Fortune's Lady

  “Good night, Philip.”

  He chuckled gleefully, anticipating her capitulation. “Good night, my dearest wife. Don’t forget—one week.” He grinned again and was gone.

  She stared at the closed door, brushing her fingers across a faint, irrepressible smile. One week.

  XIV

  THE WEEK PASSED with excruciating slowness—for Riordan because he knew what would happen when it was over, for Cass because she didn’t. She suffered his teasing, near-constant attempts to seduce her with an increasingly light heart, and his contagious happiness tempted her to hope again. Luckily, his work kept him out a good deal of the time, attending meetings and endlessly talking to his cronies in his political clubs about the bill he would sponsor and other parliamentary business; otherwise his persistence would surely have worn down her defenses before the week was out.

  She was up and about now, eating and sleeping well, feeling almost like her old self. But except for one new friend, a woman named Jennie Willoughby, Cass saw no one and remained at home. Their social life was deliberately quiet, all but curtailed, while they waited for Walker’s return. Riordan’s mother went back to Cornwall without seeing them again, and his brother paid no call. Cass wondered if he felt slighted, but couldn’t summon any regret for his family’s coldness on her own behalf. She liked them as little as he, and felt content to be ignored by them indefinitely. Lady Helena’s “fête champêtre” took place without them, to their immense relief; anyway, it was the invitation that was important, Riordan assured her, not one’s attendance at the bloody thing. Aunt Beth sent a stiff note inviting them to her engagement party; Cass sent a stiff note back, declining. She knew she could end the rift between them with a word, but she didn’t care to, at least not yet. The things Lady Sinclair had called her at their last meeting were still perfectly fresh in her mind; if they were to become cordial again, she would always suspect her aunt’s motives.

  She read a great deal to make the time go faster. She also renewed another pastime she’d begun a few months ago, a secret one even Riordan didn’t know about, which gave her hours of pleasure and contentment: writing. She wrote essays, mostly, about London life from a woman’s viewpoint, but also stories and even a poem or two. Her proudest achievement was a letter to the London Gazette about the need for a reduction of the number of capital crimes—not coincidentally the subject of Riordan’s bill. She wrote it under the name “C. Lindsay,” Lindsay being her mother’s maiden name. To her astonishment, two days after she sent it, it appeared in print.

  That evening, one of the rare nights when Riordan had the leisure to stay at home, he and Cass sat in their separate chairs before the fire in the library. A light rain pattered outside, imbuing the room with a warm and cosy feeling. Riordan got up to stir the fire, then to poke his head out the French doors and test the air. The smell of wet leaves wafted in, moldy and pungent. Neither spoke, but both wondered if the rain were slowing Walker down. Today was the sixth day.

  He came back to his chair and unfolded his evening paper. Cass tried to pretend she was engrossed in her book but kept stealing glances at him, waiting on pins and needles for him to turn to the editorials, as he always did. At last he came to the page. She watched his expression with covert intensity.

  “Hm,” he said once. And “Ha!” a little later.

  “What is it?” she asked, all innocence.

  He kept reading. “Well, now.”

  “Something interesting?”

  “Mmm.”

  She was almost squirming with impatience.

  Finally he looked up. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Here’s an editorial that sums up the argument I intend to make to the House in two weeks, Cass. It’s as though this Lindsay fellow took the words out of my mouth.”

  She shivered with excitement, bursting to tell him.

  “Listen to this. ‘In a country that prides itself on being the most civilized in Europe, the carnage reaped on the scaffold every year in the name of justice or criminal deterrence is a national disgrace. Thinking men must wonder whether it be justice or bloodthirstiness that sentences a boy caught stealing a sausage and a man caught murdering his wife to the same brutal end.’ Good, eh?”

  “I wrote it.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m going to tell them, too. That ought to make the blighters sit up and take their hands out from under their arses.”

  “I wrote it,” she said a little louder. He peered at her, frowning. She took off her glasses, folded them, put them in her lap, and looked at him.

  “You what?”

