How To Tempt a Viscount Read Free Page A

sincerity, gave a nod of acknowledgement. ‘I was sent first to school and then to a seminary for young ladies.’
    ‘I have an educated wife.’ Contrary to all her expectations he sounded proud. He smiled and his eyes were warm, and something deep in her stomach gave a somersault at the sight of it so that she could not help but smile in return. A real smile that was all of Ellen and nothing of Kitty.
    ‘You need not worry, I am hardly a bluestocking.’
    His smile deepened. He stopped walking, and, taking her hands in his, turned her so that they standing facing one another. His eyes grew serious and he said softly, ‘So where do we start, Ellen?’ And she had the notion that he was not talking about the statues that surrounded them in the gallery, but about something else all together, and with it came the first stirrings of doubt over her plan and all she had striven so hard to set in place. She looked up into those midnight blue eyes regarding her so intently. And for a moment she was tempted to abandon it all, to drop the charade and speak to him with honesty about all that she felt in her heart. This was dangerous ground. She could hear the warning bells ringing all around her. Telling her not to trust him. Screaming at her not to be such a fool. And she listened to them for the scars were too fresh and she could not risk letting him hurt her so badly again.
    ‘We start here, Marcus….’ She glanced away to the nearest marble, removing her hands from his and gesturing to it. ‘With…’ Her heart gave a little stutter when she realised the statue they were standing before. ‘Adonis.’ She moved to face the stone hero, her back to Marcus, blocking him from her vision so that she could play the role she had come here to play. ‘The personification of the ideal of Greek manly beauty.’ The irony was not lost on her, and in a way it helped strengthen her. That memory of all she had thought him…and thought him still.
    She reached out and touched a hand to Adonis’s smooth stone face. Traced her fingers down that bold sculpted nose, swept a slow caress across the cold lifeless cheek. A man whose handsome looks had dazzled her from the moment she set eyes upon him. ‘Little wonder that Aphrodite fell in love with him.’ Just as Ellen had fallen in love with Marcus. She slid her fingers lower, her thumb tracing along the strong stone jawline to find his chin. ‘He was killed by a boar while out hunting, and where the drops of his blood splashed upon the forest floor, anemones sprang.’ Her hand stilled as she stared at the perfectly chiselled lips that reminded her too much of Marcus’s.
    ‘A tragic story,’ he said.
    ‘Very.’ She swallowed down the lump in her throat and moved her fingers to the stone lips in a touch as lingering and intimate as a lover’s, imagining they were Marcus’s lips.
    ‘Ellen.’ His voice was so close behind her that she could feel his breath against her hair, feel his warmth against the length of her spine, yet she had not heard him move.
    ‘He is so very cold,’ she murmured. ‘With the touch of my lips do you think I could breathe life and love and desire into him?’

    He reached his hand and placed it over hers where it lingered upon Adonis’s mouth. His fingers captured hers, his thumb stroking against her hand. ‘I think it is a certainty.’
    His other hand slid around her waist and came to rest flat against her abdomen. She jumped at his touch, her pulse leaping, her heart hammering so hard that she thought he would hear it within the still silence of the gallery. His touch seemed to brand her as if his hand were laid against the nakedness of her belly.
    ‘Ellen,’ he said again, more gently this time. ‘We need to talk….’
    But Ellen did not want to talk. Talking would only open those floodgates of emotion that she had barricaded shut. If she started talking she knew she would end up weeping. And God only knew what he wanted to say: words that had