“She did?”
“Wearing a magnificent wrapper and smoking a cheroot. She quit smoking only a few years ago.”
Lavinia’s mouth tucked into a smile. “I can imagine that.”
“She dragged a rocking chair up to my bedside and made me tell her everything I remembered of my family, no matter how insignificant it might seem. She came in night after night, after all the other children had fallen asleep, until finally I had nothing left. Some weeks later, she presented me with a commonplace book with every one of my stories in it, arranged more or less chronologically.”
“That’s beautiful,” Lavinia said, her smile wobbling. “She is an exceptional person.”
“I would have forgotten my parents,” Parth said. “I was too young and it was easier to push the pain away. But for years I read that book over and over, until the stories became part of me. At the same time, the Wildes became my new family.”
“That easily?” She could hear the wistfulness in her own voice.
“Yes and no.” Parth was silent a moment. “I sometimes think that if my father had returned, I might have turned into a far more proper Englishman, spending my time in ballrooms and the like. Sterling Lace and the Sterling Bank wouldn’t exist. Their deaths gave me a ferocious wish to succeed. To prove myself, I suppose.”
“Tell me one of the stories that Lady Knowe wrote down.”
“Most of them aren’t about my parents. My nanny liked stories about emperors and I told Aunt Knowe all that I remembered. My favorite emperor, Shahab-ud-din Muhammad Khurram, was a warrior and a poet.”
“What did you remember of your mother?”
He smiled wryly. “I had clear memories of a time when she came into the nursery, burst out laughing, and then summoned my father.”
“What happened?”
“I had painted a beard on my face with an ink made from tar and pitch, the better to look like an emperor.”
“Just look at you now,” she teased, running her fingers over his silky, close-cropped beard. It was a caress that had all her love in it, had he but known.
He looked startled. “I suppose I might have grown this beard in honor of the emperor.”
“Perhaps in honor of your mother’s laughter,” Lavinia suggested.
He surged up, pulled her down into a hungry kiss. A growl in the back of his throat made her sink against him, desire running like a deep river through her body. His hand ran up her leg and rounded her bottom; the river overflowed into pure carnal lust.
After that, they didn’t speak for long minutes, apart from moans, sighs, a command here or there.
“Do you know what Shakespeare would have called our recent activities?” Lavinia said sometime later, rolling onto her side, luxuriating in the erotic burn between her legs and the way muscles that had been tense and desperate were now completely relaxed.
Parth’s chest was still rising and falling in a very attractive manner but he turned his head. “Bedding? Shagging?”
“‘Ferking,’” Lavinia said. “Isn’t that interesting?”
“There is a clear similarity to a word now in use,” Parth allowed. But she could see crinkles at the corners of his eyes. “Is that the sort of bawdy joke you tell your friends?”
Lavinia ran a hand over his stomach, loving the corded muscles there. “I am a very proper young lady, Mr. Sterling. What would I possibly know of bawdy humor?”
He gave her a kiss. “I watched you making people laugh for years. And I always wished that you were telling me the joke.”
Her hand stilled. “I always thought you were . . .” She didn’t finish that sentence because it was all too uncomfortable. “Very well, here’s a joke that goes all the way back to the ninth century before Christ.”
“How do you know it’s that ancient?”
She blinked at him. “I read it in a book! You haven’t even heard the joke yet.”
“My mistake,” he murmured. He rolled on his side as well and leaned forward and kissed her eyebrow. “I’m ready to be amused.”
“What hangs at a man’s thigh, under his coat, and wants to poke a hole that it’s often poked before?”
Parth let out a bark of laughter and leaned closer, rubbing against her thigh. “This?”
Lavinia shook her head. “Incorrect. Guess again.”
“A key,” Parth said.
“You knew already!”
“Very few jokes involving poking exist that schoolboys haven’t memorized by the age of twelve,” Parth admitted.
“Schoolgirls are just as intrigued,” Lavinia said, letting her fingers wander over Parth’s “key.” He felt so good: silky and warm and firm.
He let out a deep breath. “I don’t know much about women. I always told myself that I wouldn’t marry.”
Her fingers curled around him possessively. “Until you met Elisa?”
