“Astley is in the grip of passion,” Villiers said. “Yes, I will take some of that lamb now, Popper. Thank you.”
“Passion needn’t last more than a week,” Anne said with her usual cynicism.
Villiers glanced at Eleanor. “It will in this case.”
“A tiresome subject of conversation,” Eleanor said. “How are your daughters settling in, Villiers?”
But Anne wasn’t diverted. “Why do you think Astley won’t settle down and wait once he is certain that Eleanor won’t marry you?”
“Because he’s had a few years to realize what he threw away.”
Back to the immeasurable charms of the Whore of Babylon, Eleanor thought dismally.
Anne was relentless. “What exactly do you think he’s realized?”
“He thinks that there’s no reason to eat breakfast unless Eleanor is there to give him that silly wide grin of hers. He wants to have an argument with her just so he can kiss her into a good mood again. He wants to sleep with her every night, see her holding a baby with brandy-colored hair like hers.”
Eleanor’s mouth fell open.
“He wants her forever,” Villiers continued. Their eyes met and his were as cool as ever. “He can’t bear the idea that she might ever love another man. I’d bet my entire estate that he will arrive tomorrow.”
Anne sighed. “If I wasn’t so prodigiously fond of my husband, I’d probably fall in love with you just for that description, Villiers.”
Eleanor’s mind was whirling. If his face hadn’t been so impassive, so composed, she would have thought…
“Since you inquired about my daughters,” he said, turning to Eleanor, “Lisette spent several hours with them today. I expect they will be very sad when we return to London.”
“You ought to leave soon, before she tires of them,” Anne said, proving her voice could be just as emotionless as Villiers’s.
“That seems an unnecessarily unkind assessment,” Villiers said. “I believe that Lisette genuinely enjoys the girls. And she is looking forward to being their mother.”
Eleanor shot Anne her most ferocious look, the one copied from their mother. Anne twitched an eyebrow but said in a sweetly musical voice, “Of course it will all be different this time, Villiers. I quite forgot that the two of you are to be married.”
“Don’t try for a life on the stage,” Villiers said flatly.
“I think we should go back to discussing Astley,” Anne said. “That’s a far more fascinating subject than your marital mishaps.”
“There is no marriage yet,” he snapped.
“Then we can save the discussion of your unhappiness for the next time we meet,” she said brightly.
Eleanor rose. “If you’ll excuse me.”
“Do tell me that you’re going to succor some orphans,” Anne said, fluttering her eyelashes. “Or perhaps you plan to distribute food among the starving villagers?”
“I am retiring to my chamber,” Eleanor said, with what she considered a masterful control of her temper. “I plan a tedious night with a bath and my book.”
“Ah, Shakespeare’s sonnets,” Villiers said. “Love that lasts ages, into which category we must now place the Duke of Astley. A good choice.”
Eleanor managed to get herself out of the room without saying something she might later regret.
The two people remaining at the dining table stared at each other.
Then Villiers looked at Popper and jerked his head, so the butler and his footmen quickly left.
“A touch of the bourgeois,” Eleanor’s sister said mockingly. “I didn’t know you cared about servants’ talk, Duke.”
He ignored that. “I was under the impression that you were not in favor of my suit.”
“What suit?” Anne said. “You’re marrying Lisette. And, in case I haven’t said it already, congratulations. Your life is certainly going to be interesting.”
He narrowed his eyes.
“All those children,” she said innocently. “What a responsibility. It’d be one thing if you were planning to bundle them all off to the country with fifty pounds and a package of bread and cheese, but to bring them up as nobility? To pitch them onto the civilized world as if birth and illegitimacy didn’t matter?”
“I know they matter.”
“Well, of course, they don’t matter to Lisette.”
He didn’t know why he was defending himself to Anne, whom he hardly even knew. He had a flash of nostalgia for the old Villiers, the one who tolerated no insolence of any kind. The duke who was coolly uninterested in anyone’s opinion except his own.
What had happened to him? He had given Mrs. Bouchon a look that would have silenced anyone from the queen to a scullery maid, and she paid him no heed.
“That is precisely why Lisette will be a perfect mother for them,” he said, wading into the sort of explanations he never would have made a mere year ago. “She cares nothing for the formalities of the ton, for its strictures and rules.”
“She can’t afford to care for them,” Anne said. “She is considered mad.”
“She’s not mad,” Villiers said sharply. “She seems eminently sane to me.”
“I agree,” Anne said, rather surprisingly. “I’ve known Lisette for years, and I’ve never considered her to be cracked. Not in the way that Barnabe Reeve went mad. Did you ever know him? You must be about the same age.”
“Yes,” Villiers said, placing his fork and knife precisely on his plate. “Reeve told me when we were both at Eton that he thought he might be able to fly someday. At the time, I considered it a boyish ambition that I rather shared. His later conviction that he was growing wings was a surprise.”
“So, there’s madness like Reeve’s, and then there’s Lisette.”
“There is no comparison,” Villiers said. “None.”
