The Seducer Read Free

voice was quieter this time, with no hard edge.
    He had her very worried now. “Sixteen.”
    “I am sure not. I suspect that you concluded it was in your interest to lie. But let us be certain. The gown, mam’selle.”
    “The gown?”
    “The gown. Remove it.”

chapter
2

    S he faced him, with her chestnut hair pouring down her lithe body. Her lips parted in confusion and her soulful eyes widened with shock. With that expression she looked almost as young as she claimed to be.
    “Remove it,” he repeated.
    “You cannot tell my age from . . . At sixteen I already . . .”
    “A female does not stop maturing so early. There is a difference between the voice of a girl and that of a woman, and yours has a mature resonance. There is also a difference in their bodies, especially in the hips. The ones that I just saw struck me as too rounded for sixteen. Remove your garments so that I can check if my fleeting impression was correct.”
    Her face flushed a deep red. Sparks of indignation flickered in her dark eyes. He half-expected her to start disrobing and call his bluff.
    Then the fires disappeared and her gaze turned cool.
    She suddenly reminded him of her father. There was no reason why the hell that should bother him, but it always had, and he abruptly lost interest in the game he had initiated with her.
    “I am twenty years old.”
    She did not sound like someone who had just been outflanked. Her tone suggested that she had made some decision.
    A tiny spike of caution stabbed him.
    “Does Madame Leblanc know your true age?”
    “She never asked my age when I came. I was small and unschooled and put with the youngest girls. However, she can count the years.”
    “But she never raised the question of your future with me.”
    “It was not in her interest to do so. You continued paying the fees. I progressed through the curriculum quicker than most. Three years ago I moved to the front of the schoolroom and began teaching what I had been taught.”
    “Very convenient for Madame Leblanc. However, you also never raised the question. In fact, you have lied to me about it before, and just did again.”
    “I have seen girls leave at eighteen. I did not think you would let me stay here if you knew I had come of age. So when you asked, I gave you the same age for several years before getting older again.”
    She had been very clever, Daniel realized. More clever than one expected of a young girl.
    He made the annual trips to this school with dark, soul-churning resentment. They served as sharp announcements of duties delayed and hungers unfed, of time passing and of quests unfulfilled. His responsibility here only reminded him that there would be no peace until he finished what he had started years ago. Even as he talked with her each year in this study, he blocked most of his mind to her.
    She had seen his self-absorption as indifference and taken advantage of it.
    She blushed prettily at her admission of guilt. “I apologize for the deception, but this is the only home I have known. I have friends here, and a family of sorts.”
    Home. Family.
A small, wistful smile accompanied those words.
    She had been willing to take a whipping to keep what little she had of both those things.
    He instantly wished that he had not let curiosity follow its course. Looking at her pretty face, he had forgotten whom he dealt with. For a few moments there he had been a man toying with an attractive woman and enjoying her dismay far too much.
    “We will forget this conversation, mam’selle. You can indeed stay. We will say nothing about your true age, and I will continue sending the fees. In time, Madame Leblanc will probably begin compensating you for your duties and you will officially move to the front of the schoolroom.”
    She strolled around the chamber, absently touching the glassed bookcase and the velvet prie-dieu. “It is tempting, I will not deny it. But the book . . . Madame Oiseau . . . It cannot be the same now. Sometimes