“Do you know where they located my father’s nephew?” Gabby asked. To Quill’s mind, there was a peculiar urgency to her tone.
Breksby looked surprised. “Where? Why, where else but in London?”
To Quill’s astonishment, Gabby’s whole body relaxed. It was clear to him, at least, that Gabby was pleased with Breksby’s answer. His curiosity sharpened.
“Are we invited to tomorrow’s fete?” Quill asked.
“Certainly not,” Breksby replied. “The last thing that Mr. Grant would welcome is the presence of Lady Dewland, who may be able to persuade my colleagues that Mr. Kasi Rao is incapable of rule. However, I am invited. And who is to say whom I shall bring on my arm? As it happens, I choose to be accompanied by a beautiful viscountess.” He looked properly mischievous.
“There’s nothing we can do to stop tomorrow’s affair,” Quill told Gabby. “The best you can do is stay close to Kasi so that he feels comfortable.”
“I will do all I can to make this a pleasant occasion for the young prince,” she replied sweetly. Quill frowned. He would have expected Gabby to make a passionate protest at the very idea of Kasi Rao being dragged into a room full of gawking strangers.
“If it is as you say,” Breksby observed, “we shall immediately ascertain his inability to rule the Holkars. Mr. Kasi Rao will have one uncomfortable evening, and then we will inform Mr. Grant that his scheme has failed. I should tell you, however, that Mr. Grant seems quite confident that the boy will be able to take on his responsibilities in a timely manner.”
“I shall accompany my wife,” Quill remarked to Lord Breksby.
Breksby bowed. “I will be most happy to have you with us, my dear sir.”
“I know Grant,” Quill said rather grimly. “He is, in fact, one of the reasons that I sold my East India shares some years ago. He’s a buffoon, and whatever business he’s involved in is likely to be discreditable.” In the last few years Charles Grant had become the dominant figure at India House. It was a pity, since he held the fervent belief that the only way to repay the company’s huge debts was to acquire more and more Indian territory. One hardly needed to add that Grant increased company holdings any way he could—by fair means or foul.
“My feelings precisely,” Breksby said cheerfully, standing up. “Lady Dewland, I shall look forward to tomorrow evening with unabated pleasure.” He bent and kissed Gabby’s hand with a flourish, swept Quill a bow, and left the room.
Gabby didn’t dare look Quill in the face.
“You must be overset by these events,” Quill said. “I am very sorry that Kasi has been taken into custody, Gabby.” He watched his wife with a puzzled frown.
“Yes, I am distraught,” she replied, rather vaguely.
When she didn’t say anything further, Quill added, “Tomorrow I will make inquiries as to how Kasi Rao is faring. I still have friends among the East India Company I can call on.”
Gabby nodded, still mute.
For his part, Quill stood by the door, trying to make himself leave. But his eyes kept drifting to Gabby’s body. It was too easy to imagine pulling down her little cap sleeves and running his hand down—he wrenched his eyes away. He would never, never take an unwilling woman. And that’s what she was. Unwilling.
He’d given it long, hard thought during nights of unhappy celibacy. Gabby’s naïveté made her unwilling to have a sexual relationship with him; he judged that it would take him perhaps a week to cure her of her distaste for messy bedsheets and naked skin. But they hadn’t a week. They could have another night, but after that the migraine would make him unavailable again. Try as he might, he couldn’t think of a way around her shudder of distaste.
So he stood in the library doorway, cursing the lust that tied him to a female. Cursing the burning urge in his loins to bed his wife, to take her, to make love to her.
To never let her go.
SUPPER PASSED IN AN AGONY of polite conversation. She was wearing the dress that had caused a scandal, but Quill showed no signs of recognizing it, and she had never felt less attractive in her life. When Quill requested the salt salver, she had to gesture to a footman rather than hand it to him. She was afraid that the climax of her little performance would come far too soon and enliven the servants’ evening rather than her husband’s.
