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hold gentlemen’s parties here,” he said, as if discussing the weather. “I don’t keep female servants, in case a guest is tempted to misbehave. There you are.”
    She sensed him step back, and turned, aware of her clothes slipping from her skin. “You’re a rake.” She realized too late that she really shouldn’t fill her sight with him like this.
    “What is a rake? I don’t drink to excess or game for disastrous stakes. I don’t rape serving wenches—or ladies, for that matter. But I enjoy women, both their company and their bodies.” His eyes on her reinforced that to an alarming degree. “I have a healthy appetite for women and for their pleasure. I love to give a woman pleasure, to watch her melt… You really should go, you know.”
    He hadn’t moved. During that extraordinary speech, he hadn’t moved a muscle that she’d seen, but it was as if she could see herself through his eyes, in disorder, her long hair down her back, her gown sliding off her, clutched to her full breasts.
    It was as if she could feel his hunger like the heat of a fire. She stepped back, but her foot tangled with her drooping skirt, and she stumbled.
    He caught her in one arm. His other hand took possession of a breast, still covered by her loosened corset— but not well. He was looking at it almost as if a battle roared in him.
    Then he removed his hand and turned her, somehow restoring her gown to her clutch. He steered her toward his open door and through it. “Good night, sweet nymph,” he said, and closed the door on her.
    She staggered into her room thinking of
Hamlet: “Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered
.”
    Sins. She should indeed be praying, for both of them. Instead, as she let her dress fall and then wriggled out of her corset, she acknowledged a shard of regret that he wasn’t a more sinful man and hadn’t tried to seduce her.
    She noticed the earrings and banknotes, but couldn’t even be bothered to pick them up.
Tried to seduced her
? He’d only have had to sweep her to his bed and keep on doing what he’d been doing.
    She clambered into the bed in her shift and pulled the covers up over herself, still trembling. She had to be grateful for his willpower, but all the same, all the same, a bit of her wept for an opportunity lost, an opportunity that was unlikely to ever come her way again.
    Cressida woke to strangeness. She remembered the events of the previous evening and where she was, but that in itself was the strangeness.
    The Duke of St. Raven, playing at being the highwayman
Le Corbeau
, had snatched her from Lord Crofton and carried her off to his scandalous house, Nun’s Chase. She could never have even dreamed such a scenario.
    Now he was intent on saving her from ruin, and she’d given her word to stay here at least until they had breakfasted. She would keep her word, but she must complete her journey to Stokeley Manor. Everything depended on that.
    Would her plan to outwit Crofton still work? It should, but if it failed, she would go through with the worst—she would become Lord Crofton’s mistress for a week. But then she stiffened with dismay. Her plan depended upon a small vial of liquid in her reticule, and her bag had been left in the carriage!
    She pulled the covers over her head as if that might save her. Could she get more of the emetic? If she convinced the duke to let her go on to Stokeley, he might find more of it for her.
    She pushed back the covers and sat, sweeping her hair off her face. Her life had become disaster after disaster, but she would not fail. She
had
to win.
    A slit of light through the heavy curtains said it was day, and it was time for her to face it. She wriggled out of the bed and squinted around the edge of the curtains to find a pleasant garden edged by woodland. From the angle of light she guessed it was about nine or ten o’clock. She heard whistling, then a stocky man in shirt, breeches, gaiters, and boots appeared, strolling down a path