Duchess in Love

  “Yes,” Gina murmured.

  “Well, don’t go into a trance,” Cam snapped. “Physical beauty is not everything.”

  She looked at him curiously. “I would think that a sculptor would value beauty above all other attributes.”

  Cam shrugged. “I could sculpt Burdett, but I couldn’t do much about his brains. He would still look like a Jack Pudding.” Bernie had handed over his apple and was kissing Esme’s hand as a reward. “How can she bear to be around him?”

  Gina didn’t ignore the innuendo, because there was no scorn in Cam’s tone, only genuine curiosity. “Esme has a great love of beauty,” she explained. “At the same time, she seems to choose friends who have—who are—”

  “Half witted?”

  “Well—” Gina said reluctantly.

  Cam shrugged. “It’s a common decision in the male case. The ideal mistress is beautiful, cheerful, and indolent. Bernie seems to fit the bill.”

  “Do you—” Gina caught herself. There was something about Cam’s beguiling curiosity that lured her into saying whatever came to mind.

  “I don’t have a mistress, at the moment,” he said obligingly. “But when I did, she fit precisely into the parameters I just outlined.”

  “And wives,” Gina said, feeling dispirited, “should wives be the same?”

  “Less beautiful is acceptable, but they must be even more obedient,” Cam said. “Do you think you could live up to the bill, had we been married in earnest?”

  “I never gave it a thought,” she said, sweeping him a glance under her eyelashes. He had the most suggestive grin she’d ever seen on a man, this husband of hers. “But I doubt it. Obedience is not one of my virtues.” She turned to walk toward Sebastian, but Cam stepped directly in her path.

  “One doesn’t wish a wife to be obedient at all times, you know.”

  He looked as if he were laughing at her, but she wasn’t sure why. “What are you saying?” she asked.

  “Obedience is such a complicated issue,” he said dreamily. “For example, with regard to the bedchamber, one must choose a wife—”

  Gina cut him off. “That is of no concern to me. I am quite aware that you did not choose me as your wife.”

  “True enough,” Cam said. “I remember my father telling me that you would ripen into a beauty, though, and you certainly have fulfilled his prophecy.”

  Gina gaped. “Your father said that?”

  Cam nodded. “Is it so surprising?”

  “When I made my debut, he remarked that I should be thankful I already had a wedding ring, so that I needn’t try to parade my wares on the market. I always took that to be an insult.”

  “Quite right too,” Cam remarked. “My father was a master of the insulting remark. In fact, he said very little that one could not take offense at.”

  “Besides, I am not beautiful in the way Esme is beautiful,” Gina remarked, wondering why on earth she was saying something so pitiful.

  Cam looked over at Esme. “Yes, Lady Rawlings is certainly one of the most classically beautiful women I’ve ever seen, in England at least.”

  “I can’t imagine why we’re discussing such a foolish topic,” Gina said airily.

  “Come along!” Esme called, waving at them.

  Cam turned toward the classical beauty, but Gina walked toward Sebastian instead. It was best that she not spend time with her husband. She certainly didn’t want to weaken her chances for an annulment.

  Sebastian was sitting alone at a small table. He had an expression that she secretly thought of as his puritanical look. She slipped into a seat with her back to Esme and Cam.

  “How is Lady Rawlings this morning?” Sebastian asked disagreeably. “She certainly seems to be enjoying herself.”

  “I’m sure that she is,” Gina said, glancing back. Esme was ensconced between Bernie and Cam, and shining with pleasure. Cam was leaning toward her as if she were speaking pearls of wisdom.

  “I suppose if she keeps your husband occupied, it will be all the better for the annulment,” Sebastian remarked.

  “I expect so,” Gina murmured.

  It was unfortunate that Sebastian was facing Esme’s table, because he didn’t seem to be able to keep his eyes off her. All the way through lamb à la béchamel he kept up a hissing commentary on Esme’s bold seduction of Gina’s husband. “At this rate, your annulment proceedings will be twinned with a bill for divorce from Rawlings,” he said disagreeably.