Precisely at nine o’clock, Quill finished a last bite of lemon tart. “I am afraid that it is time for me to retire to my study, my dear,” he said, with the studied politeness that passed for marital intimacy between them.
She gulped. “Perhaps I shall visit you later in the evening, Quill?”
He looked startled. “Of course,” he agreed after an infinitesimal pause. “I am happy to greet you at any time, naturally.” His lips pressed the back of her hand for the merest moment and he was gone.
Gabby wandered upstairs with no real location in mind. Once in her room she drifted to the dressing table. Most of her hair was still neatly plaited into a coronet. With a sudden thought, she started pulling out hairpins. Quill liked her hair. Perhaps if she took it down, it would help her act seductive.
Because she didn’t feel seductive. Never mind what Sophie had said. She felt overly plump and unattractive, a woman whose husband had threatened to go to a concubine.
When she had taken all the pins out, Gabby worked her fingers through the braids and let her hair fall in great rippling golden-brown sheaves down her back.
Thankfully she encountered no servants in the hallway, nor on the stairs leading to the floor below. Gabby knocked lightly and pushed the door open.
Quill was sitting at the far end of the long room, white sleeves pushed up around his elbows to protect his cuffs from ink. An oil lamp burned on the table, casting a warm light that made his hair shine with burgundy tints.
He looked up and instantly rose. “How nice to see you,” he murmured, quite as if he hadn’t said good night to her a mere fifteen minutes earlier.
Gabby felt a pulse of despair. Quill sounded as uninterested as a man married for twenty years. He would likely yawn if her breasts popped free of her gown. Still…what else could she do? She walked toward him across the room, consciously forcing her hips to sway, dip and sway, as she walked. Her hair felt like a bushy curtain. It likely made her look five times rounder than she already was, Gabby realized with a sense of horror.
“May I offer you a glass of sherry? Or ratafia?” He gestured toward a sideboard.
Gabby swallowed. “Yes, thank you.” Her voice sounded oddly breathy. She accepted a glass of sherry and took such a large swallow that her glass was virtually emptied in one gulp. The liquor burned its way comfortingly down her chest. Quill looked faintly surprised, but refilled her glass.
“I received a letter from Lady Sylvia that might interest you,” he remarked.
“Oh? What does she say?”
“The travel has done Mother good and she is less lachrymose, to use Lady Sylvia’s phrase. And they met one of Peter’s university friends in Switzerland, Simon Baker Wollaton, who has come to Greece with them. Apparently, Wollaton is quite amusing.”
“That’s good,” Gabby said faintly. She made herself walk away from him. It wasn’t clear whether he had even noticed that her hair was unbound. If so, he hadn’t flickered an eyelash. She walked at random over to a bookshelf and stared blindly at a copy of Herbert Bone’s The London Perambulator.
“This book looks interesting,” she said, her throat tight, touching the volume with one finger.
Quill loomed up at her shoulder. “Not a scintillating read,” he commented.
“Lud!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t even hear you coming.”
“Well, here I am.” He leaned his forearm against the bookshelf. His arm was bronzed against his white linen sleeve. “Here I am,” he repeated softly. “The puzzlement is that…here you are.”
Gabby raised an eyebrow. Now that she was face to face with Quill, her apprehension was trickling away. Nerves, she thought. Naught more than nerves. “And why shoul
dn’t I be here?” she asked, looking at him provocatively through her lowered lashes.
He shrugged. His eyes were hard, with a questioning gleam.
Yet Gabby felt more sure of herself every moment. Even her hair had miraculously transformed from a bushy thicket to a silken, sensual screen. She reached up and pulled some of it forward so that it hung over one breast.
When his jaw tightened, Gabby mentally noted the small victory.
“The question is,” Quill said meditatively, “why my chaste wife has unexpectedly left off her blacks and dressed herself like Bathsheba about to leap into the bath—although I remember quite clearly that the said wife has no interest in marital pleasures.”
