She managed only one step before he stopped her. His hand was so large that it circled her upper arm.
“Don’t,” he said. His voice was rough and urgent, quite unlike the sleek, composed Mr. Ravensthorpe.
“Cyrus.” Her heart was pounding, her body tense, but she kept emotion out of her voice. “I would ask you to let me go.”
“I was hopeful I would find a bride without fuss. I didn’t think—I just thought you were sensible. Quiet. My proposal had nothing to do with my cousin.”
“Of course it didn’t. At that point he had no more interest in me than you did. You chose your bride on the basis of lack of ‘fuss’?” She turned back, just enough so that she could see his face. “What did you mean by fuss?”
His mouth twitched. “Overwrought emotion. Sometimes in the past, women have—”
He stopped, a look of agonized embarrassment on his face. “I sound like a pompous ass.”
Lucy laughed, genuinely amused. “Has it never occurred to you that you are a pompous ass?”
“That terrible?” He sounded shocked.
She arched an eyebrow. “You chose a plain girl from an acceptable bloodline because you thought it would be easier for you, and that she would be so grateful that you wouldn’t have to bore yourself by wooing her.” There was something a little savage in her tone, but she didn’t choke it back. “Yes, Mr. Ravensthorpe, I do think you’re a pompous ass. Wouldn’t you agree?”
There was a moment of silence and she could hear birdsong again. She’d always thought that birds didn’t sing during the rain.
“I never thought of you as plain,” he said painstakingly. “That was no more a factor in my proposal than was my cousin.”
She shrugged. “It hardly matters now.”
His hand tightened on her arm. “It does matter. I thought of you as unlikely to fall in love with me.”
“That is certainly true,” Lucy said, delivering her lie with tremendous aplomb. Really, she ought to go on the stage.
“I realize now it was not a good reason to choose a bride,” he said.
“You’ll need to woo the next lady,” she said, a bit more gently. “Be kinder and a little less pompous and I’m sure you’ll have no difficulty finding a new fiancée. You might even be able to keep her.”
His eyes burned with an emotion she couldn’t interpret. “I just wanted to have a tranquil marriage. It seemed a reasonable desire.”
“Someone who would adore you too much to challenge you, no matter how overwrought you and your cousin grew in your little war? Do you—did he—think that I wouldn’t notice that His Grace talked of your waistcoat the entire time he danced with me? Or that you are only talking to me now because the world judges it likely that I shall be the next Duchess of Pole?”
“Do you always say what you think, no matter how uncomfortable?”
She pulled away from his hand. “Life is much simpler when people are honest about their motives.”
The silence stretched and grew awkward before he responded. “I thought that a woman whom every man wanted would be likely to create a scandal,” he said finally and then he shrugged. “And I didn’t want anyone who might fall in love with me, or even worse, with another man.”
She shook her head. “You are so odd. I have no idea why you concluded that I will never fall in love—with you or anyone else.”
“Obviously I misjudged you in many respects.”
“I will fall in love,” she declared. “I will love my husband.” She could feel heat rising into her cheeks, but from anger, not embarrassment. “And do you know, Cyrus, I think there will come a day when you honestly regret the foolish way you are choosing a spouse!”
“I agree with you.”
Lucy could think of nothing to say to reply to that, so she started to turn again, and once again he made a swift grab at her. This time he didn’t merely catch her arm; he pulled her to him with the same ferocity he had in Lady Summers’s sitting room earlier in the evening.
She gasped, and he took advantage of her open mouth. He kissed her slowly, so slowly that her blood heated and she found herself leaning into him, filled with pleasure, her fingers shaking. It was a truly scandalous kiss, this meeting of tongues . . . mating of tongues? She’d never heard of such a thing.
And yet she suddenly knew why a kiss could signal that a woman was ruined. She was ruined. His hands weren’t even moving over her body and yet she trembled at the touch of his mouth, soft, velvet, demanding.