  Gina was beginning to feel slightly sick. “Sebastian!” she finally said, “don’t you think that I am the one who should be upset, if anyone? And I’m not. Who does it hurt if Cam and Esme grow acquainted? No one.” She took a bite of chicken. It tasted like a wrung-out piece of dishcloth.

  “I suppose you’re right. I just don’t like to see a good man drawn in—”

  “You are forming a veritable obsession!” Gina said, exasperated. “To be honest, you are quite impolite to even air this subject in my presence.”

  Sebastian look startled, and then appalled. “You must forgive me, Gina. I completely forgot that you have no more experience of the world than a mere green girl.”

  “I’m not quite that uninformed.”

  “No, I insist on apologizing.” Sebastian’s blue eyes smiled at her so warmly that Gina felt more friendly despite her annoyance. “I allowed your innocence to slip my mind. And yet that is one of the qualities I most love about you, Gina: your air of being untouched by the seamier side of life.”

  “And what will happen when we are married and I am no longer so innocent?” she asked baldly.

  Sebastian smiled. “You will always have an innocent beauty. There is something untouched and untouchable about you—the mark of good breeding bred in the bone.”

  “But, Sebastian—” Gina began, entertaining for one reckless moment the idea of discussing her newly discovered illegitimate brother.

  Lady Troubridge was clapping her hands for attention and Sebastian instantly turned toward their hostess.

  “Hear ye! Hear ye!” Lady Troubridge cried gaily. “Mr. Gerard has agreed to organize a small performance for the weekend—just a few scenes from Shakespeare. Anyone who would like to take part in a reading, will you make yourselves known?”

  To Gina’s dismay, Sebastian’s brow darkened again. “Performing with a professional actor? Grossly improper!”

  “Oh, Sebastian,” she said, “sometimes I think that is your favorite word.”

  He opened his mouth and then paused. To her inexpressible relief she saw a glimpse of the old Sebastian, before he became so intent on his rank and title. “I’m getting to be stiff-rumped, is that what you’re saying?”

  She smiled gratefully into his eyes. “Only a little bit.”

  “My father was an old stick. I was thinking about it last night. I reckon you’re right, Gina. I’m getting prudish.” He looked horrified at the thought.

  Gina patted his hand, wishing she could be more demonstrative, but that would shock not only Sebastian, but the rest of the assembly as well.

  “I have you,” he said, looking into her eyes.

  “Yes, you have me,” she repeated, rather heartily.

  “Well, isn’t that endearing? We should all be so lucky as to possess Gina,” Cam continued silkily at Gina’s shoulder.

  “In fact, I do believe that we both have the same good luck! Isn’t that extraordinary?”

  “I am a lucky man,” Sebastian said, too loudly.

  “And so am I, so am I.”

  “Gina and I were about to volunteer to take parts in the Shakespeare reading,” Sebastian said, standing up so quickly he almost knocked over his chair. “If you’ll excuse us—”

  “Don’t let me hinder you. I was thinking of joining the performance myself, and I know that Lady Rawlings will feel the same,” Cam remarked. He turned and waved at Esme, and to Gina’s disgust, her best friend smiled at him so warmly that she felt a curl of embarrassment. Esme had no right to openly seduce her husban
d.

  “Come along, Sebastian!” she snapped, walking toward Lady Troubridge without waiting for Esme.

  The young actor, Reginald Gerard, was surrounded by a fluttering group of debutantes who all seemed to be giggling and begging to play the heroine. But their hopes were quickly dashed by Lady Troubridge.

  “I’m sorry, girls,” she said briskly, shooing them away with a brightly colored handkerchief. “But your mothers and I have decided that performing a play is a little too daring for girls who are unmarried. I’m not having any scandal attached to my party!” She sanguinely ignored the fact that her house parties invariably provided the prime gossip for the first two months of the season. “No, Mr. Gerard will have to make do with married women, that’s all. You four will be perfect!” she exclaimed.

  Gina watched as Reginald Gerard’s face fell. It was clear that he didn’t wish to spend his afternoons with married couples. Likely he hoped to elope with an heiress.