  “I wrote that editorial.” She was amazed at how calm she sounded. “I sent it in on Wednesday. I never expected them to print it.”

  “Cass! You wrote this?”

  She nodded, pursing her lips, struggling to look modest.

  Riordan stared down at the paper, then back up at Cass. “Good lord, woman.” He held his hand across to her. “Come over here. Come!” She came. He took hold of her wrists, gazing up at her in astonishment.

  “Are you angry?” she asked worriedly.

  “Angry!” He pulled her, unresisting, onto his lap and wrapped his arms around her. “Lord God Almighty,” he marveled softly, “what have we wrought here?” He was looking at her as though he’d never seen her before, and she blushed like a schoolgirl who’d won first prize in the essay contest. “I’d better take care my constituents don’t read this—I’d hate to lose my seat to my wife in the next by-election!”

  She beamed like a sun god. “You really like it?”

  “Like it? Cass, I think it’s splendid. I’m so proud of you.”

  Pure delight filled her to overflowing. “My father was a journalist, did you know?” He nodded, smiling. “For this, I did a little reading, but most of it came from just listening to you and writing it down.”

  He was charmed by her self-effacement. “I had no idea I was so eloquent.”

  “You are. Very eloquent.” Suddenly she was shy, and she didn’t know where to put her hands. “I’ve written some other things, too. Would you like to see them sometime?” But then her nerve failed. “Oh, but they’re nothing, really, just silly drivel, you wouldn’t care to—”

  “I want to see them very much. Everything you do interests me, everything you think. You’re the most fascinating woman I’ve ever known.”

  Her heart contracted. She had no reply, could only look into his penetrating blue stare and feel her control trickling away like water down a window. The newspaper slid from her lap to the floor, unnoticed. Finally she thought of something to say. “You’re trying to seduce me again.”

  His mouth curved in a slow smile. “There, you see how astute you are? But I meant every word.” He ran a finger down the side of her neck very softly, watching her color change. “Lord, Cass, your ears are almost transparent, they’re so delicate,” he told her wonderingly, apropos of nothing.

  “You said you wouldn’t do this. This is…exactly what you said you wouldn’t do.”

  “Did I say that?” He moved the wide palm of his hand up and down her backbone in a lingering, hypnotic rhythm, and she nodded slowly to the same cadence. “When?” He lifted her hair and let it fall in an ebony cascade down the back of her neck.

  She rested one hand on his shoulder. “That night.”

  “That night you were in bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I kissed you?”

  It came out a sigh. “Yes.”

  “Like this?” His thumb and forefinger on her earlobe exerted the minutest pressure, no pressure at all, but her head moved surely toward his and their lips touched in a whisper of a kiss. In seconds it changed, flared hot and bright like oil on a wood fire as their arms tightened around each other. Their tongues met in the slow dance of love, and Cass knew with a helpless, hopeless shudder that she no longer cared whether he was her husband or not. He was her love, her life, and this was happening now.

  “Philip. Philip.”

  He twisted sidew
ays and bent her back until her head was against the chair arm, leaving him with a hand free to caress her bodice, her abdomen, her sleek thigh. All the while his mouth never left hers but claimed it again and again, his warm tongue flashing, deep and seeking, as if to the core of her. She made no attempt to stop him when he slipped his middle finger inside her gown, between her breasts, and eased it against the plump flesh on either side with slow, seductive strokes.

  If Riordan had ever wondered about the strength of his will power under cruel and unusual conditions, all doubts were laid to rest that night when he didn’t lift his wife up, lay her before the warm hearth, and take her with all the overwrought passion in his body. But because he loved her not only with his body but with his heart and his mind, he only held her and caressed her, taking a bit of comfort in the certain knowledge that she would let him if he asked, that indeed, at that moment she’d have done anything he wanted. But he’d made a promise and he would honor it, even though neither of them could remember now why she’d asked for it or why he was keeping it.

  “Who told you we aren’t married?” he whispered against her lips, unashamedly taking advantage of her helplessness in order to pry out the information he wanted.

