He glanced back at Lady Godwin. Truly, she was very attractive. She looked like a cool drink of water.
“This is so kind of you,” she called. “You must tell me precisely what you think.”
Stephen snapped a bow in the direction of Lady Beatrix. “May I have this dance?”
“My pleasure,” she said demurely.
If demure was the correct word. That sleepy, sensual smile of hers ought to be outlawed. It said everything, without saying anything. And yet it was more a matter of her eyes than her mouth. Why on earth was she bothering to give him, a man her grandfather’s age, apparently, such an invitation? Naturally his body didn’t understand that it wasn’t personal.
“There’s a small introduction before the waltz proper starts,” Lady Godwin said. She nodded, lowered her hands and the music splashed around them.
The waltz had none of the ceremonial pacing that Stephen vaguely remembered from the waltzes he’d encountered in the past. No, it leaped from the keyboard.
For a moment he was frozen in place, already behind in the beat. Then he literally grabbed Lady Beatrix’s waist, pulled her hand into the air, and plunged into the cleared space.
They galloped down the center of the room. Stephen didn’t attempt a twirl; it was all he could do to keep them on time when the music suddenly broke off.
“I’m so sorry!” Lady Godwin called from the pianoforte. “I’ve set it far too fast. I see that now. One minute—”
His companion was giggling. “You were far more agile than my grandfather.” Her face was pink and her chest was heaving.
There was always the chance that her dress would fall to her waist, Stephen thought with a flash of interest. She had glorious breasts for a schoolgirl. Not that she was a schoolgirl, except in relation to his years.
“You don’t seem at all out of breath,” she observed.
“We’ll start again, please,” Lady Godwin called.
Stephen settled his hand more firmly on his partner’s waist. This time the music began more slowly, so Stephen ventured a turn. He suddenly remembered that he had once considered dancing a delight, but that was long ago, before he’d discovered politics. Now he had no time for such frivolity. The melody drove them on. It was beginning to speed up again. One Two Three! One Two Three! Faster and faster they circled and spun. Lady Beatrix was grinning like the schoolgirl she wasn’t, her eyes shining with delight.
“May I offer you my compliments?” she said, obviously rather out of breath. “You keep to this rather rapid pace extremely well.”
Was her compliment in respect to his age? “I should say the same to you,” he said stiffly. It was annoying to realize that his hand on her waist was tingling. That he was taking huge pleasure in holding such a ripe piece of womanhood in his arms…and all the time she was thinking that he was fit for the knacker’s yard. It was repugnant.
Yet any man would feel a pang of interest. For one thing, he could tell from his hand on her back that Lady Beatrix did not wear a corset. His leg brushed hers as he turned her again. If this dance had been in vogue when I was young, Stephen thought suddenly, I’d be married by now. It was intoxicating to hold a woman in one’s arms. No wonder all the old biddies thought the waltz was too scandalous for Almack’s. This was the closest he’d ever come to lovemaking by music.
The waltz reached out and pulled them forward. It suddenly grew slower and rather melancholy, shifting to a minor key. They floated down the room on the sadness of it. That deep curve to her bottom lip was not something that could be enhanced by art, he thought absentmindedly.
“She must be putting her marriage into the music,” Lady Beatrix said, meeting his eyes. “The music is so sorrowful now.”
It was extraordinarily imprudent to remark to a perfect stranger about the countess’s marriage! She spoke as if they were acquaintances of old, as if he were her uncle, or her infernal grandfather. And she was waiting for a response. “I would disagree,” Stephen said, rather stiffly. “I’m not sure the music is sad as much as resigned.”
“That’s even sadder,” Lady Beatrix observed.
Stephen dropped his hand from her waist the instant the music stopped. He didn’t want her to think that she’d enticed him, with all her uncorseted beauty. “That was indeed a pleasure, Lady Beatrix,” he said, with just the faintest touch of irony.
She caught it. Her eyelids flickered, and she gave him a langorous look that drifted down his front and made his private parts shoot to attention. “The pleasure,” she said, “was entirely mine.”
