From a safe position behind Tobias, Lucinda shook her head. “You’re not our pa,” she said. “We’ve got the same one as Tobias. He promised us, and so—”
“Sorry,” Phyllinda said to Villiers, peeking around from behind Lucinda.
“He is your father,” Tobias said cheerfully.
“Is he?” Lisette said, turning her large eyes on Villiers. “My goodness, but you’re very virile, Leopold.” There was a little snigger from one of the footmen, which died instantly.
Villiers tried to arrange his face into what he imagined to be a nicely paternal expression. “I am your father. I accidentally lost you when you were quite small, and only found you today.”
“You lost both of us,” Lucinda said pointedly.
Phyllinda was hiding behind Lucinda, who was behind Tobias. “Yes,” Villiers said, trying to meet Phyllinda’s eyes. “I lost both of you at the same time, of course.”
“Remarkably careless,” Lisette put in, not helpfully.
“I’m sorry,” he said. What else could he say? He held himself as stiffly as he always had, except it was only lately that he felt stiff. Before, he just felt ducal.
Tobias hauled Lucinda out from behind him. “He’s not so bad,” he said, so that every servant could hear him. Villiers was used to living out his life in front of the household, but this was ridiculous. The sting of humiliation was practically Dantesque.
He turned to Lisette. “Can you summon your housekeeper to take care of these children? They need baths.”
“Nonsense, I’ll bring them to the nursery myself,” she said. With one look at her smiling blue eyes, both girls trotted away with Lisette, who was promising baths, hot soup, and Lord knew what else.
Villiers walked silently into the house, drawing back to allow Eleanor to climb the stairs before him. He occupied himself by noticing how small her waist was, and mocking himself for responding in an altogether physical way to the effect achieved by her corset.
At the very top she paused. “Do you know what I keep thinking?” A wildly mischievous smile spread across her face.
“Please don’t feel that you have to share it with me.”
“Oh, Lucifer, angel of the morning, how art thou fallen,” she said. And then whisked herself off, grinning.
Two could play at that game. He went straight to his room, out onto the balcony, and, after pausing at her window to make sure her maid wasn’t in the room, walked into Eleanor’s chamber.
She was washing her hands, and turned around with an undignified squeak.
Villiers wasted no time. Her maid might arrive at any moment. He pulled her into his arms and took that sweet hot mouth of hers, kissing her so hard that he expected a protest, or a shove, or even a curse.
Not from Eleanor.
Her arms went around his neck and one hand curled into his hair; his ribbon fell to the floor and her body came against his with joy. She squirmed against him, she sighed into his mouth, she gave a little moan when his hand stroked her back.
It wasn’t that women hadn’t done the same before. He knew how to turn a woman’s body into molten liquid, to shape and mold her so she couldn’t stop panting, so she couldn’t remember her own name, let alone his.
But Eleanor’s breathing was unsteady before he tried his practiced caresses. It didn’t have to do with his title, because he’d already learned that she didn’t care about it. It didn’t have to do with his beauty, because he didn’t have much. And it didn’t have to do with his money, because the way she was rubbing herself against him, without shame, without guilt…that had nothing to do with money.
A thought occurred to him and he broke free even as her lips clung. “Are you thinking of him?” he demanded.
“Yes,” she breathed. “What?”
His heart thudded and he pulled free of her hands.
She pulled him back. “Kiss me again.” He looked at her half-open eyes and groaned. There was something about Eleanor—something about the contrast between her composed, snappy personality and the wildness she unleashed in him that made him unable to control himself.
Even if it meant kissing her while she fantasized about someone else.
He kissed her as if to convince both of them that he owned her, that he controlled her. Eleanor was too free to be controlled. And yet when she pressed against him and craved him, obviously craved him…he believed.
He couldn’t not believe. He was only a man, after all. He couldn’t stop his hand from stroking down her back, circling that small waist.
“Are you wearing a corset?” he murmured in her ear.
She chuckled and he grew even harder, if that were possible. “What do you think?”
His hands, practiced and sure, roamed her back. “I think you’re wearing a gown of tobin silk, sometimes called Florentine,” he said, nibbling her ear.
She shrugged. “I have no idea. My sister ordered it.”
“This piece at your bodice is gauze, a very thin silk made at Paisley.”
“But am I wearing a corset?” she demanded.
“That is the real question.”
There was a scrabble at the door and Villiers sprang to her open window. He looked back for one more drink of her, to see the color in her cheeks, her tumbled hair, her desirous eyes.
“I’ll discover the answer to that question tonight,” he said, and it came out sounding like a vow.
Chapter Sixteen
Eleanor bathed in silence, her mind whirling. She was playing a dangerous game with Villiers. But there was no reason not to play.
Flirting with him felt fresh…clean. It felt as if all the empty places inside her that had yearned for Gideon these many years were being filled, even if Villiers wasn’t another Gideon, and even if she wasn’t falling in love with him.
She was falling in lust with him, a thought that would make most of the maidens in the ton swoon from shock. Men were the only ones allowed to lust; women were allowed only an impassioned yet mysteriously platonic “love.” Not to be consummated, naturally, until all the necessary papers and ceremonies were tidied up.
