“Why the surprise?”
“Oh, the dukeness of you,” she said with a wave of her hand, wondering if she might have drunk a bit too much. Just to prove to herself that she hadn’t, she finished her glass.
“My dukeness,” Villiers repeated.
“Swathed in velvet, from the moment you left the crib.” She looked away because the very sight of his lips made her feel like squirming, as if her soft parts became softer at the sight of him.
“I was in love with a woman named Bess. She was a barmaid.”
Eleanor giggled. “Buxom and beautiful?”
“I actually don’t remember whether she was buxom,” Villiers said. “Certainly she wasn’t as fortunate in that regard as you.” His eyes didn’t drop below her face. “I would remember that.”
“My bodice is a bit small,” Eleanor confessed. “This gown belongs to my sister. My preference is for less revealing clothing.”
He nodded.
“Did Bess return your affection?”
“How could she not?” he asked. There was something hard in his voice. “I was already a duke.”
“That needn’t have—”
He interrupted. “Believe me, the barmaid who turns down a duke should be cast in bronze.”
“Nonsense,” Eleanor said tartly. “You have a distorted idea of your own consequence.” A thought occurred to her. “Is Bess the mother of one of your children?”
The edge of his mouth quirked, sending a blaze of heat down Eleanor’s legs.
“My children really don’t bother you, do they?”
She considered that. “Should they, on moral grounds? Religious? Ethical?”
“Any of the above.”
“I myself would prefer to have tidier domestic relations,” she said. “But I don’t see that it’s any of my business if you don’t agree with me.”
“Well, you are marrying me,” he pointed out. “Or so you said.”
Eleanor reached out and took his glass of anisette. He had barely tasted it, after all. “Perhaps. An announcement before my mother is hardly a commitment. Either of us may decide that we would rather marry another.”
“You would consider our betrothal a tentative one?”
She glanced deliberately at Roland. He looked like the embodiment of a medieval troubadour, dark and dreamy, singing of love. She listened for a moment. He was actually singing about a widow marrying her sixth husband, but the principle was the same. He sang. “I don’t suppose you sing?” she suggested.
“Never.”
“I don’t either,” she sighed.
“Bess is not the mother of any of my children,” Villiers said.
“All right,” Eleanor said agreeably.
“She fell in love with a much prettier fellow.”
She considered his face. He was not pretty, not by any stretch of the imagination. Everything about him was just slightly rough-hewn, aggressive, male. Too male. He made embarrassing ideas float through her head. As if the Duke of Villiers would suddenly swoop on her, push her down on the settee, and throw himself on top of her. “I thought a duke’s precedence was all-important,” she said hastily.
“The Duke of Beaumont stole her from me.”
“Goodness,” Eleanor said, smiling. “Lucky Bess! Chased by two dukes. Do tell me that you fought a romantic duel?”
“There’s nothing romantic about duels,” Villiers said. “But no. I had no claim over her, you see. I had completely lost my head. But a young man’s adoration was no match for Beaumont’s Adonis-like profile.”
“I suppose Beaumont is handsome,” she agreed. Not as handsome as Gideon, in her opinion, but good-looking enough. Still, he always looked so tired that it was hard to imagine him young.
“You are practically the first woman I’ve spoken to who doesn’t rhapsodize over Beaumont’s face,” Villiers said.
She glanced at his nose and looked away again. She could hardly admit that Gideon had soured her interest in beautiful men. To the point to which she felt far more attracted to Villiers’s sort of rough-hewn looks.
“And yet I suppose that Astley is even more beautiful than Beaumont, to your eyes?” Villiers asked, uncannily echoing her thoughts.
She nodded.
“More golden, more sleek, more attractive in every way?”
“Yes,” Eleanor agreed. She took another drink of Villiers’s anisette.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and the sharp edge dropped from his voice. He actually sounded sympathetic.
“It was years ago,” she said.
“If you still think of him while kissing another man, then it hasn’t been long enough.”
She couldn’t think how to refute that, but at that moment she looked up to see Lisette sling her lute at Roland’s head. Roland threw himself sideways and at the same time managed to put up a hand and catch the lute.
“You wretched little—” he hollered.
Lisette opened her mouth to scream back, cast a look toward Eleanor and Villiers, and ran into the library.
It all happened so quickly that she was gone by the time Villiers looked around.
“I apologize,” Roland said, walking toward them. “When two musicians come together, we lose sense of time. Even worse, we sometimes lose our heads.”
Eleanor felt her cheeks growing pink. She certainly had forgotten their presence during Villiers’s kiss.
“Your music played so sweetly on the night air that we all lost track of time,” Villiers said at her shoulder.
Roland glanced at him. “Shakespeare on music. I gather that’s part of If music be the food of love, play on, etcetera? Is that from A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”
“Actually no,” Villiers said. “The beginning of Twelfth Night.”
“I hate those old plays,” Roland said to Eleanor with a comical grin. “So stuffy and antiquated. You have no idea how hard it can be to make older people realize that fresh material can be so much better.”
He didn’t glance at Villiers, but she felt an irresistible urge to smile. Obviously he had seen them kiss.