  Not fair! thought Cass. Her body ached from wanting him. No fair forcing her to think at a time like this. Instead of answering, she bit his lips softly, then his invading tongue, with a sure instinct for how to distract him.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and prayed for control, uncertain who was supposed to be seducing whom. “Who told you?” he persisted, gently shaking her. “Tell me.”

  “I can’t. Not yet.” At last she managed to put her fingers on his mouth, holding him away, while sanity made a gradual and unwelcomed trip back. “Please don’t ask me. If John Walker comes home with good news, I will tell you, I promise.” She felt she owed Quinn that much. But if he was lying, then Riordan would need to know what sort of man his best friend was, to protect himself. “Now let me up, Philip. You must.”

  He almost obeyed, but then he didn’t. He liked her in this position too much. He kissed her instead, while he told her, in explicit detail, what she would have to do to redeem herself when Walker got home.

  The next day Cass had a visitor. George, Viscount Lanham, said he’d come to see his brother, but he didn’t seem at all incommoded when she told him Riordan was out and wouldn’t return until evening. Cass hadn’t seen George since that night at Almack’s. She wanted to be friends, even though George’s interest in her didn’t strike her as brotherly and the liberties he took—the hand-holding that went on too long, the kisses that ought to have been on the cheek but were invariably on the lips—made her want very much to keep him at arm’s length. She ordered tea and cakes and sat him down a good distance away from her in the drawing room, then set about inquiring politely as to how he did, how his family was, and what he thought of all this rain.

  She studied him while he answered, impressed again by how little he and his brother resembled each other. Then an alarming thought struck—what if they’d had different fathers? She dismissed it immediately, ashamed of herself for such a wicked speculation, but the notion returned with perverse frequency as the conversation went on. After all, it wasn’t so very unlikely, was it, considering the things Riordan had told her about his mother? Still, it was unworthy of her, thought Cass, and even if it were true, what did it matter? It had absolutely nothing to do with anything now. It was idle and petty and malicious, and with an act of will she cast the unbecoming thought from her mind once and for all.

  The viscount slouched in the middle of the sofa across from her, his legs spread wide in an aggressive and somehow suggestive posture, it seemed to her; was it his way of flirting? If so, it wasn’t successful. Even apart from his crudeness, his body had no appeal for her, though she knew there were many who would call him a handsome man. She found herself comparing his coarse, big-boned toughness to Riordan’s hard but elegant strength, only to discover there really was no comparison at all. And all at once she felt a fierce, physical longing for Philip. She missed him. She wanted him. Oh, she wanted him! She bent her mind to the task of paying attention to what his brother was saying.

  They found they had a mutual friend in Wally, Lord Digby-Holmes, who shared a bench with the viscount in the House of Lords. Wally seemed to have shared the highlights of Cass’s elopement with his lordship. “Faith, I wish I’d been along for that wedding,” George exclaimed, folding his arms across his chest and winking at her in what seemed to Cass a most offensive manner. “Heard you were all drunk as magpies. What a sight it must’ve been, the six of you waking up in that carriage the next day! They say Philip was so sick he couldn’t walk. Eh? But he did the right thing—a wager’s a wager, after all.” He seemed to recall his manners. “But faith, he’s a lucky man, by God! Couldn’t have done any better if he’d tried, which is what I tell everybody who says otherwise.”

  This appeared to be intended as a compliment, so Cass murmured something faintly grateful.

  “Now what really would’ve been funny is if Wally and Tom had married those two whores at the same time!” He struck his knee with his hand and roared with laughter, spilling tea on the sofa cushion.

  Cass flushed. At least he hadn’t said “those other two whores,” though she suspected the thought wasn’t far from his mind. “Tell me about your family,” she suggested with icy calm. “What was Philip like as a child?”

  “Philip? Oh, he was a terror, a real bad ’un. Hasn’t he told you? Drove us all mad when he was a boy. Had a devil in him, it seemed like.”

  “But you were so much older. No doubt you could put him in his place easily enough.” She said it in an even tone, but her eyes were cold; she was remembering what Riordan had said about the kind of brother George had been. She realized that no matter how long she knew him, no matter how fond she might grow of him, she would never forgive George for that adolescent brutality.

