But Valencia, her fingers laced in characteristic fashion back of her neck, leaned back and mocked his defeat with indolent amused eyes.
“My engagement,” he suggested as a reminder.
“Poor boy! Are you hard hit?”
“Your flights of fancy leave me behind. I can't follow,” he evaded with an angry flush.
“No, but you wish you could follow,” she laughed, glancing at the door through which her cousin had departed. Then, with a demure impudent little cast of her head, she let him have it straight from the shoulder. “How long have you been in love with Alice? And how will you like to see Ned Merrill win?”
“Am I in love with Miss Frome?”
“Aren't you?”
“If you say so. It happens to be news to me.”
“As if I believed that, as if you believed it yourself,” she scoffed.
Her pretty pouting lips, the long supple unbroken lines of the soft sinuous body, were an invitation to forget all charms but hers. He understood that she was throwing out her wiles, consciously or unconsciously, to strike out from him a denial that would convince her. His mounting vanity drove away his anger. He forgot everything but her sheathed loveliness, the enticement of this lovely creature whose smoldering eyes invited. Crossing the room, he stood behind her divan and looked down at her with his hands on the back of it.