Silk Is For Seduction by Loretta Chase Read Free Book Online Page A

“My luck seems to be turning.”
    “So it does,” she said.
    “Or perhaps you’ve been playing with me, madame, in more ways than one.”
    “I’m paying closer attention to the game,” she said. “You won a great deal from me before. My resources, unlike yours, are limited. I only want to win my money back.”
    He dealt. She looked at her card and pushed a stack of coins to one side of it.
    He looked at his card. Nine of hearts. “Double,” he said.
    She nodded for another card, glanced at it.
    Nothing. No visible sign of whether the card was good or bad. He’d had to practice to conceal his small giveaway signs. How had she learned to reveal or conceal them at will? Or had Dame Fortune simply smiled on her this night? She’d won at roulette, a game, as she’d said, of pure chance, though men never gave up trying to devise systems for winning.
    She won again.
    And again.
    This time, when they’d gone through the pack, she swept her coins toward her. “I’m not used to such late hours,” she said. “It’s time for me to go.”
    “You play differently with me than you did with the others,” he said.
    “Do I?” She brushed a stray curl back from her eyebrow.
    “I can’t decide whether you’ve the devil’s own luck or there’s something more to you than meets the eye,” he said.
    She settled back in her chair and smiled at him. “I’m observant,” she said. “I watched you play before.”
    “Yet you lost.”
    “Your beauty must have distracted me,” she said. “Now I’ve grown used to it. Now I can discern the ways you signal whether it’s going well or badly for you.”
    “I thought I gave no signals,” he said.
    She waved a hand. “You nearly don’t. It was very hard for me to decipher you—and I’ve been playing cards since I was a child.”
    “Have you, indeed?” he said. “I’ve always thought of shopkeepers as respectable citizens, not much given to vices, especially gambling.”
    “Then you haven’t been paying attention,” she said. “Frascati’s teemed with ordinary citizen-clerks and tradesmen. But to men like you and Émilien, they’re invisible.”
    “The one thing you are not is invisible.”
    “There you’re wrong,” she said. “I’ve passed within a few yards of you, on more than one occasion, and you didn’t look twice.”
    He sat up straighter. “That’s impossible.”
    She took up the cards and shuffled them, her hands quick, smooth, expert. “Let me see. On Sunday at about four o’clock, you were riding with a handsome lady in the Bois de Boulogne. On Monday at seven o’clock, you were in one of the latticed boxes at the Académie Royale de Musique. On Tuesday shortly after noon, you were strolling through the galleries of the Palais Royal.”
    “You said I wasn’t your sole purpose for coming to Paris,” he said. “Yet you’ve been following me. Or should I say stalking me?”
    “I’ve been stalking fashionable people. They all go to the same places. And you’re hard to miss.”
    “So are you.”
    “That depends on whether I wish to be noticed or not,” she said. “When I don’t wish to be noticed, I don’t dress this way.” One graceful hand indicated the low bodice of the crimson gown. His diamond stickpin twinkled at him from the center of the V to which the bodice dipped. She lay the cards, precisely stacked now, on the table in front of her, and folded her hands.
    “A good dressmaker can dress anybody,” she said. “Sometimes we’re required to dress women who prefer not to call attention to themselves, for one reason or another.” She brought her folded hands up and rested her elbows on the table and her chin on her entwined fingers. “That you failed to notice me in any of those places ought to prove to you that I’m the greatest dressmaker in the world.”
    “Is it always business with you?” he said.
    “I work for a living,” she said. She turned her head, and he watched her gaze sweep over the various bodies