  “I agree with you, my lady,” Sebastian was saying to Lady Troubridge. “Dramatic prose is entirely too exciting for young ladies.”

  “What play are you considering?” Cam asked.

  “A few scenes from Much Ado About Nothing,” the young actor replied. He might have been disappointed, but he rallied and bowed politely enough. “May I introduce myself? I am Reginald Gerard.”

  “I believe I saw you at Covent Garden this past season,” Sebastian said, bowing. “I am Marquess Bonnington. This is the Duchess of Girton, and Lady Rawlings. And the Duke of Girton,” he added.

  Reginald smiled at the little circle. “I think we shall be able to come up with an enchanting little performance here. Perhaps the duchess could play Hero and—”

  “I think not,” Cam interrupted. “The duchess and I had better play Beatrice and Benedick. After all, we are married, and it would be quite harrowing for me to see another man at my wife’s bedchamber window.”

  “Oh, of course,” Reginald agreed.

  Sebastian frowned. “What’s this about a bedchamber window?”

  “In the play, Claudio—that would be you, my lord—believes that his betrothed, Hero, has been unfaithful to him when he thinks he sees another man at her window.”

  “That sounds most unsuitable to me,” Sebastian said, frowning. “Is the play appropriate for mixed company?”

  “It was performed with great success only last season,” Reginald said politely. “Besides, we will only do a few scenes. If there is anything that you and Lady Rawlings do not feel quite comfortable with, we will avoid that section. I suggest that we meet in the library before supper, and decide on the scenes.”

  Gina felt a warm hand at her waist for a split second. “Do you suppose that we will survive a foursome for an hour or more?”

  “Why, what do you mean?”

  “Surely you’ve noticed your fiancé’s preoccupation with the beauteous Lady Rawlings?” He nodded toward them. Sure enough, Sebastian appeared to be lecturing Esme as she absentmindedly ate an apple.

  “You seem to suffer from the same affliction,” Gina remarked.

  Cam laughed. “What’s not to love? She’s beautiful, curvaceous, and apparently quite friendly.”

  Gina’s lips tightened. “She’s not that friendly!”

  “I’d give a groat that Bonnington is lecturing her on her friendliness.”

  Gina looked again. True enough, Esme was starting to champ her apple, and a flush was rising up her cheeks.

  “She would make a superb Diana,” Cam said.

  “Diana, the goddess of virginity?” Gina asked, with a touch of skeptism.

  “Odd, isn’t it? But she has a touch-me-not air, for all her friendliness. Perhaps I’ll see if she will pose for me.”

  Gina glanced up at her husband. He was looking at Esme with the critical eye of a master jeweler assessing a perfect diamond. “I thought you were already working on a Diana. Won’t it be tedious to do another figure of the same goddess?”

  “No. Each woman is different. Giving them the names of goddesses—that’s just putting a name to what you see in their faces. In the case of Lady Rawlings, she is provocative, beautiful, even erotic. But at the same time, she is distinctly reserved. I would guess that she is not sharing a bed with Burdett, for all she acts as if she is.”

  Gina looked at him with new respect.

  Sometime later she and Esme walked up the hill in silence, returning to the house. Gina was longing to know whether Cam watched them leave, or whether he turned blithely away. She almost turned, but Esme caught her elbow.

  “Don’t look!” she whispered, eyes dancing. “I’m sure he’s watching, but you don’t want him to suspect, do you?”

  “Sebastian?”

  “Of course I don’t mean Sebastian, you half wit!” Esme exclaimed. “I mean your oh-so-gorgeous husband, of course!”

  “Well, I’m glad you think so,” Gina said tartly.

  “Of course I think so.” Then her eyes widened. “Gina, you didn’t think that I—”

  “No, of course not!”

  “Yes, you did!” Esme had delightful dimples, Gina had to admit. No wonder every man she met fell in love with her, including Gina’s own husband. “Don’t be silly. You know I have no use for intelligent men.” She tucked her hand into Gina’s elbow. “May I say one thing though?”

  Gina nodded.

  “I think you should keep him.”