Gabby swallowed. His reference to Bathsheba was more apt than he realized, given her plans to disrobe. Obviously it was time for the gown—time to lose the gown, rather. She gave a little twist and a shrug of her shoulders.
Nothing happened. Silk remained firmly anchored over her nipples.
“Gabby?” Quill’s voice had taken on a sardonic tone.
“It was tedious upstairs, by myself,” she said quickly. She surreptitiously wriggled her shoulders again.
Quill’s eyes softened. “You know we cannot have a public life yet, Gabby. But in a very few months our mourning period will be over and we can go into society.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Unfortunately, the funeral and my illness put me far behind in my work. I cannot entertain you this evening.” He took Gabby’s elbow and turned her about.
“But I haven’t even finished my sherry!” she protested.
“Please forgive me,” Quill said. His tone was oddly angry, Gabby thought. She drank her second glass of sherry.
“All right,” she said reluctantly. She thought of wiggling again, but she was afraid he might think she was suffering from an itch. And he looked so very, very uninterested.
Quill marched her over to the door of the study, but Gabby stopped there. She felt like a naughty child being ejected from the schoolroom.
“Surely you are not too busy to escort me to my chamber?” She managed to turn the question into a delicate reference to his manners.
There was a second’s pause and then he answered evenly, “Naturally, I would be most pleased to do so.” They walked silently beside each other up the curving staircase. Gabby trailed her fingertips on the satiny rail, trying desperately to think of another tactic.
Her heart was sinking. It seemed that Quill truly was busy. And she was the one who had banished him from her bed. Perhaps he’d put the whole business out of his mind, and that was why he was treating her like a nuisance. She was so dispirited that she didn’t even dip and sway as she walked before him down the hallway.
As they paused at her bedchamber, Gabby reached toward the door a fraction of a second after Quill leaned around from behind her. Since Quill had already pushed the door open, she lurched through the entrance and stumbled into the room. She caught her toe on the edge of the carpet and plummeted to the floor, landing on her left shoulder.
For a second the only sound in the room was Gabby’s heartfelt “Bloody blistering botheration!”
Only when she rolled to her back and gripped her sore shoulder—her bare shoulder—did she realize that her dress had given up its fight midway to the ground.
And only when she looked up and met her husband’s eyes as he stood frozen in the doorway did Gabby realize that she had inadvertently scored all the points necessary to win this particular round of marital chess.
She propped herself up on her elbows, quite enjoying the fact that she had, to quote Quill on their wedding night, truly magnificent breasts.
“Well,” she said, grinning shamelessly at her husband.
He cleared his throat. His eyes had gone quite black, she noted with satisfaction.
“I believe I’ve changed my mind about nudity in the confines of my bedchamber,” Gabby explained. Really, the man looked moonstruck. As if the very sight of her had turned him into a want-wit.
She was able to cherish that notion for all of two seconds. Then Quill walked into the room and closed the door quietly behind him.
HE KNELT BESIDE HER in one swift movement. “Am I to understand that you have changed your mind?”
Gabby swallowed. “Yes,” she said, rather faintly. “That is, I have an idea, Quill.”
“An idea?” He reached out and caressed her sore elbow. Then he brushed her hair back over her shoulder.
“Perhaps your migraines are related to your hip injury,” she said, trying to ignore the way she was sitting half-clothed on the floor.
“My doctors have concluded that they are the result of a concussion I received in the accident.” Quill was definitely not listening to her.
A honey-dark hand rounded the curve of her breast. His thumb trailed across her nipple and Gabby shuddered inside, excitement and nervousness beating a double rhythm.
“Luscious Gabby,” he murmured. He looked at her with his wicked smile. “I’m glad you changed your mind.”
“Quill, did you hear what I said? If the migraines were connected to your hip injury rather than to your concussion, then—”
He stretched himself out on the carpet next to her and began kissing her shoulder, little nipping kisses.
She started over. “Perhaps the migraines are the result of your hip injury.”