He drew back, cupping his hands about her cheeks. “When I was thinking of wallflowers, I wasn’t looking at anyone in particular. Had I looked, I would have seen that your face is a perfect triangle, with a mouth so kissable that I’m amazed every man in London isn’t at your feet.”
Lucy caught her breath, tried to get her unruly body under control. She had to be graceful and poised. Not show how he undid her, how weak her knees were. Somewhere, she found a measure of composure and said, with just the right shading of amusement, “You are absurd.” She rolled her eyes for good measure.
“I was absurd to have overlooked you, perhaps,” he said, his lips tracing the line of her cheek.
“You did no more than every other man in London.” But she added quickly, “I sound like a whimpering baby. I didn’t mean it. I’m being stupid.”
A rueful grin curved his lips. “I’m not sure, Lucy, that it’s in you to be stupid, is it? Do you hide your intelligence all the time, or was it only for my benefit?”
“I am not so intelligent,” she said, frowning at him. “I’m quite average.”
“I did keep wondering why I could never win a game of backgammon, or cards, or any sort of game, in fact.” His eyes narrowed. “You mentally calculate the odds, don’t you?”
She gave a little shrug. “It’s not hard to do. People are lazy.”
Cyrus gave a bark of laughter and ran a hand over her cheek to the back of her neck. He knew that when their betrothal was broken he had given up the right to touch Lucy, to even dream of touching her. But he couldn’t stop himself.
All night he had stalked the ballroom like a madman, steering his dance partners in her direction. He didn’t like it when she was out of his sight.
Ever since she’d looked at him with those gorgeous silvery eyes and told him with just the tiniest break in her voice that she was a wallflower, he had wanted to tear apart every man who had ever walked past her and not begged her for a dance.
Unfortunately he didn’t have an opportunity, since the men he saw her with were gazing down at her with expressions as demented as his. He’d even eaten supper one table away from her, trying his damnedest to pay attention to his supper companions, but in reality just watching Pole sit with his—his. . .
Not his.
He was an ass who had thrown her away, and only wanted her now because he was jealous of Pole. At least, that’s what she believed. The notion bounced around his head like a rubber ball, but all he could think about was the way her lips looked, like the climbing roses that grew outside his father’s study window.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said, pulling himself together.
“What do you mean?” Her eyes rounded.
“I want to know who you are, what you are like. Who are you, Lucy Towerton?”
She laughed.
“I know one thing, at least; you’re not at all like your mother,” he said, leaning back against the railing but keeping his hands loosely on her waist. It was scandalous, but if someone came out onto the terrace, he could drop them immediately.
“No, I’m not.” She said it without inflexion nor apology, the voice of someone who knew precisely how discourteous her mother could be.
“In that case, what are you like?”
“I could not sum up a person in a few words. Not you, and particularly not myself, because I know myself too well.”
“I could sum up myself in five words.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Ambitious. Possessive.”
r /> “Intelligent?”
“Intelligent . . . and yet appallingly stupid.” The laughter in her eyes eased some of the sting of being called a pompous ass—more, deserving the title pompous ass.
“That’s four. And your last word?”
“Regretful.” He offered her a rueful smile. “You? I know you said you couldn’t do it, but please try?”
She hesitated, and he thought she meant to turn and leave, but then she said, “All right: Argumentative. Daydreamer.”
“Mathematician,” he added.
“Nonsense!”
“You won every single game of piquet we played in six weeks.”
“Playing with numbers does not make one a mathematician.”
“Argumentative daydreamer, mathematician,” he repeated. “And?”
She started to speak, but he interrupted before she could say anything.
“Don’t say ‘wallflower,’ because I watched you all evening and the label does not apply.”
She smiled, a secret smile that made him think of Cleopatra meeting Antony. “Passionate. I will fall in love someday.”
Lust streaked through Cyrus with dizzying speed. She was passionate, this gorgeous, argumentative, blunt woman. “And?” he managed. “One last word to describe Miss Towerton?”