  9

  A Slab of Pink Marble and a Contemplative Duke

  Cam stared at the piece of marble three footmen had gingerly deposited on the Axminster carpet. There was no doubt that Esme Rawlings, with her generous curves and glossy hair, was as close to Marissa—and therefore to goddesslike beauty—as he was like to find in England. It even seemed possible that Esme would lend herself to such a risqué project as being sculpted in pink marble as a seated, half-naked deity.

  But somehow the idea of creating a shapely goddess of the hunt had little interest at the moment, not to mention Stephen’s insistence that he sculpt something other than a female torso. He kept turning back to the copy of Much Ado Lady Troubridge had sent to his room. In the throes of loneliness when he first left England, he had read Shakespeare’s plays over and over. Lonely for English hearth and home, for English phrases and English ale.

  But he never thought to play Benedick to his wife’s Beatrice. Well, he never thought of himself as having a wife at all, so why should he? But there Gina had been all the time he was reading Shakespeare, trotting around England with that slim body and silky red hair, that indomitable curiosity and keen intelligence. Wearing his ring all the time, even though he hadn’t given it a second’s thought.

  He eyed the marble again. Gina would make a terrible Diana. She had a far too eager look in her eyes. The misanthropic goddess never regarded a man with Gina’s frank and appreciative gaze. Would never greet him with pleasure, as if she had genuinely missed him. Certainly the goddess would never write that delinquent husband hundreds of letters.

  It hadn’t occurred to him that once they were no longer married, Gina wouldn’t write to him. Her letters had followed him from country to country. He frowned down at the book in his hand. Hell, if the truth be told, he’d hounded those letters from country to country. He always wrote her before he moved, because he didn’t want to miss a letter. And there was that time when he sent Phillipos on a three-day trip back to an inn they had long since left to retrieve one of her letters they had missed.

  The thought made him uncomfortable. She was his link to England, nothing more. In fact, the letters, not Gina, were his link to home. It was nothing to do with his wife. It was the letters that mattered to him.

  Of course.

  He tossed the slim volume of plays on the ground where it slid across the carpet and rested next to the obscenely pink marble. Damn it, but Stephen had done him a disservice. Now he looked at the stone and saw fleshy thighs and vulgar hips, whereas always before he had seen the potential to shape a nubile and beautiful woman. Pin
k, plump, and naked. He curled his lip. Stephen made him sound like a purveyor of pornographic etchings.

  His wife wouldn’t want to pose as a member of the pantheon of Roman goddesses. Although the idea of Gina wearing nothing more than a transparent piece of veil was enough to fire any man’s loins.

  He wouldn’t make her into Diana, of course. Not Venus either…too bland. Besides, he wasn’t even certain that he could sculpt Gina. Her sliding mass of hair—how did one turn that into marble? And the way she was always in motion, always turning, always moving. It was impossible to imagine Gina pausing long enough to catch her on paper, let alone in stone. And yet his fingers itched to try.

  But sculpting Gina was a moot question, because after this visit he wouldn’t return to England for years. No point in that. No point in coming back to see his former wife presenting the turgid marquess with babe after babe, enthusiastically produced in a marital bed.

  No, he’d stay in the village, thank you very much. At least there he was the unquestioned master of his fate. No wives around to send hot blood pounding to his loins with their innocently seductive remarks…

  It’s just lust, he thought. After all, he and Marissa had stopped what lackadaisical sexual activity they used to perform a few years ago. And although he’d enjoyed a woman’s company now and then, it had been months. That’s why he was annoyingly, humiliatingly watching his wife’s slender hips and the creamy skin on the inside corner of her elbow. That’s why—that’s why he insisted on playing Benedick. Because Benedick kisses Beatrice, unless he was much mistaken.

  Suddenly impatient to confirm his memory, Cam scooped up the play again and leafed through its pages.

  It wasn’t that he really wanted to seduce his own wife, he reasoned. Or even to kiss her, in the way a man kisses a woman. It was just that his sexual appetite had grown out of control, due to abstinence. Wasn’t good for a man, abstinence. Led to madness and uncontrolled lust. And the woman was his wife. If he felt like kissing a woman, well, he might as well kiss one who already belonged to him.