“We old people generally go to bed with the chickens,” Villiers said, without a trace of resentment in his voice.
“Ah well, I certainly didn’t mean that comparison,” Roland said, leaving in doubt exactly what comparison he had meant. “Lady Eleanor, may I call for you tomorrow? I would love to show you the countryside.”
“Of course,” Villiers said genially, taking on the demeanor of a kindly uncle. “You young people ought to trot about on horses while the rest of us are taking our morning constitutional.”
“I would be happy to see you again, Sir Roland,” Eleanor said, holding out her hand.
He fell back into a flourishing bow, raising her hand to his lips and holding it there for a long moment. “Tomorrow,” he said, meeting her eyes.
“Don’t leave those lutes,” Villiers said.
Roland’s bow to the duke was extremely brief, barely more than the kind of bob Eleanor had seen irate footmen give to a butler.
Villiers leaned back on the settee as if there was no question about the fact that they would stay there, unchaperoned. “I didn’t see what happened to Lisette, did you?”
Eleanor thought of the jerky violence with which Lisette had swung the lute. “I believe she was irritated by something Roland said.”
“I can certainly understand that. I would suggest that Sir Roland’s manner could be considered a far more reliable guide to matrimony than might his kisses.”
“What do you mean?” Suddenly the stars seemed much closer, now that there were only the two of them outside together. The night air was velvety and warm on her skin.
“If I were married to him, it would be about a week before I pushed one of his pompous, artistic poems down his throat,” Villiers said with a perfect lack of expression, which made his comment hilarious.
Eleanor burst into laughter. “You hurt his feelings with that twaddle about Shakespeare. It could be that he’ll be a great writer som
eday, you know.”
Villiers leaned a little closer. “Dropping the tiresome poet from the conversation, I don’t think I want my marriage decided by a kiss that includes the Duke of Astley as an unknowing partner.”
“I thought of Gideon for only a moment.” Her treacherous heart sped up a bit.
“Why don’t you kiss me this time? Perhaps that will help to focus your attention on the man before you.”
Of course she could kiss him. She was good at kissing, and those dalliances with Gideon weren’t all that many years ago. So she leaned forward and kissed him with all the persuasive power that she’d polished with Gideon. Her lips slipped along his, begged him for entrance.
His lips didn’t move.
She swallowed a little humiliation, leaned farther forward so he could see her bosom if he wished.
Gideon always closed his eyes when she kissed him, but Villiers kept his open. And to her dismay, he seemed to be looking at her with amusement rather than raw desire.
“What?” she demanded.
“I don’t think I like being kissed. That was as boring as my kiss, the one that drove you to start dreaming about Astley.”
Gideon hadn’t liked her kisses all that much either. “Very well,” she said, moving back and feeling around for her wrap. “I really should go to—”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like kissing you,” he interrupted.
“Yes, you—”
“I don’t like being kissed.” And with that rather cryptic statement he reached across and pulled her against his chest.
Eleanor’s arms went instinctively around his neck. But she didn’t have time to think before his hands laced into her hair and his mouth took hers. He didn’t beg or seduce. He invaded. He took her mouth hard, with a kind of concentrated lust and fever, and she knew exactly why all those women had never said no to him.
It didn’t have anything to do with his ducal crest, as he seemed to think. It was the moment when the immaculately dressed, starched and beruffled duke suddenly turned wild, his mouth hot on hers, his hands gripping her hard.
This kiss was unlike any she’d shared with Gideon. There was nothing sweet about Villiers’s kiss. And Villiers didn’t feel like the right way to think about him.
She broke free and his lips slid, hot, across her cheek. “What’s your name?” she whispered, knowing it perfectly well. Leopold was too accustomed to women’s avid attempts to claim intimacy with him. He was spoiled by too much adoration.
He said it against her lips. “You do remember my title?”
“I don’t care about your title any more than—” But she didn’t want to talk, so she turned toward his mouth again, starving as a new-born chick. He made a growling sound in his throat, and their tongues tangled. She was shaking, she thought dimly, pushing her fingers into his hair and pulling it free of its ribbon so that it slid like rough silk across her skin.
“Leopold,” he said.
She wasn’t listening because she was burning, breathless.
“Leopold,” he growled.
She turned her mouth, wanting more of him, not words.
“You are a surprise,” he said a moment later, pulling back again.
Men never wanted to kiss as long as she did, she thought, and then pulled herself together. “A surprise?”
Instinctively she knew instantly that she had to—must—cover up the extent to which she was unable to think because of this craving. For him. For this man who was looking at her with absolute self-possession, pulling his hair back and swiftly retying its ribbon. Apparently the duke didn’t tolerate being unkempt for long.
She managed a shrug. “Because I enjoy your kisses? Since you imply that every woman falls prey to the ducal title, how do you know that I’m not belatedly captivated simply by your crest?”
“Are you? After all…I am the second duke with whom you’ve cavorted, if we count Astley. And I think we must count Astley, mustn’t we?”
There was just the subtlest insinuation to his voice. “I was in love with Gideon,” she said, not bothering to try to fix her own hair. It was probably a mess, but she refused to care. Instead she picked up the anisette, but it tasted sickly sweet now, and she put it down after it had barely touched her tongue. “I suspect that I loved him more than you loved Bess.”
