Silk Is For Seduction by Loretta Chase Read Free Book Online

that was why he became bored so quickly. He left the table, found Aronduille, and said, “This place is dull tonight. I’m going to the Palais Royal.”
    “I’ll go with you,” said Aronduille. “Let’s see if the others wish to join us.”
    The others had moved to the roulette table.
    She was there still, in the crimson silk one could not ignore. The marquis remained at her side. In the same moment Clevedon was telling himself to look away, she looked up. Her gaze locked with his. An endless time seemed to pass before she beckoned with her fan.
    He would have come whether or not he’d expected to find her here, he assured himself. He’d come, and found another man glued to her side. It was nothing to him. Paris abounded in fascinating women. He could have simply nodded or bowed or smiled an acknowledgment and left the hotel.
    But there, she was, Sin Incarnate, daring him.
    And there was Émilien.
    The Duke of Clevedon had never yet yielded a woman he wanted to another man.
    He joined them.
    “Ah, Clevedon, you know Madame Noirot, I understand,” said Émilien.
    “I have that honor, yes,” Clevedon said, sending her his sweetest smile.
    “She has emptied my pockets,” said Émilien.
    “The roulette wheel emptied your pockets,” she said.
    “No, it is you. You look at the wheel, and it stops where you choose.”
    She dismissed this with a wave of her fan. “It’s no use arguing with him,” she said to Clevedon. “I’ve promised to give him a chance to win back his money. We go to play cards.”
    “Perhaps you will be so good as to join us,” said Émilien. “And your friends as well?”
    T hey went to one of Paris’s more discreet and exclusive card salons, in a private house. When Clevedon arrived with the marquis’s party, several games were in progress in the large room.
    By three o’clock in the morning, the greater part of the company had departed. In the small but luxurious antechamber to which the marquis eventually retired with a select group of friends, the players had dwindled to Émilien, a handsome blonde named Madame Jolivel, Madame Noirot, and Clevedon.
    About them lay the bodies of those who’d succumbed to drink and fatigue. Some had been playing for days and nights on end.
    At roulette, where skill and experience meant nothing, Noirot had won more often than not. At cards, where skill made a difference, her luck, oddly enough, was not nearly as good. The marquis’s luck had run out in the last half hour, and he was sinking in his chair. Clevedon was on a winning streak.
    “This is enough for me,” said Madame Jolivel. She rose, and the men did as well.
    “For me, too,” Émilien muttered. He pushed his cards to the center of the table and dragged himself out of the room after the blonde.
    Clevedon remained standing, waiting for the dressmaker to rise. He had her to himself at last, and he was looking forward to escorting her elsewhere. Any elsewhere.
    “It seems the party is over,” he said.
    Noirot gazed up at him, dark eyes gleaming. “I thought it was only beginning,” she said. She took up the cards and shuffled.
    He sat down again.
    T hey played the basic game of Vingt et Un, without variations.
    It was one of his favorite card games. He liked its simplicity. With two people, he found, it was a good deal more interesting than with several.
    For one thing, he could no longer read her. No wry curve of her mouth when her cards displeased her. No agitated tap of her fingers when she’d drawn a strong card. When they’d played with the others, she’d exhibited all these little cues, and her play had struck him as reckless besides. This time was altogether different. By the time they’d played through the deck twice, he felt as though he played with another woman entirely.
    He won the first deal and the second and the third.
    After that, she won steadily, the pile of coins in front of her growing while his diminished.
    As she passed the cards to him to deal, he said,