“Reeve doesn’t listen to the people who tell him repeatedly that people rarely, if ever, grow wings. Lisette doesn’t listen to people who tell her anything that she doesn’t want to hear.”
“The difference between will and wings is the difference between madness and its opposite,” Villiers pointed out.
“Exactly.” She beamed at him. “Reeve thinks he can grow wings and he can’t. Lisette thinks she can spend her life doing exactly as she wishes, no matter the amount of human wreckage she leaves behind her—and she can. That is the difference, my dear Villiers.”
One had to say that Eleanor’s sister understood a good exit line. She hopped to her feet and dropped into a deep curtsy. “Your Grace.”
Villiers stood, but only because the rules of society were drilled into him. They were second nature at this point.
He remained standing even after she left the room.
Until it occurred to him that Eleanor was in her bedchamber. And she was likely taking a bath. That ridiculous excuse for a man, Astley, was returning for the treasure hunt, and that was—
That was very soon.
Chapter Twenty-five
Eleanor lay in the bath once again staring at her book of sonnets, but only because that’s what she had told everyone she was going to do. She hated Shakespeare. What did he know about real human relationships? About how complicated they were?
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks…Perhaps he was right about that, but it was all so much more complex than that simple sentence promised. Gideon still loved her. He did. Shakespeare said that love looked on tempests and was never shaken.
Yet hers was shaken. There was no other way to describe it. Her love had altered. All these years she’d been loving Gideon, and not allowing herself to be angry at him for his cowardice, for not loving her as deeply as she loved him.
But it came down to it, she was the one lacking in true depth of feeling.
After a while, tired of trying to sort it all out, she dropped the book to the floor by the bath. Then she realized it might get wet, and shoved it so hard that it spun under the bed and disappeared.
She wasn’t even surpri
sed when the door to the balcony silently opened. It was a relief, really.
Villiers—Leopold—wasn’t in love with her, so she didn’t have to align her feelings for him with the claims made in a love sonnet. She could just enjoy being indecent. Shameful. Outrageous.
When she didn’t hear anything more after the soft click of the door, she pulled one leg slowly out of the water and pointed her toe. She had nice legs, if she said so herself. She was particularly fond of the roundness of her kneecap.
After discovering one had a shallow soul, it was very reassuring to be able to retreat to the solid reality of a kneecap.
Though she’d heard nothing, a pair of burning lips suddenly pressed the left side of her neck. She obligingly bent her head to the right to give him more access, and two hands slid around her from behind and cupped her breasts.
“Look what I found.” His voice was a low rumble at her ear. “A brassy baggage, waiting in her bath for a man to wander by so she can entice him with her skills.” The odd thing was that the sound of his voice sent heat to her legs even faster than the sight of his hands caressing her breasts, even faster than feeling him caress her.
“Villiers,” she said, dropping her head back against his shoulder and ignoring his foolish comment.
He bit her ear, and growled. “What did you call me?”
It was a command, a brand, a thrilling display of domination and authority. She felt her mouth curve. “Leslie.”
One hand slid over her stomach.
“Try again.”
“Landry.”
He snorted and his hand slid down another few inches, hovering. Eleanor just stopped her hips from arching toward him. Inside, she kept thinking, Please, please, please…
“Leopold,” she whispered. “Leo.”
He turned his head and caught her in a kiss, an erotic, dizzying kiss that was so absorbingly like a conversation that she didn’t even realize at first that his hand was between her legs. Then it all blended together into the taste of his tooth powder, flavored with something—cinnamon, perhaps—and the smell of him, and the dancing, sleek power of those wicked fingers.
It wasn’t until after he made her arch so high that water rolled off her body, until she cried his name aloud, until her body flared into brief, blazing perfection, that she remembered Gideon.
Gideon was back. He was in love with her. Why was she lying in a bath waiting for a different duke to prowl illicitly through the door?
What sort of woman did that make her?
Obviously Leopold was wasting no time thinking about Gideon, or his own fiancée, for that matter. Before her knees had regained strength, he bundled her out of the bath, wrapping her in a towel. She swayed on her feet, her body still singing with pleasure, her mind confusedly trying to sort through her moral iniquities.
“No going to sleep,” he muttered at her.
“That felt so good. I could do it all night.”
He laughed. “Just what a man most wants to hear.”
“Untrue,” she said, opening her eyes. He had put her on the bed and was rubbing her hair dry with a towel.
“I assure you that it is.”
“Men don’t want their wives to be too desirous,” she said flatly. “I believe it makes them nervous.”
“Never having been married, I couldn’t say. But just in case you’re right, I’m glad we’re not married,” Villiers said, throwing aside the towel and standing back as if he were a pirate about to ravish a fainting maiden.
“Don’t be like Lisette, and pretend that rules don’t matter,” she said, raising her head and then letting it flop back down because he wasn’t looking at her face. “They matter. We’re not supposed to make love like this without marriage, because marriage matters.”
“I agree. It does.”
She studied him for a moment, but he had bent over so he could run his lips over her ribs, and tease the curve of her breast. He wasn’t following the conversation very closely.
