Dancing With Danger (Goode Girls #3) - Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,4

hairline and some of it gathered to trickle between her breasts. The sway of the coach on dubious springs felt to her like a rowboat on the open ocean during a sea gale.

It was making her green at the gills.

Well, if her breakfast were to make a reappearance, she’d be certain to direct it at the shackled man taking up more than his share of space, not to mention entirely too much of the fetid air.

She refused to acknowledge Raphael Sauvageau as she lunged at the door, kicking out at it with all her might. The irons securing her wrists in front of her were attached to a bar above the long bench by a chain that set her teeth on edge with the most grating rattle.

As the carriage lurched over a bump, the chains were the only reason she didn’t end up on the floor in a heap of petticoats and sprawling limbs.

Mercy hadn’t gone easily into confinement. She’d writhed and scratched and spit like an angry tomcat being forced into a bath. It’d taken four constables to subdue her.

Behind her, the damnable gangster had sauntered toward his imprisonment as if he were on a lazy stroll, looking so much like he preferred his hands to be manacled behind him so he didn’t have to hold them there on his own.

His calm was patently infuriating. And if she were speaking to him at the moment, she’d make certain he knew it.

“Let me out, you knob-headed ignoramus!” she shouted through the bars, gripping them and shaking, as if it would do any good. “It shouldn’t be a crime to slap a man for being a discourteous toad, especially when he gave as good as he got!”

She ignored a sound emanating from the man locked inside with her, unable to tell if it was mirth or wrath.

The uniformed officers around Mathilde’s tidy row house disappeared as the conveyance rounded a corner.

In one final fit of pique, Mercy slammed her palm against the door with a satisfying clang before heaving herself onto the bench in a huff.

“I can’t be here,” she said to no one. Particularly not to the only other occupant of the coach. “My father is a baron and a commissioner, and my brother-in-law is the Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard. I’ll never hear the end of it.” She tugged at her tight manacles, twisting her slim wrists this way and that. “Oh, blast and bloody bother!”

This time, the rumble of amusement was unmistakable, drawing her notice.

“Really, I must beg you to refrain from saying such things,” Raphael Sauvageau intoned in a voice that threatened to curl her toes.

He lazed on the bench across from her as if it were as comfortable as a throne, legs sprawled open at the knees and expensive jacket undone. The threads of his trousers molded to long, powerful thighs, calling attention to an indecent bulge at their apex.

“I’ll say what I like, you—you—” If she wasn’t doing her best to avoid looking at it—at him—she would surely have delivered a most clever and scathing remark.

“Do not misunderstand me, mon chaton, I have no wish to censure you. It is only that I find your attempts at profanity relentlessly adorable and distracting. It is torture to be unable to do anything about it.” Beneath his charcoal suit, he lifted a helpless shoulder made no less broad for the captivity of his arms behind his back.

“The only thing you can do is to sod right off,” she snipped. “They’re going to put you to death, how can you be so calm?”

That Gallic shrug again. “I have many reasons not to panic, not the least of which is that I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing they ruffled my feathers.” He raised one dark, expressive eyebrow at her.

Mercy felt her frown turn into a scowl. Every person in a five-city-block radius categorically understood the current state of her feathers. They hadn’t been merely ruffled. But plucked.

Fit to be tied, she was.

Drat.

Mercy sagged back and let her head fall against the wall, squeezing her eyes shut.

She didn’t want to look at him.

What was he about calling her adorable? Had he meant it as a slight? A condescending jab at her youth? She was only all of twenty, but she was well educated. Well read.

Not to mention...one just didn’t go around calling people adorable, did one? Not unless they were your nine-year-old niece or something equally perturbing.

She was a woman.

And some part of her wanted him