Gideon had been slender, young, and beautiful. Villiers was hard, masculine, and—not bitter, but sardonic. There was a dark core to him that she would never know. Not that she needed or wanted to know it, she reminded herself.
She wanted his body. She couldn’t bring herself to feel shame over that, though the world would think she ought to. But she’d never been able to feel particularly shameful when she loved Gideon either.
Villiers’s very touch made her melt and shudder. It brought out the same side of her that had enticed Gideon into a haymow, the side of her that dared Villiers to wonder whether she was wearing a corset.
“I’ll wear Anne’s chemise dress,” she told Willa after her bath. The gown was made of pale lilac taffeta, so delicate that the fabric flowed to the ground without pleats or folds. It fit very close on the bodice and buttoned from the bosom to the hem with small canary-yellow buttons.
“Are you sure, my lady? You said that you would never wear it, because we couldn’t fit a corset under that bodice,” Willa said.
“I have changed my mind.” She would wear the gown for Villiers’s sake. Willa knew the reason, but they preserved the fiction, the way polite women do. Willa buttoned her up and then went off to borrow Anne’s face paints.
“Lady Anne will not be at supper,” she reported, coming back with a small box in hand.
“Is she ill?”
“Marie says that she was up and about for a short time this morning, but she felt so poorly that she went back to bed and has been able to take nothing but chicken broth.”
Eleanor grinned. “She overindulged last night.” She picked up Anne’s face paints and began experimenting. First she tried brushing dark lines around her eyes, the way Anne had the night before, but somehow she looked more badger-like than mysterious.
“You’ve overdone it,” Willa said dubiously.
“I look like a badger, don
’t I?”
“More like someone with the Black Death. Not that I’ve ever seen the illness, but you look mortal with all that around your eyes.”
Eleanor shuddered and rubbed some off. Then removed a little more. Drew some more back on. Put color on her lips and on her cheeks. Rubbed some of that off. Put a little flip of black at the outside edges of her eyes.
Rubbed some off.
Stood up for one final glance…and smiled.
Her gown was the opposite of the stiff satin gowns that had been in style so long. The French chemise had been introduced only last year, and she hadn’t even thought of buying one. But her sister had.
Thank goodness for Anne and her predilection for fashion. Willa had piled her hair in waves of curls, with small sprays of violets tucked here and there. And after all that work, her eyes were perfect. Smudged, but not so much that she looked like a dying person. Or a badger.
Her lips were crimson. She made a kissing gesture to the mirror, and Willa burst into laughter.
“Do you think I’m too extravagant?” Eleanor asked, just before turning to leave.
“No. Not at all. It’s as if—well, it’s as if it’s more you, if you see what I mean, my lady.”
Apparently more of her meant dressing like a hussy, which was a disconcerting thought.
“It’s just too bad that we’re not in London,” Willa went on happily. “Because those gentlemen would go absolutely mad. They would fall at your feet.”
“I don’t know that I want men at my feet. Would you?”
“That’s not for me,” Willa said.
“Why not?”
“Because that’s for ladies and gentlemen. You should have four or five beaux at least, my lady. I want just one.”
“I think,” said Eleanor, “that I want just one as well.”
“It would be a great waste,” Willa said, shaking her head. “Look at your gown, and how beautiful you are, and all. And then there’s your dowry. It’s always better if a gentleman has to fight off other men.”
“For his sake or for mine?”
“Oh, for both,” Willa said, getting into the spirit of the conversation. “He feels better because he’s had to fight off rivals.”
“Well, I don’t think that Villiers cares,” Eleanor said, feeling a touch of wistfulness. “He just wants a mother to his children.”
“That’s not what he wants from you,” Willa said with a chuckle.
Villiers inspected himself one last time in the glass while Finchley waited, another cravat close at hand in case he decided to redo the knot. He was wearing one of his favorite coats, made of a pale green silk, the color of the very first leaves in spring. It was embroidered with mulberry-colored flowers, a fantasy of climbing trumpet vines. His hair was tied back with a ribbon of the same green.
He looked like what he indeed was: an idiosyncratic and powerful duke. He did not look like a man who was prey to unaccustomed and unwelcome emotions. Shame, for one. And fear. When Tobias couldn’t be found…when the daughters he had never met couldn’t be found…he had felt sick.
That was unacceptable.
And what he felt for Eleanor was, frankly, unacceptable as well.
He had to make a dreadfully important decision that would determine his children’s future happiness. He didn’t need a wife or a lover. The important thing was that they needed a mother. And Lord knows, they deserved whatever he could give them.
His jaw tightened as he pictured the fusty, filthy sty again. And Tobias, wading through the bitterly cold mud of the Thames.
“Your Grace?” Finchley prompted. “Would you like your gloves?”
“No,” he said, turning to go. “I think I’ll stop by the nursery before going downstairs for dinner.”
“Very well, Your Grace. I will wait in the downstairs entry with your gloves.”