“I met you first.”
“You didn’t think much of me, so it must have been Elisa who convinced you that marriage was a possibility.” She pulled her hand away and sat up. “I was there, on the terrace at teatime, remember? I know you planned to marry her.”
Parth smiled. “It’s true. I had decided to marry her. It was a rational, pragmatic decision, but an exasperating woman kept disrupting my logical plans.”
Lavinia tried to scowl at him, but a smile emerged instead.
“She intruded on my heart,” he said, his voice dropping. “I couldn’t keep her out, and I realized that Elisa had never had a place there.”
Lavinia opened her mouth but no words emerged.
“I discovered that I could imagine her—you—at my breakfast table, and in my bed, and next to me my whole life. My life would be barren without you.”
Lavinia blinked away tears. “Oh, Parth.” She leaned forward and put her hands on his shoulders. “Are you certain?”
“I fought the way I felt about you for years, telling myself that you weren’t enough. If I had told myself the truth, I felt you were deserving of a duke, if not a prince.”
Lavinia choked on a watery laugh. “That’s absurd.”
Parth ran his knuckles gently down her cheek. “No. It’s absurd that you’ll have anything to do with me, Lavinia. You don’t need my money; Prince Oskar will be devastated when he finds I’ve snatched you for myself.”
“You must stop talking about money,” Lavinia ordered. “You say it as if it were some sort of magic sentence, as if it made a difference. You are you, Parth. You have no idea what it’s like to survey a ballroom and realize that every available man is tedious in his conversation and, even worse, never asks what I think.”
“Huh.”
She looked down at his chest again, running her palm slowly over the lovely ridges of muscle. Had he said he loved her? Not exactly. But he had said she had a place in his heart. Was that the same thing? He used to believe she “wasn’t enough,” but now she was. She was foolish to feel a trickle of unease.
“I would never want to be a princess, or duchess.” Her voice, even to her own ears, was heartfelt. “I just want to be with you, Parth.”
His arms pulled her closer to him and his lips brushed hers. “I’m yours, Lavinia.”
“Oh.” The tiny, involuntary sigh was surprising. Hers? No person had ever put her first. Her mother was affectionate, if fretful. Willa was loving, but married. Her friends were . . . friends. “Mine?”
His lips nuzzled her cheek and slid down to nip her mouth. “Only you. Yours.”
She turned, just enough so that his tongue slipped between her lips. The word echoed in her bones. She wound her arm around his neck and fell into a kiss that was as sensual as it was profound.
Her heart was singing and she could feel tears on her cheeks. Parth Sterling wanted her. Loved her, maybe.
Treasured her, definitely.
Chapter Twenty-three
Parth departed the next morning at dawn, and Lavinia settled into a rhythm bounded by the walls of the sewing chamber. She had six weeks to co
mplete every garment. In the next few weeks, she and the seamstresses faced an occasional hitch, but to her enormous pride and pleasure, the garments were being completed on schedule.
When Lady Knowe’s daring gown for the wedding was finished, the lady tried it on, looking extraordinarily dashing. Lavinia found herself grinning helplessly at the look in Lady Knowe’s eyes as she stood before the mirror.
Lady Knowe turned around, examining the oversized collar and the distinctive buttons running down her back. “I would never have imagined,” she said, her voice softer than it was usually. “Why, Lavinia, you’ve given me a waist and hips. I look . . .”
“You look marvelous,” Ophelia said, giving her a hug.
That evening, while dressing for dinner, Lavinia found an emerald tiara on her pillow. Confounded, she brought it to the dining room and waved the piece before the assembled Wildes, but no one claimed responsibility for it.
Lady Knowe laughed and said that she believed that Diana had had a tiara like that a few years ago. Diana promptly took it from Lavinia’s hand, placed it on her head, and declared that indeed it was her lost piece, and perhaps the matching necklace would be found in some corner.
His Grace said, gravely, that stray jewelry was regularly being found in the castle’s nooks and crannies, adding, “One of my ancestors was very fond of emeralds.”
“Your Grace—” Lavinia began. With exquisite kindness, the duke had just doubled the commissions she had made from merchants. He had given her the emerald tiara that she meant to buy with that money.
