Seducing an Angel by Mary Balogh Page A

she not be shocked when you arrive home with a—a lover ?” he asked her.
    “She has been warned,” she told him, “not to come out of her room when I arrive home, Lord Merton, and she will not.”
    “You knew, then,” he asked her, looking very directly into her eyes despite the darkness, “that you would be bringing a lover home with you?”
    He was a tiresome man. He did not know how to play the game. Did he imagine that like a lightning bolt out of a blue sky she had been smitten with love as soon as her eyes alit upon him in his sister’s ballroom? That everything had been spontaneous, unplanned? She had told him it had all been very much planned.
    “I am twenty-eight years old, Lord Merton,” she said. “My husband has been dead for more than a year. Women have needs, appetites, just as surely as men do. I am not in search of another husband—not now, not ever. But it is time for a lover. I knew it when I came to London. And when I saw you in Hyde Park, lookinglike an angel—but a very human and very virile angel—I knew it with even greater certainty.”
    “You came to Meg’s ball, then,” he asked her, “specifically to meet me ?”
    “ And to seduce you,” she said.
    “But how did you know I would be there?” he asked her.
    He sat back in his seat. But almost at the same moment, the carriage rocked to a halt outside her shabby-genteel house, and he moved his head closer to the window and looked out at it. She did not answer his question.
    “Tell me, Lord Merton,” she said, her voice almost a whisper, “that you are here not only because I set out to seduce you. Tell me that you looked across the ballroom at me earlier this evening and wanted me.”
    He turned back to face her, and she could just make out his eyes in the prevailing darkness. There was an intensity in their gaze.
    “Oh, I wanted you, Lady Paget,” he said, his voice as low as hers. “And that is not just past tense. I want you. I told you earlier that when I go to bed with a lady it is because I choose to do so, not because I am unable to resist seduction.”
    Yet he would not have spared a thought to bedding her tonight if she had not deliberately collided with him—or almost collided, just before the waltz began. He might not have even spoken with her or danced with her, unless he had done so for his sister’s sake.
    No, Lord Merton , she told him without speaking aloud, you have been seduced .
    His coachman opened the door and set down the steps. The Earl of Merton descended, handed her down, and dismissed the carriage.
    There was a certain feeling of unease, Stephen found, mingled with the pleasant anticipation of sensual pleasures. He could not quiteunderstand the discomfort, except perhaps that they were in her home, where her servant and her companion were sleeping. It did not feel quite right.
    Sometimes he despised his conscience. While he had lived an active, even adventurous life since he was a boy, he never had sown very wild oats, though everyone—including himself—had expected that he would.
    To his relief, they encountered no one inside her house. One candle had been left burning in a wall sconce in the downstairs hall, and one on the upstairs landing. In the dimness of the light they shed, he could see that the house was respectable, if somewhat shabby. He guessed that she was renting it, and that it had come furnished.
    She led him inside a square bedchamber at the top of the stairs and lit a single candle on the heavy dressing table. She angled the side mirrors so that suddenly it seemed as though there were many lights.
    He shut the door.
    There was a large chest of drawers in the room beside a door leading, presumably, into a dressing room. There were small tables on either side of the bed, each with three drawers. The bed itself was large, with heavy spiraling bedposts and an ornate canopy covered with a faded dark blue fabric that matched the bedcover.
    It was neither an elegant nor a pretty