Villiers pushed open the door to the nursery with some trepidation. He and Tobias seemed to be able to rub along together. But he had another son and a daughter at home with whom he had hardly exchanged a word. And now two more daughters. It was overwhelming.
The first thing he saw when he entered was Lisette. She was sitting in a rocker by the fire, singing. She had a beautiful voice, as clear as a bell and yet surprisingly low. “Hush-a-bye baby, on the treetop,” she sang. Lucinda or Phyllinda was curled in her lap, wearing a white nightie. Villiers looked around for the other girl, and found her in one of the beds, sucking her thumb in her sleep.
“When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
Down will come baby, cradle and all.”
The moment Lisette stopped singing, the little head on her shoulder popped up. “Don’t stop, lady, don’t stop…”
That had to be Lucinda, given her exhausted but stubborn tone. Lisette stroked the little girl on the shoulder, then bent her bright head over the girl again and sang.
“Mama will catch you, give you a squeeze.
Send you back up to play in the trees…”
Villiers smiled. He didn’t remember ever being sung to. His nanny was greatly taken with the young duke’s consequence and treated him as a small prince from the moment he could remember.
No one sang to princes.
“When twilight falls, and birds seek their nest.
Come home to the one who loves you the best.”
Lisette’s voice was so beautifully soothing that it wasn’t in the least surprising to find Lucinda had succumbed. A maid tiptoed over to take the little girl, but Villiers waved her away and picked up the child himself.
She was utterly beautiful, from her curls to the long eyelashes hiding those lavender eyes she inherited from his grandmother. In sleep, her mouth was a rosebud rather than the defensive, obstinate grimace that she had worn downstairs.
“Put her down carefully,” Lisette said softly, at his shoulder. “You don’t want to wake her.”
He started toward one of the other little beds lining the wall of the nursery, but her light touch on his arm stopped him. “With her sister.”
Of course. He placed Lucinda on the bed next to Phyllinda. Their ringlets curled together on the pillow.
“You’re going to have a fine time fending off suitors when they’re old enough to be noticed,” Lisette whispered.
“They may be rejected by the ton. I’ll dower them, of course, but they’re bastards.” He had promised to himself that he wouldn’t try to avoid what he had done to them, and that meant naming it.
“If they were mine, I would teach them not to care.”
“Hard to do in the midst of London, and children to a duke,” he said wryly.
“I don’t agree.” She gave a disdainful little wave. “I would teach them to ignore such foolishness. The ton is made up of unimportant, stupid persons. I care nothing for them; why should they?”
She meant it. He could see the truth in her eyes: she really believed the ton was unimportant.
“What do you think of my title?” he asked her.
“What do you mean, what do I think of it?” She smiled. “It has four letters. D-U-K-E.”
“Do you revere it?”
“Should I?”
“No.”
“My father does not revere his title in the least,” she said.
Villiers hadn’t even thought about her father. Gilner was an excellent man in Parliament, by all accounts. “Your mother died some time ago. Do you know if your father ever thought to marry again?”
“Oh no,” Lisette said peacefully. “He says he would prefer that his direct bloodline die out. My second cousin will inherit.”
“How extremely—”
But she slipped her delicate hand into his and put a finger to her mouth. As they watched, Phyllinda shifted to her side and threw an arm around her sister.
“We will be missed downstairs,” Lisette whispered. “I only meant to stop by the nursery and see how they were doing.”
Villiers said. “I??
?ve heard the first part of that lullaby, but never the second verse.”
“Oh, I made it up,” Lisette said. “I never liked the idea of the basket falling. Why, the babe would be hurt!” She tugged his hand gently. “Come on, Leopold. My aunt has returned home and she’ll be vexed with me if I’m overly late.”
She called him Leopold so easily, as if they had been intimates forever.
Chapter Seventeen
Eleanor entered the drawing room and was greeted by a tall, thin woman wearing a towering, snowy white wig. “Darling, it’s been years! I haven’t seen you since you were in pinafores, and look at you now. Utterly gorgeous.”
“Lady Marguerite,” Eleanor said, dropping into a curtsy. “It’s such a pleasure to see you again. I may have changed, but you have not.”
Marguerite laughed at that, but it was true. She was not only beautiful, but stylish, with arching dark eyebrows that sharply contrasted with her white wig. She had to be in her forties or even her early fifties, but she dressed with the éclat of a young woman.
“It’s such a pleasure having visitors, even though several of them are confined to their chambers. Apparently your mother has a toothache,” she said, leading Eleanor into the room, “and dear Anne refuses to leave her bed. So we’re very thin company tonight, with Lisette, Villiers, and myself. But I must introduce you to my good friend, the Honorable Lawrence Frederick Bentley the Third.”
Bentley was from Yorkshire, with stiff white whiskers and very bright eyes. He looked as if he enjoyed galloping the moors shouting Tally-Ho! “How do you do?” he said with a flourishing bow.
“We’ve been discussing the endlessly fascinating subject of matrimony,” Marguerite said, seating herself. “I myself have never been married, as you know, and I shall never choose to be at this point in life. I prefer to have devoted friends.”