Damn it, she was worse than a courtesan!
Lady Godwin was rising from the pianoforte. The countess would never be so indecorous. Stephen felt his blood cool to a steady beat just watching her. The fact was, he had neglected that part of his life for too long. Now he seemed to have the unruly enthusiasm of an adolescent, lusting after every woman who crossed his path. Steady, he told himself. Steady ahead.
He strode over to Lady Godwin, took her hand and raised it to his mouth for a kiss. “That was a delightful performance,” he told her softly. “Your waltz is exquisite.”
“No, it isn’t!” she protested. “It is far too fast. You must be quite fatigued.” But she was smiling.
Stephen decided to take a chance. He turned her hand over and pressed a kiss into her palm. “Nothing you could do would ever make me tired,” he told her, looking straight into her eyes.
She truly had a delightful blush.
4
The Garden of Eden
Regular reading of the Tatler would convince anyone that English gentlewomen seduced their butlers and their footmen on a regular basis.
“This journal is a disgrace!” Mrs. Cable said, dropping the offending paper to the table. “If Lady Syndenham were indeed foolish enough to run away with her footman—and I see no reason to disbelieve the report—the information ought to be suppressed, so others don’t follow her lead!”
Her companion’s response was as frivolous as her nature. “Reading of Lady Syndenham’s adventures is not likely to prompt one to cast a lascivious eye at a footman,” Esme Rawlings pointed out. “At least, not unless one’s footmen were better looking than those in my household.”
“There’ll be no end to it,” Mrs. Cable snapped. “Before we know it, impressionable young ladies will be marrying footmen—nay, even gardeners! You may laugh, Lady Rawlings, but ’tis a serious concern.” She stood up and gathered her reticule and shawl. “I myself am starting a campaign to weed out incorrigible sinners from my staff, and I sincerely hope you will do the same.”
Mrs. Cable made a point of visiting Lady Rawlings, since the poor woman was widowed with a child on the way, but she often found her efforts unrewarding. Lady Rawlings’s inclination to levity was disturbing. Mrs. Cable found herself all too often reminded that Esme Rawlings was considered something of a fast woman. Infamous Esme, that’s what they used to call her in London.
All the more reason for Mrs. Cable to make frequent visits and impress the wisdom of the Bible on Lady Rawlings. Even looking at her now made Mrs. Cable uneasy. Lady Rawlings was entirely too beautiful, despite carrying a child. There was something about the color of her cheeks that looked feverish, as if she were ill. And that smile curving her lips…Mrs. Cable could only hope the woman wasn’t thinking about one of her footmen. Surely not! Even Esme Rawlings would never smile at such a sin.
Mrs. Cable couldn’t quite articulate her thoughts, but she knew what she saw, and if Lady Rawlings were one of her maids, she’d turn her off without a reference. She herself had never smiled like that in her life. She must remember to drop off some improving tracts on the morrow.
Mrs. Cable was right.
Esme had not been thinking of her butler, a worthy man by the name of Slope. Nor had she thought of her footmen, a callow group of country lads who suffered mightily under Slope’s tutelage. It was worse. She had lost track of the conversation for a moment because she was thinking about her gardener.
r /> Esme bid farewell to Mrs. Cable. Then she sat down in her sitting room and tried to remember all the good reasons she had to be respectable. Mrs. Cable wasn’t one of them. She had a sharp nose, the beady, inquisitive eyes of a swallow, and a flock of acquaintances that rivaled that of the Regent himself. Mrs. Cable considered propriety next to godliness, and if she ever discovered the truth, Esme’s reputation would be blackened the length and breadth of England.
Normally, Esme wouldn’t be caught within ten yards of such a woman. But these days, she didn’t have that luxury. Mrs. Cable led the Sewing Circle, an inner sanctum of ladies dedicated to the virtuous and charitable life. When the Sewing Circle was not hemming acres of coarse sheets for the deserving poor, it monitored the reputations of everyone within five counties. Manuevering her way into the circle had taken the diplomacy of a reformed rake aspiring to a bishopric in the Church of England, and Esme found the idea of forfeiting her newly acquired virtue galling.
