Page 55 of Souvenir Heart

For everything, except Marguerite de Rouvroy leaping to her feet, rushing towards him and flinging her arms around his neck.

The impact of her body knocked the breath from his lungs, though somewhere in his spinning brain he knew she hadn’t hit him that hard. He had a fleeting impression of tendrils of hair against his cheek, soft breasts against his chest, and lips against his mouth.

His next impression was far from fleeting.

He’d kissed her before because it was necessary. He hadn’t thought then, he’d just acted. Now, unprepared, unguarded, he couldn’t think at all. One moment the ground beneath his feet was solid, the next moment it was utterly, crashingly, gone. Desire roared through him. He reached for her. He wanted more.

Marguerite de Rouvroy broke the kiss.

“Disgusting,” a voice at the far end of the cell clucked disapprovingly. “We may be in prison, but some of us still remember what it means to comport oneself as a lady.”

“Some of us never learned and never gave a rat’s ass about being a ‘lady,’” another voice, also at the far end of the cell, crowed cheerfully.

Marcus, his head spinning, searched for the source of the cheerful voice, grateful for the distraction—any distraction—from the waves of want. A thin young woman with long black hair dressed in a low-cut scarlet gown winked at him and said, “I usually charge for what she’s offering, but for a fine-looking citizen like you...”

“Disgusting,” the voice behind him repeated. Marcus turned to see a solidly built woman with a black twisted bun seated on the edge of the bed across from Marguerite’s. The bed, he realized with a start, that, on his last visit, had been occupied by an elderly noblewoman.

“I brought a miniature for Citizeness Auginot,” he said, glancing over at the bed across from Marguerite. It was empty.

“She’s gone,” Marguerite said.

“To the courtyard?” he asked, hoping he misunderstood. He held out the carefully wrapped miniature.

“They came for her this morning,” Marguerite said slipping her arms from around his neck and stepping back. She closed his fingers around the package. “Did you think she’d wait for you?”

There was something about the way she said the word wait. As if it was an accusation. He tightened his grip around the miniature, feeling the gilt edges dig into his flesh. He shoved the package into his pocket. Marisol hadn’t been his responsibility. He couldn’t save them all. He was trying his damnedest to save her.

“Come, my love,” she said, taking hold of his wrist and leading him to the bed. “Sit.”

There was something about Marguerite de Rouvroy, not just the way she looked—but the way she looked at him, that rattled the sealed compartments of his heart. He needed to compose himself.

Marguerite reached for a shawl tied to the headboard of her bed, then drew it across to the footboard, once again creating a thin veil of privacy.

The black-haired woman who now occupied Marisol’s bed emitted a horrified gasp that provoked a peal of laughter from the thin woman with the braid.

Take your shoes off and lie down,” Marguerite hissed.

My shoes?” If she’d just stop being so…unpredictable.

Pausing her efforts to knot the shawl to the footboard post, she said, “This place is filthy enough without you mucking up the blankets.”

“Why do you think I’d put my shoes on your blankets?”

“Because I’m going to need you to lie down?”

“Lie down?” He was vaguely aware he sounded like the scandalized woman at the far end of the cell. But…after the way she’d kissed him. He’d heard of people abandoning themselves to sensual pleasures when they thought they were facing their final hours. Hell, he’d seen them as he was passing through the hallways of this damned place.

He’d tell her he wasn’t that sort of man.

Because she was offering him the perfect opportunity to remove the key in his heel, he obeyed. Reminding himself—or rather reminding his pulsing blood and heated nerve endings, that he was a professional, here to do a job, not to take advantage of a clearly emotionally distraught and vulnerable woman. No matter how bloody tempting.

He pushed the heel of his right shoe to the side, removed the bit and slipped it into his waistcoat. Wiping the mud he’d smeared on his heels off his fingers with a handkerchief, he slid the straps of the art box and leather tube off his shoulder and set both beside him on the mattress.

“I cannot believe they’re going to have…marital relations…here,” said the scandalized woman.

“We are not,” he said, speaking as much to himself as to Marguerite.

The lady in question cast him a look that suggested she thought he was the world’s biggest idiot and whispered in a tone that made it apparent that she did, “Of course we are not. But if my cellmates believe we are, it should make them less interested in what we’re actually discussing. Feel free to toss out the occasional grunt, if you feel so inclined.”