“Immoral, illegal—and yet so—beautiful.” She sighed.
“Come on, princess.” Villiers pulled her upright.
She hadn’t realized that he was wearing a wrapper. It was deep black velvet, embroidered with pearl arabesques.
“I don’t like this garment,” she said, tracing an embroidered design with her finger.
“I didn’t buy it for you.”
She eased the thick velvet apart in the front. Suddenly she wasn’t in the least sleepy. Leopold’s chest was broad and ribbed with muscle. He didn’t say a word, so she put her face against him and just inhaled.
He smelled wonderful. Faintly of starched linen. But also of decadence, and privacy, and plain dealings.
Even better, of private sin.
She slid her hands inside the robe and the fabric fell over her arms, too thick, too luxurious. “I don’t like this wrapper,” she murmured. She found his nipple and licked it. The tiniest shiver passed through his frame.
“I didn’t ask for sartorial advice,” he said. He managed to sound indifferent, but she wasn’t fooled by him any longer. Leopold had perfected a blasé, ducal manner. But he wasn’t indifferent.
“You care,” she said, nipping him with her teeth because he had done the same to her. And, she discovered, he liked it as much as she had.
So she slid her hand down to his bottom. It was firm and muscled and about as different from her rear as it could possibly be. She kept kissing him, exploring all the curves and angles of his body, the places that made him suddenly draw in breath, or sway toward her.
A brutal-looking white scar marked his right side. “Your duel?” she asked, tracing it with her fingers.
“It doesn’t seem large enough, does it?”
“For what?”
“For death.”
She reached out and pressed her lips to the mark. “I’m so glad you didn’t die.”
“At this moment,” he said, and the fervency in his voice couldn’t be mistaken, “so am I.”
She sipped and nipped and experimented until he was muttering something that sounded like a prayer or a curse, but with her name tangled in…and then with a quick twist, she rose and pushed him back on the bed.
“I need to—” he gasped.
“Not yet,” she said, grinning.
“Enough practice for you,” he said, grabbing her wrists.
“I—” He seemed intent on getting up, so she cut him off. “There may not be a tomorrow, Leo. You know that.”
He shook his head as if to clear it. “What are you talking about?”
“My mother, Anne, and I will leave for London in two or three days at the most.”
His grip tightened. “You can’t.”
She waited a split second and realized he wasn’t going to say more. “I must,” she said, pulling out of his grip. He let her go, of course.
But she wouldn’t drown in the sudden bleakness that threatened to engulf her. It wasn’t as if they were in love, that unshakable, unalterable thing. She could alter, and she would alter. Once she had slaked herself with him.
His brow was drawn, and he looked as if he were trying to coerce his foolish male brain into figuring out what she was thinking. So she slid down to her knees, which put her right where she needed to be.
He tasted hot, and male, and faintly like soap. Even putting her lips on him made heat shoot to her groin. It wasn’t because of his taste, or the fact that he felt like heated honey against her lips.
It was the power of it, if she were honest. Leopold obviously stopped thinking, was unable to think. Every time she tightened her lips, he let out a groan. In just a few minutes he seemed to be struggling for breath. Every time he groaned, a scalding wave of desire washed down her legs.
Suddenly his strong hands caught her and he pulled her up to face him. All the cool self-possession was gone from his face, from his eyes. He kissed her urgently, desperately, falling back on the bed and pulling her on top of him. The French letter took a moment and then she sli
d down, taking him as if they had always belonged together, as if the rhythm they forged was the rhythm of life.
She braced her arms on either side of his head and looked down through the screen of her hair. “I know why you wear such elaborate clothing,” she told him.
He wasn’t listening. Instead he thrust up, his fingers biting into her shoulders. She fell for a moment into voluptuous, toe-curling pleasure, and then recovered. “It’s because you’re hiding your eyes,” she whispered.
“What?”
“You don’t want anyone to see your eyes, so you dress like a peacock.”
He grunted and thrust up again, sending a shock of white heat through her body. “I suppose you think you’re very clever?”
“I am very clever,” she said. “For example, it takes a clever woman to figure this out…”
What she did then made the Duke of Villiers actually cry out.
And those eyes, the eyes he hid from the world behind a screen of ice and a mask of gold thread…they were almost black with desire and yet he never closed them.
He kept looking at her, and she kept looking down at him.
“I know what is dangerous about you,” he said suddenly, a few shuddering moments later.
“What?” she gasped.
“You see me too clearly.” He flipped her over in one smooth motion, pinned her down, bit her lip. “You’re damned dangerous, Eleanor, Lady Eleanor.”
It made her feel shy…to be dangerous for other reasons than her own desire.
“My Eleanor,” he whispered.
And she didn’t correct him because her heart was singing the same tune, and there was no need to speak about it.
Chapter Twenty-six
Knole House, country residence of the Duke of Gilner
June 21, 1784
By the next morning Lisette had lost interest in the treasure hunt. The piles of paper had disappeared. At luncheon she airily announced that the housekeeper would be handling all the rest of the details, from the children’s whereabouts, to the refreshments, to the—