Lucy looked away, at the rain. “Twin.”
“Twin?”
She pulled gently from his grasp and walked a pace to stand beside him at the balustrade, reaching a hand toward the silvery water falling from the roof. “My twin sister died when we were five.”
“I’m very sorry. Do you remember her?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Do you still miss her?”
“Not often. But she is still with us, in a way. My mother changed—” She threw him a glance that acknowledged just how unfeeling her mother’s behavior could be. “My sister and I both got a fever. I recovered; she didn’t. Mother was never the same after Beata died. She did not leave her bedroom for a year and a day, or so they tell me. I don’t remember it.”
“She didn’t come out at all?” he asked sharply.
Lucy shook her head. “Never.”
“But who was with you? Were you left alone in the nursery?”
Rainwater splashed from her palm as she tilted it left and right. “I would have had my brothers with me, since they had not yet been sent to school. But in truth I refused to enter the nursery again. And because my mother wasn’t . . . able to leave her room, there was no one to force me. I proved more willful than our nanny could manage.”
Cyrus watched her profile with fascination. Her eyelashes curled like an angel’s. And the curve of her lips was beautiful, perhaps even more so because of its hint of sadness, he realized now.
“Were you thinking of her when I would come for tea? You often seemed very far away.”
She glanced at him, a sardonic arch to her eyebrow. “It’s been twenty years, Cyrus. Of course not.”
“So when you refused to return to the nursery, what did your nanny do with you? Your highly ineffectual nanny, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“She did her best. They moved me into a room on the ground floor, facing the gardens. As a matter of fact, I still sleep there.” Her lips curved in a self-deprecating smile. “You see, I didn’t merely refuse to enter the nursery; I refused to go upstairs at all. I think I should add ‘stubborn’ to the list of my descriptions.”
Cyrus ran his hand down her arm and caught up her wet fingers, curling his hand around hers to warm it. “Were you afraid of her ghost?”
“No.” She was silent a moment, looking at the rain. “For some reason I decided that if I returned to the nursery, or even climbed up the stairs, she would not leave me and go to heaven. It makes no sense, but I had a terrible time overcoming my conviction. I didn’t climb the stairs until my seventh birthday, and only then under duress.” She glanced at him with a look of mingled amusement and regret. “Terribly stubborn . . . and a daydreamer. A bad combination.”
Cyrus dropped her hand and pulled her into the circle of his arms. “You don’t know that. Maybe one little angel would have remained in the nursery rather than leave her sister behind.”
Their eyes met, and hers softened. “Kiss me,” Cyrus said, hearing the sound of his own voice with a sense of incredulity. It was throaty and dark. He had literally never spoken like that before. Ever. “Kiss me, Lucy. Please.”
It felt like manna from heaven when she wound her slim arms around his neck, when she raised her face to his, when she didn’t flinch when he forgot to kiss her like a gentleman, but threw himself at her again, diving into her mouth like some sort of starving beast.
He ravished her mouth, kissing her as if he were making love to her entire body. This wasn’t just because of Pole. Or because he felt guilty. Or whatever else she had scolded him about.
“I’m not kissing you because of my cousin,” he found himself telling her, tearing his mouth away from hers. The words had the ring of truth, because they were truth.
She looked as if she were a little drunk, her eyes soft and unfocused, her lips reddened by his. Wisps of her hair slid through his fingers as if moonlight turned to liquid silver. “Then why are you kissing me?” she whispered.
“Damned if I know. I simply must kiss you, that’s all.” He bent his head again and sank into her lips. He could feel himself shuddering against her body like a raw teenager.
“It’s not because I’m sorry for you, either,” he said a while later. Her fingers were wound in his hair.
“Well, that’s good,” she replied. Now she sounded more than a little drunk. “I don’t want to kiss someone just because he’s sorry for me. Not even you.”
