Page 39 of Master Wolf
“We will charm this Begg,” she went on, grinning. “Charm the very stockings from his legs! We will dress our best.” She sent Drew a severe look. “Both of us, if you please. One never knows in what direction a man’s lusts swings.”
Drew gave a dry chuckle. “I will do my best, but I have to point out that unlike yours, my clothes are all the same really.”
“Pshaw! As though you need fine clothes to be noticed with your looks! Besides, I will look down my Parisian nose at everyone and you will be the worst sort of snooty London gentleman. We will flash our money in a vulgar fashion and allow this Begg to begin dreaming of a great prize. And I—or you—will flirt if he seems susceptible to that.”
“Flirt?” Drew said. “I wouldn’t know where to begin!”
“You could try smiling occasionally,” Marguerite said airily. “Instead of glaring all the damned time.”
“I don’t—”
But she was already moving on. “I will wear my new garnet-red gown. It is beautifully daring and I am ravishing in it.” She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Not that you would notice,mon cher.”
“On the contrary,” he said. “I appreciate all forms of beauty.”
The carriage was slowing now, the short journey almost done.
“I am sure you do,” she said. “And I think you would want to fuck me about as much as you want to fuck that little china shepherdess in your parlour in London.”
Drew gave a bark of shocked laughter. The carriage had stopped and the groom was opening the door.
Marguerite laughed too as she turned away to step lightly down, calling over her shoulder. “I have you there.”
He couldn’t argue with that, he thought, as he followed her out of the carriage and into the townhouse. Over the last thirty years he’d come to terms with that much at least: that he had never and would never truly desire women. Strange to remember how impossible that had once been to admit. Something that would mark him out from the rest of humanity, a morally corrupt deviant. When he had finally been seduced by Lindsay at the grand old age of five-and-thirty, he had felt as though he had taken a step into the fiery pit of hell; as though allowing this beautiful, captivating man to suck his cock had changed the fabric of his universe.
Christ, but he’d had no idea then just how much Lindsay was going to change his universe. He almost laughed now to remember how twisted up with misery and anxiety he’d been over Lindsay’s seduction, unaware that there was something else Lindsay would do to him that would bring about a far more irrevocable and profound change to Drew’s life.
“We will dine at six,” Marguerite informed him once they were ensconced in the parlour. “We need to eat well—it is full moon and we will need the reserves later.”
Drew sighed. He would have to shift again tonight, allowing his wolf to ascend for the third time inside a week.
“Do not fight it,” Marguerite advised, correctly guessing his thoughts. “You make too much of shifting. You and your wolf are one and the same, two sides of the same creature. When he does things you do not like, consider this: he is only playing out your own desires.”
Drew shook his head. It was difficult to contradict a wolf as powerful as Marguerite, but he felt strongly about this.
“You and your wolf may be as one,” he said. “But that is not true of me and mine. I did not want him and we have ever been at odds, since first he emerged. Before then even.”
Marguerite sniffed, unimpressed. “He is probably angry at you, and well he might be. You had a gift, Drew. A devoted mate who wanted to make you his world, who—”
“Don’t call him that,” Drew ground out. This was an old argument, one that played out between them every time they saw one another. “His wolf is my wolf’s master, that is all.”
Marguerite made a sound of frustration. “You are blind—wilfullyblind.”
“On the contrary, I see the nature of the bond for what it is,” Drew argued. “Once the maker’s wolf causes the transformation with his bite, the made wolf is his to compel as he chooses. He is a master, not a mate. A mate would be an equal, not someone who—”
“Silence!” Marguerite snapped, the sharp scent of her anger spiking.
Drew pressed his lips together.
Marguerite glared at him. “I do not think you know Lindsay at all. The things you say!”
Drew’s face heated and he felt suddenly ashamed. When he spoke of his hatred of the bond, and his uneasiness with his wolf, he forgot himself sometimes. “I didn’t say that Lindsay uses his power against me,” he said awkwardly. “Only that, if he did, there would be nothing I could do to stop him.”
Marguerite sighed heavily and dropped into a chair, her rage seeming to seep away. “I swore I would not discuss Lindsay with you this time,” she said. “And I have broken that promise.”
“You made no such promise to me,” Drew said awkwardly.
She offered a rueful smile. “I promised myself.”