Yet what was she to do? The gardener refused to leave her employ. Presumably, he was roaming around her garden at this very moment, although it was noon. He had likely retreated to the hut at the bottom of the apple orchard and was sitting there without a care in the world, reading Homer and not even considering the deleterious effect his presence might have on her reputation.
Of course she wouldn’t visit him. This was her new life, a principled life, a life in which she would conduct herself in a respectable fashion. She had promised her husband, Miles, as much. Before he died, they agreed that he was going to give up his mistress, Lady Childe, and she was going to become the sort of woman who wore little lace caps and sewed sheets for the poor. And never, ever, thought about gardeners.
She bundled herself into a pelisse two minutes later, explaining to her maid that she wished fresh air. It wasn’t as if her child was born yet, she told herself as she headed down the slope into the apple orchard. Once the child was born she would never see the gardener again. In fact, she would have her butler terminate his employment. Esme’s pace quickened.
The hut was a small, roughly built structure at the bottom of the garden. It had one of everything: one chair, one bench, one table, one fireplace. One bed. And one gardener.
He was standing by the fireplace with his back to her when she pushed open the door. He didn’t turn until she closed the heavy wood door with a thump. Then he whirled around so suddenly that the pot over the fire tipped and its contents cascaded across the wood floor. What appeared to be lumps of carrot and beef dripped into the cracks between the boards. Esme’s stomach growled. Pregnancy had the unfortunate effect of making her always hungry.
He looked at her without greeting, so she tried a jaunty smile. “Never tell me that you’re learning to cook?”
He still didn’t say anything, just took a step toward her. Her gardener was big, with a rider’s body, tousled blonde curls, and eyes the blue of a patch of sky in summer. His features were as regular as if they were chiseled from marble. No man had a right to be so beautiful. He was a danger to all womankind, perhaps even to Mrs. Cable. “Did you cook that stew yourself?” she insisted, waving at the pot.
“Rosalie, in the village, brought it to me.”
Esme narrowed her eyes. “Rosalie? Who is she?”
“The baker’s daughter,” he said, shrugging. He took another long step toward her. “Is this a social call, my lady?” Something had sparked in his eyes, something that made her heart skip and her knees feel weak.
She opened her mouth to inform him that he was shortly to be discharged from his position, and found herself saying something entirely different. “How old is this Rosalie?”
“Rosalie is a mere lass,” he said negligently.
“Ah,” Esme said, realizing that there was nothing she could say to that. She herself was no lass. No, she was all of twenty-seven years old, and huge with child in the bargain.
He was just in front of her now, all golden and beautiful in his rough workman’s shirt. He’d rolled it to the elbow, and his forearms swelled with muscle. He was everything the smooth, delicate gentlemen of her acquaintance were not: There was something wild and untamed about him. Esme felt a shock of shyness and couldn’t meet his eyes.
“My lady,” he said, and his voice was as smooth and deep as that of any marquess. “What are you doing in my humble abode?”
She bit her lip and said nothing. Embarrassment was creeping up her spine. Hadn’t she told him last time that she would never visit again?
“You are responsible for the loss of my meal,” he said, and his hand pushed up her chin so she had to meet his eyes. He loomed in front of her, the sort of man all young girls are warned to stay away from. The kind who knows no laws and no propriety, who sees what he wants and takes it.
“It was purely an accident,” Esme pointed out.
“Then you must provide me with another.” She barely caught a glimpse of the hunger in his eyes before his mouth closed on hers.
It was always the same with them. There were no words for it, really. Esme had been married. She’d had lovers. But she clung to Baring, her gardener, as if he were the first man on earth, and she the first woman. As if a smoky little hut smelling of charred stew were the famous Garden itself and she, Eve shaking in Adam’s arms. And he held her with the same desperate hunger and the same deep craving.