Quill shook his head and answered patiently. “I exercise my hip frequently, Gabby. I never suffer migraines as a result. And concussions are known to cause headaches.”
She pushed his head away from her breast. “Please listen to me!”
“I don’t want to,” Quill whispered against her skin. “Gabby, I exercise daily, and don’t suffer headaches as a consequence. The only activities that give me migraines are sexual intercourse and riding horses.”
“Riding horses?” Gabby tried to pull her rational self together. One of Quill’s hands drifted to her stomach and was making little teasing circles, pushing at the crumpled gauze of her dress, threatening to go lower.
Abruptly he suckled her. When he finally raised his head, his breath had become a flame in his chest, an erotic hymn in his throat. “There’s no escape from migraines, love. My doctors have all agreed that motion exacerbates the old head injury. There’s no mystery about it.”
“You walk all the time,” she protested. “Obviously, not all motion causes problems.”
“True. But this is not a good time for conversing, Gabby,” he added, lowering his mouth to her breast again.
She couldn’t help it; she gasped as he roughly pulled a nipple into his mouth. Her body involuntarily turned toward his, asking for his weight, his pressure, again.
“Mmmm,” Quill muttered, his hand sliding seductively down her back. He pushed it under the drape of her gown.
Gabby squirmed and her breath came harshly. He cupped her bottom and swung her toward him, picking her up in one smooth motion.
“You shouldn’t!” Gabby said, panic in her voice. “If your hip is the cause of your headaches, you shouldn’t pick me up.”
He shook his head, teasingly running his lips across hers. “No, sweetheart. That’s not a logical conclusion. Besides, I don’t mind a migraine now and then.”
And she could tell he didn’t mind, that he wouldn’t begrudge a moment of pain for the time in her arms.
Quill lay her on the bed and then slowly, slowly pulled the infamous gown from her body, letting it fall to the floor. She was wearing silk stockings and shoes, nothing else. “You’re so beautiful.” His voice was a caress.
Gabby took a deep breath and resisted the impulse to dive under the covers. “I would like to try to make love without straining your hip, please,” she said, forcing her voice to sound authoritative. He may not care about the headaches, but she did.
“An experiment?” Quill’s eyebrows arched. “I have a good deal more experience than you do, Gabby. I honestly feel that you will be more comfortable with old-fashioned
methods.”
He was trembling with the effort of standing casually before her. He was fighting off an overpowering urge to fall on her and push himself inside without grace or forethought. He let his eyes range from the delicate bend of her knee to her shining, tangled hair. Slowly he drew off her slippers, his fingers lingering on the arches of her feet.
“What happened to you, wife?” His voice was thick in his throat. Willy-nilly he leaned forward and curved a hand possessively around Gabby’s creamy breast. “You’re naked in the open, as if you never protested nudity.”
She glanced down at her uncovered breast, at his hand on her bare skin, and didn’t bother replying. If he thought she had turned into a wanton who didn’t realize that her dress was on the floor, so be it. Her eyes sought his. “Do you have any ideas, Quill?”
He had no idea what she was talking about. “Ideas?” He came onto the bed and his large body loomed over hers. He pulled a rosy nipple into his mouth again.
Her hands clutched his shoulders. “A plan,” she gasped.
“Plan?”
Gabby bit back a moan. “For this,” she insisted.
Quill raised his head. “What are you talking about, Gabby? I didn’t need a plan the last time I took you to bed, I can assure you.”
Her breath was catching in her chest. “How—how—you didn’t listen to me!” She pushed at the knee wedged between her legs.
Quill shook his head. Then he ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “I’m listening. What are you trying to say?”
“You put weight on your hip,” she said, pointing. “That’s your scarred hip, isn’t it?”
Quill closed his eyes for a moment. “I told you what the doctors said.” But from the depths of his lust-driven body, a silent voice spoke. Do whatever she wants, advised the voice. Otherwise she might exile you from the bedchamber again.