  “Oh, I could and I did,” he admitted without remorse, “and for his own good. And believe me, he needed it. Not that knocking him about helped much, him being such a persistent little bastard. Never let up with his tricks and his tantrums and his evil tongue. Until that sanctimonious schoolmaster came, he gave us all fits.”

  “Mr. Quinn, you mean?”

  “Quinn. Now there’s a weasly beggar if there ever was one. I never understood what Philip saw in him—sees in him, for I hear they’re still friends.” He shook his head in bewilderment, and for once Cass was in sympathy with him. “Me, I couldn’t stand him. Looked like a scarecrow and talked like God. Gave me the jitters. Seemed like he wanted to have power over people, possess ’em almost, and I wasn’t having any of it. Philip got taken in by him, though, for a time.”

  “Taken in? How do you mean?”

  “Like he’d put a spell on him or something. But then the blighter went away, and Philip went back to his old self. Only then he was even worse.” He stroked his chin, and there was a speculative glint in his eye. “I could tell you some things about Philip that would make your hair stand on end. I remember once—”

  Cass stood abruptly. “You know, I believe I’d rather you didn’t.” She went to the fireplace and pretended to stir the coals in the grate. “Why do you think Mr. Quinn wanted to ‘possess’ people?” she asked, partly because she wanted to know, partly to get him off the subject of Philip’s scandalous behavior, the details of which she was not anxious to learn.

  George stood up too and went to lounge beside her at the mantel. “Couldn’t say. Some people are like that,” he philosophized. “Makes ’em feel important. But that wasn’t the schoolmaster’s worst quirk, to my mind.”

  “No?”

  “No.” He sidled closer. “If you ask me, he had a thing about women. Didn’t like ’em.” He held up one hand, palm out, to disclaim, “Oh, I’m not saying he liked men better, or boys, or anything of that sort—farthest thing from my mind. He didn’t like what men and women do together, if you get what
I mean.” He raised his thick brows and leered at her.

  “I think I take your meaning,” Cass said coolly, moving an unobtrusive step back.

  The viscount lowered his voice to a new, intimate note. “Remember once when I was about seventeen. We had this new chambermaid, name of Hettie. She was a year or two older than me, and nearly as randy. But it’s a randy age, isn’t it? For a boy, at any rate. What would you be, now, eighteen? Nineteen?”

  “Really, it—”

  “No matter. So anyway, one day Hettie and I were together in the library, getting to know each other better. Oh hell,” he grinned, apparently deciding to abandon all pretense of delicacy, “we were on the couch, is what we were, going at it. Well, sorry, but you’re a married lady, and we’re family now, aren’t we?” He took her red-faced speechlessness for acknowledgement and went on. “So—who walks in on us in all our glory but the schoolmaster? Lord God, you ought to’ve seen him. Went off his hinges, right before our eyes. His face turned so purple, veins popping everywhere, we thought his head was going to explode. I feared for the girl’s safety, I truly did. And swear? I never heard such swear words in all my life. Not vulgar, mind you; more like out of the Bible, Old Testament curses or some such thing. It was as if God himself had found us there, and was sending us straight to hell for our sins. I’m telling you, the man was definitely non compos for a few minutes.”

  “Who was?”

  Relief washed over Cass in a rush. She hurried across the room toward Riordan, who was leaning in the doorway, and took hold of his arm. “Philip, I’m so glad you’re home,” she said with quiet fervor.

  “Are you, love?” He wasn’t sure what had provoked this uncommonly cordial greeting, but he knew he’d be a fool not to take advantage of it. Before she could slip away, he put both arms around her and kissed her on the mouth. It was a thorough and, except for ending much too soon, a satisfying kiss, especially since Cass didn’t pull back or even seem embarrassed despite his brother’s keen, if slightly sullen, observation. “So who was non compos?” he asked again when it was over, turning toward George but keeping an arm around Cass’s shoulders.