“I saw the way Rathbone looked at you,” he said, taking a little nip at the delicate curve of her ear.
She gave a little squeak, so he did it again, feeling the tremor that ran through her body.
“He wants you. I saw the way you were laughing together. He was seeing you for the first time, the way I did.”
“Amazing how many blind men there are in London,” she said. All that dry humor was back in her voice; her eyes had cleared. They sparkled with intelligence. She wasn’t the kind of woman who would ever soothe a man with lies, or let him make a fool of himself.
She would be a partner to her husband.
Pictures of his mother and father’s marriage flashed through his eyes—the way his father headed blindly for his wife’s embrace whenever he’d lost a defense, meaning a man would hang. His father rarely lost, but her arms would open up for him, and even as a child he’d known that it would be all right, that his father would return to the family with color in his cheeks and the haunted expression in his eyes muted.
Partnership hadn’t been on his damn-fool list, but all of a sudden he knew he wanted it. Maybe more than all the things in his plan.
“Do you ride in the early morning?” he asked as they approached the door to the ballroom.
She obviously caught sight of her mother talking to Lady Summers, and a little pucker appeared between her brows. “Yes,” she replied absentmindedly. “Mother must be wondering where I am.”
Lucy, he realized, didn’t want her mother to catch sight of the two of them together.
“Goodbye, Miss Towerton,” he said, dropping her hand and giving her a swift bow. “Thank you for accompanying me on the terrace.” He moved backward before her mother turned her head.
Lucy looked after him for a second, numb with the surprise of it. One moment Cyrus was kissing her as if she were something precious, the next moment he had dropped her arm and backed away as if she were . . . were what?
She’d never been more confused in her life.
He said he wasn’t kissing her merely because of the Duke of Pole’s attentions, and something in her badly wanted to believe him.
But if not, why?
In fact, he sounded more jealous of Rathbone than of Pole, which was absurd. Or perhaps not so absurd. Beca
use she liked Rathbone. She did. He made her laugh, whereas Cyrus made her angry, and confused, and desirous.
Desire, she was finding, was a rather annoying emotion. Her whole body was throbbing at the moment, for example.
A man whom she didn’t know turned from a small knot of people and his eyes slid over her. But instead of looking away as if she were no more than a patch of air, his eyes warmed and lingered.
She pulled herself even straighter . . . taller. The stranger was a tall man, but not tall enough for her. She had exacting standards. She wanted height, and a certain level of beauty, the kind of intelligence that leapt to the eye.
She walked toward her mother, her hips swaying a little.
She didn’t walk like a debutante. Not anymore.
CHAPTER TEN
Lucy lay in the bath for quite a while that evening. She felt strangely altered, as if she had taken a step into a strange country in which parents and their opinions mattered little. The panic she’d felt earlier about being forced to marry a man whom she didn’t want? Gone.
The Duke of Pole could crawl to her on his hands and knees and she wouldn’t marry him.
In fact, she wouldn’t marry any man who didn’t beg her to do so because, for the first time in her life, she decided that she wanted her fiancé to long to marry her in a heartfelt way, the way that had always seemed reserved for pretty girls, not beanpoles like herself.
This evening Cyrus came a good deal closer to looking at her the way her imaginary pirate lover always did. There was something different about their last kiss, after she’d told him about Beata.
As she soaped her legs, she thought about how she hadn’t mentioned her twin in years. She wasn’t even sure that Olivia knew she once had a sister. And yet she blurted it out in a ballroom to a man she hardly knew?
Hardly knew but for a girlish infatuation . . . and was now on the verge of falling in love with. And she knew why, too. It was his innate decency. The way he accepted it when she told him he was a pompous ass. The way he apologized, with words and—much more convincingly—with a kiss.
She stood up and snatched the towel that waited on a chair. Cyrus would always have a tendency to try to rule the roost. He would think he knew exactly what was best for everyone, and dictate his decision.