“I can’t imagine how we would determine such a thing,” Villiers—no, Leopold—said.
“I wanted to marry him,” she confessed. “I thought we would marry.”
“So I surmised. Since I can’t imagine that Astley chose his languid wife over you, I gather that fate intervened.”
The pleasure of that compliment warmed her. “Fate in the form of his father’s will.”
“I expect you did love him more than I loved Bess, then,” Leopold said. “For I never thought to marry her. I was infatuated with her laugh. She had a wonderful chuckle. I wanted all her laughter for myself.”
Eleanor raised an eyebrow. “I would have thought that most young men felt possessive about other attributes of bonny Bess.”
“Oh, I wanted those too,” he said wryly.
“You mean you didn’t—” She stopped.
“Elijah intervened before my adoration of Bess could lead me to convince myself that I should offer her money,” Leopold said. “I’m afraid that I merely stood about the inn adoring her, and never thought about money until it was too late.”
“Oh.”
“Elijah, of course, didn’t need to offer money because he was so very pretty.”
He would hate sympathy, but she felt a flash of it anyway, followed by a wave of rage at stupid Bess for following the luscious Duke of Beaumont wherever he willed her. Presumably to Beaumont’s bed.
“I must take another look at Beaumont in the future. I’m afraid that I always dismissed him—he has that tiresome puritanical look—but now that I know he stole your barmaid’s attentions…”
He laughed, and Eleanor liked the sound. “Your problem is not choosing between myself and Beaumont, but choosing between myself and young Roland.”
“And yours,” she countered, “has nothing to do with a barmaid. Instead you are faced by two nubile daughters of dukes.”
“You think I should consider Lisette?”
She knew perfectly well that he was considering Lisette. She’d seen the way he watched her, with a kind of fascination, as if she were a fairy plaything.
“She’s exquisite,” she said. “I would marry her, too.”
He raised an eyebrow at the detachment in her voice. With luck, that meant he hadn’t guessed that she was lusting after him with embarrassing heat.
“I wouldn’t marry a woman for her beauty,” Villiers said. She caught just a trace, just the smallest trace, of the unlovely boy thrown over for his handsome friend. “I need a mother for my children.”
“Lisette loves children,” Eleanor said, meaning it. “She truly loves them.”
“I can tell. And she does so much work with those orphans. I believe that she wouldn’t be put off by illegitimacy.”
“Absolutely not. Lisette would never think twice about a person’s origins.”
“She could teach them to care as little about society as she does,” Leopold said. “I asked her why she was never presented, for example, and she just laughed. She didn’t care.”
“Lisette has never cared for convention. It’s not in her nature to kow-tow to someone because he is of high rank.”
“I’ve seen that in Quakers. But never in a woman of the aristocracy. It’s unexpectedly alluring.”
“Yes,” Eleanor said, gathering her wrap. “Lisette is definitely alluring.” She was not going to say anything about Lisette’s inability to care for anything for very long. Or, for that matter, about her betrothal.
“Do you really mean it?” he said. Now he didn’t look like a Leopold any longer: she was faced once more by the Duke of Villiers.
“Mean what?”
“That we might treat our betrothal as somethin
g of a…temporary state, perhaps to be dissolved by either of us.”
“Of course,” she said quickly. “I am certainly looking forward to Roland’s visit tomorrow.”
“So he is Roland. And I?”
“Villiers,” she said.
He didn’t like that. His gray eyes turned cold, and she was glad that Roland had made an appearance, glad that she didn’t care too much.
“You are the Duke of Villiers,” she told him.
That glare of his probably withered other people. Those who cared more.
But she was determined not to care—in fact, never to care that much about any man again, she reminded herself. “That’s not to say that I’m not interested in marrying you.”
“Then call me Leopold.”
“Perhaps, if we decide to marry,” she said, standing up. “But I think that you are far more Villiers than you are Leopold. My mother always calls my father by his title.”
“And yet you refer to Roland by his first name.”
She took her time winding her wrap around her breasts, even though Villiers had never given her the satisfaction of knowing that he was looking at them. “Roland is a Roland,” she said finally.
“And I’m a Villiers?”
“Lisette is a Lisette,” she pointed out. “It’s a lovely, flirtatious name, perfect for someone with flyaway curls and a giggle.”
He raised an eyebrow at that description. “Remind me not to cross you. Does your name suit you?”
“Oh, Eleanor,” she said. “I’m certainly an Eleanor.” Or at least she was from her mother’s point of view.
“Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, and Queen of England,” he said, sounding amused again.
That didn’t make her amused, so she said her good-night and retired to her chamber.
Chapter Fourteen
Knole House, country residence of the Duke of Gilner
June 18, 1784
Villiers never woke early in the morning. Finchley, his valet, knew better than to even appear at his door before eleven. His ideal day consisted of playing chess most of the afternoon and then making love most of the night. He never paid calls, and he had discovered as a youth that a gift for chess translated into a gift for numbers; he gave his estate manager an hour a week, and within a few years his net worth had grown to one of the greatest in England.