It was a good ten minutes later when Esme remembered why she’d come to the hut. By then she was tucked in his arms and they were sitting on the bed, albeit fully clothed. “You’re sacked,” she said against his shoulder. He smelled of woodsmoke, and Rosalie’s stew and more, strongly, of a clean, outdoors smell that no nobleman had.
“Indeed?” His voice had a husky, sleepy tone that made her breasts tingle.
“Mrs. Cable is beginning a campaign to stamp out all incorrigible sinners in the village, and surely you qualify.”
“Is she a little woman who wears her hair scraped into a bun?”
Esme nodded.
“She’s already tried,” he said with a chuckle. “Came around to The Trout and handed out a lot of pamphlets to the lads last week. They were all about God’s opinion of the Ways of the Wicked. I gather she forgot that reading is not a strong point in the village.”
“Wait until she discovers that my aunt Arabella has arrived and brought a houseful of guests with her. Not a one of them has a decent reputation. Are you listening?”
“Of course.” He was dropping small kisses on her neck.
“It’s not a laughing matter,” Esme said crossly. “You of all people should understand how important it is to be respectable. Why, only last year you were thought of as the most proper man in all the ton.”
At that, he did grin. “Yes, and you can see how much that affected me. Here I am, living in disgrace on the Continent, and a very small Continent it is,” he added, glancing around his hut.
“Entirely your fault!” she snapped. Esme was starting to feel a wicked temper. “If you hadn’t lurched into my bedchamber in the middle of the night, you’d still be in the judgement seat, pronouncing verdicts on all the poor dis-repectable souls like myself.” She brooded over that for a moment. “I used to feel as if you were always watching me.”
She glanced up and found he was indeed watching her. His eyes were a darkish blue form of periwinkle.
“I was.”
“Not just watching. Judging.”
“I had to,” he said cheerfully. “I was so utterly miserable about your married state that it drove me mad.”
Esme felt a slight cheer in her heart. No woman in the world would dislike hearing that. “Truly, Sebastian, what am I to do? I know you think it’s foolish, but I did promise Miles that I would become a respectable wife once we had a child. I can’t have one of Arabella’s scandalous parties in my house. I’m in confinement! All Arabella will say is that Marie Antoinette was dancing a minuet up to the moment she gave birth.”
“Why don’t you just accept my proposal? I’ll make an honest w
oman of you, and we’ll turn up our noses at the gossips.”
Esme’s heart skipped a beat and then steadied. She scowled at him. “To begin with, I can’t marry you because you are even more scandalous than I am. Half the world believes you seduced your fiancée.”
“Former fiancée,” he put in.
“But that is nothing to the scandal if they discovered your current whereabouts. Arabella, for one, would instantly recognize you, and she’s invited any manner of persons, all of whom could also identify you.”
“Mmmmm.”
He wasn’t paying attention. “I don’t understand why you consider my wishes to be so insignificant!” she said sharply, pushing his hand off her breast.
He just grinned down at her, all thick golden hair and laughing eyes. “Because I’ve given up all that respectability you want so much, Esme. I don’t have it anymore. And I don’t give a damn. Do you know that I once actually scolded Gina for trying to kiss me in public?”
Esme pursed her mouth. She didn’t like to think about Sebastian kissing his former fiancée, for all Gina was one of her closest friends. “That sounds just like you,” she observed. “Holy Willy, always standing on your consequence.”
“I’d still have my Sir Sanctimonious credentials if I hadn’t gotten mixed up with you,” he observed. “My mother will likely faint when she hears of my new position.”
“You didn’t tell your mother!”
He grinned. “No. But I’m going to visit her tomorrow, and I shall.”
“Noooo,” Esme wailed. “You can’t. You absolutely cannot do that!” She tended to keep well away from the more stiff-rumped members of the ton, such as Marchioness Bonnington. Sebastian’s mother was one of those women who prided themselves on the fact that they needn’t be magnanimous to lesser mortals. And her son, at least before he’d become a gardener, had been an unexceptional successor to her manifold virtues.