a gambler. She had had to be in order to survive. Sometimes to throw down the gauntlet was the only way.

She gave a little shrug. “Very well. I concede that I was the woman you saw in the fountain. I thought I was unobserved. It was…careless of me.”

He flashed her another smile, a disturbingly attractive one. Her toes curled instinctively within her slippers and her heart did another giddy little skip as though she was a schoolroom miss developing a tendre rather than a mature woman of five and twenty.

“I like it that you do not pretend,” he said. His voice was intimately low. “Ninety-nine women out of one hundred would have claimed not to understand me.”

If only he knew. Sometimes she forgot where the pretence began—and where it ended.

She gave him a very straight look. “Of course they would, and who could blame them? A reputation dies all too easily, as you must know, Major Falconer.”

“So why are you different? Why did you admit it?”

Mari met his quizzical dark gaze and felt a little breathless. “I am not different. I do not wish you to be the ruin of my reputation, Major Falconer. But equally, I know that you saw me, so what can I say?” She spread her hands in a gesture of surrender. “I was bathing. You saw me. It would avail me little to pretend otherwise. So I must rely on your behavior as a gentleman and hope you will not speak out.”

It was not the whole story, of course. It would be impossible to tell him the truth, that sometimes the role of the respectable widow grated on her and she felt an impossible desire to be free. She could not tell him that it was this impulse that had led her to strip off her clothes and revel in the fresh coldness of the fountain. That was too intimate a thing to confide to a virtual stranger, a dangerous stranger who already saw far more than she wished.

When he remained silent, watching her face, she raised her brows. “Was that all you wished to say to me, Major Falconer?”

She saw his lips twitch into a smile at her attempted dismissal of him.

“No, it was not all.” He reached forward. His fingers brushed against her neck very lightly and lingered, warm against her skin. “You had better hide that curl if you do not wish anyone else to guess your secret. Your hair is still wet. You must have rushed home and dressed in a great hurry.”

Mari’s hand flew to her neck where the wayward curl of hair nestled against her throat. It felt feathery, soft and damp, drying from the warmth of her body. She pushed it beneath the edge of her turban, her fingers suddenly clumsy. She could feel the color suffuse her face as Nick continued to watch her.

“Hair as black as midnight,” he said. “I remember.”

There was a heat in the pit of Mari’s stomach as she thought of what else he might remember about her. Her whole body felt as though it was on fire. But then the memory of Rashleigh—his violence, his touch—slithered into her mind and turned her blood to shards of ice and this time she could not erase it.

Not all men were cruel like the Earl of Rashleigh had been. She knew that. She knew that some were all that was chivalrous and honorable. But she had no desire to find out for herself which were good and which were not. She could never trust a man; never let him close to her, and this man least of all when he could bring them all down. So she had to put an end to this disturbing attraction now. She had to finish matters before they really began.

“I have to ask you to forget everything that you saw, sir,” she said coldly, “and never speak of this again.” Indignation swept through her and she could not quite stifle it. “Indeed,” she said, “if you had any claim to the title of gentleman, you would not have been watching anyway.”

She saw the laughter lines around his eyes deepen and felt a strange tug of feeling inside. “My dear Mrs. Osborne,” he sounded amused, “you ask too much. I am a man first and a gentleman second.”

“A very long way second!”

He inclined his head as though conceding the point. He took her hand again, drawing her close. His breath tickled her ear. The icy feeling that was wedged beneath Mari’s heart threatened to melt in the heat of his touch.

“You are a widow, Mrs. Osborne,” he said softly, “and as such, I assume, you are familiar with the way a man thinks on such matters as—” his voice dropped further “—physical desire?”