“I think,” he said gently, “that you are a woman of great heart and that your compassion led you to warn me off.”
Now he really was off track. He’d side-stepped his mission in favour of walking through this unchartered territory.
To his surprise, Mademoiselle Cadeaux laughed—but the sound was not pleasant. It was forced, and when she turned towards him, there was a hardness in her eyes along with a challenging gleam. “You think you know me so well, Your Grace?”
Apparently not. He’d assumed reaching out with genuine care might garner trust.
Avers refused to be put off by her sudden change of tone. “No—I barely know you at all. In fact, the more time I spend in your company, Mademoiselle Cadeaux, the less I feel my initial judgements of you were correct.”
“Am I to thank you, then—for your gracious re-estimation?”
“Once again your wit is sharp enough to cut. No thanks are needed. I will merely keep any judgements of you reserved until I know you better.”
“You can have no judgements of me,” Mademoiselle Cadeaux said, her voice calmer.
“How so?”
“Because until you have lived my life, you have no say.”
“Touché, Mademoiselle,” Avers conceded. “Perhaps that is the realisation I have come to.”
He saw a flicker of surprise cross her face. Good. She misread the smugness for insincerity.
“I do not need to be shamed by one who has no concept of struggle.”
Avers observed her from beneath his hooded lids and then dropped his gaze to his nails before saying, “Have I done such a thing?”
“Do not play the fool with me, Your Grace. You are well versed in clever talk, but I am better versed in listening to it. I can decipher even the most sugar-coated of insults.” She gestured around herself, her voice steadily rising in volume. “I have spent enough time with men like you, born to wealth and name. Your only hardship has been your banishment to your family home in Paris to attend salons and balls and work with your cousin.”
Avers had found the nerve he had been searching for, and along with it raw, unfiltered emotion. He had done a poor job of hiding his initial judgement, and she was doing an excellent job of scolding him for making it in the first place.
He remembered the young woman on the Île de la Cité—that world that ran parallel to his own yet never intersecting it… until Mademoiselle Cadeaux.
“You decided what I was when you first met me, and you are determined to shame me for it. But I make no such judgements of you in return, despite your dissolute lifestyle, your exile, and your obvious desire to do business with the Comte.”
“And there it is again—the implication that doing business with the Comte is no good thing. You warn me away from Vergelles with an analogy about your dog though I so clearly vex you. Why is that?”
“Do I?” she asked, ignoring his question and returning his gaze unwaveringly.
Avers resisted the desire to sigh in frustration. He thought he’d cracked her hard outer shell with that outpouring of honest emotion just now. That with the glimpse of the real Emilie Cadeaux perhaps he had deciphered her, and she would cooperate with him. Or… is that what he wanted from her—cooperation?
“So, you stand by your falsehood?” he asked, the same lazy gaze running over her face as one brow rose. “You have no metaphors you wish to discuss with me concerning the Comte?”
“None that I can think of—about the Comte… or his friends.”
“Very well, I shall desist with the analogy. Let us now turn to the matter of the dog biscuit—do not tell me that you dropped such a precious item, acquired at such cost, by accident.”
“I am beginning to feel interrogated.”
“You do? In that case, I must apologise. My inquisitiveness is borne from your mysteriousness.”
Mademoiselle Cadeaux let out a rather unladylike snort.
“Aha!” Avers chuckled, finding the action endearing rather than off-putting. “But it is true.”
And now to play his trump card.
“A woman who appears in Society to possess a particular character and yet spends her nights giving to the poor of the Île de la Cité and warning off foolish Englishmen from business with the Comte de Vergelles. What is behaviour like that but mysterious?”
She visibly jumped at his mention of her nocturnal activities and her eyes fixed upon his face, the fan she had been wafting frozen in mid-air.
More than anything, Avers wanted to understand this woman, and why she was mixed up with the Comte.
“Is it not far more common for a woman in love to be her gentleman’s champion—not his detractor?”
He let the question hang in the air between them. A question which he knew he was asking far more for his own interests than that of his mission.
“And I thought,” Mademoiselle Cadeaux answered, voice even and words deliberate, “that you were a foolish nobleman in Paris looking to find pleasure and abandon. But you are not, are you, Your Grace?”
In that moment, Avers believed that Mademoiselle Cadeaux’s dark eyes could see right through him—through the subterfuge and the acting. They knew he was not here in Paris for pleasure-seeking but for some ulterior motive. He had played his hand too freely.
A wave of cold fear ran through him. What was he playing at? Had he risked the mission—and Wakeford’s reputation—in some foolish attempt to understand a woman who intrigued him? Now it was too late. She was suspicious and he had nothing more to lose.
“The more I get to know you, Mademoiselle Cadeaux, the more I believe you and the Comte de Vergelles do not suit.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