He raised his hand, and she closed her mouth.
She could hardly believe it, but perhaps . . . perhaps her skills were worth that much. As much as a set of emeralds. Every single Wilde would attend Diana’s wedding in finery such as was rarely seen outside the royal court. Diana’s trousseau rivaled anything Lavinia had seen in two years of attendance at the French court.
That wasn’t even counting the wedding dress itself.
During the last days of October, Lavinia scarcely emerged from the sewing room, taken up with questions of buttonholes, ruffles, and too-delicate lace. She stopped joining the family for meals and ate with the seamstresses while they talked over the day’s sewing. They had to finish not only each family member’s attire for the wedding, but the myriad garments for the masquerade ball that would follow.
The ball at which Parth would announce their betrothal, if her mother agreed, and she would.
Members of the family trooped in and out of the chamber as they were fitted and refitted for various garments. Diana, in particular, tried on parts of her wedding dress a total of five times.
Lady Knowe often stopped to “cheer on the troops,” as she said, and the duchess came by to encourage them, in her gentle way, to rest. Even Mrs. Mousekin, the housekeeper, took to sewing for a few hours every morning.
Then . . . they had completed their work.
On the morning of October 28, a day before planned. Not inconsequentially, the day that Parth was due to return to the castle.
Every dress, every cloak, every bonnet, every headdress was finished and dispatched to the bedchamber of its owner, including the wedding gown. When Annie bustled out of the room holding the last of Diana’s trousseau—a revealing chemise trimmed with scarlet love knots—Lavinia collapsed in a chair. A deep satisfaction hummed through her.
She’d always known that she wasn’t as intellectual as Willa. Willa read the Greek philosophers, while Lavinia kissed her prints of Lord Wilde before sallying forth to fail yet another French examination.
Willa adored visiting the British Museum, and was fascinated by Egyptian hieroglyphs. Lavinia returned from those excursions with a precise image of Cleopatra’s pleated costumes in her head, but no memory of hieroglyphs whatsoever.
Sitting in the empty room, after the only triumph of her life that mattered, she finally understood that she had succumbed to the idea that Parth had disdained her because she’d welcomed that disdain. She had been furious at him for reflecting her own opinions of herself. She saw herself as shallow, and so she acted that part for him.
No longer.
She, Lavinia Gray, had given her cousin the most beautiful trousseau that any future duchess had ever had. Whether Diana became that duchess or not—for North still seemed determined to relinquish the title—no one in all England would doubt that Diana would be worthy of that rank.
A great many members of the aristocracy would be descending on Lindow for the wedding. Those not invited would see Lady Roland presented at court—in her splendid wedding dress, as was the custom.
Diana stuck her head around the door. “Sweetheart!” she cried. “May I entice you downstairs for luncheon for the first time in days and days?”
“Has Parth arrived yet?” Lavinia asked, not even caring how transparent her question was.
“Not yet,” Diana said. “More importantly, when will you and Parth announce your betrothal?”
“We could not possibly be betrothed, because no one has asked my mother for my hand in marriage,” Lavinia said, unable to stop herself from smiling.
“Pooh, what a trifling excuse,” Diana said. “It’s not as if my mother has given permission for my marriage. Though I did receive a letter from her this morning.”
Lavinia straightened. “What does she write? Does she regret disowning you, now that you’re to be a duchess?”
“Not quite. The gist of the letter insists that the value of my emerald parure is equal to a dowry. Which reminds me . . .” Diana’s face took on an impish joy. “I have some tremendous news!”
“Do tell!”
“Just look what His Grace found under a small table in the drawing room.” She added with a mischievous giggle, “I do remember wearing it in that room during the betrothal party.”
Lavinia shook her head at the magnificent string of emeralds that Diana was waving in the air. She blinked away a burning sensation in her eyes. Diana had emeralds again—probably superior to those she had lost two years ago. The duke had been far too generous in this second, surreptitious gift.
The Wildes were so dear, so honest, openhearted, and true. All of them: from the youngest children all the way up to the duke and Ophelia. Parth was part of them. She would be part of their family, which was almost too much to imagine.
“No one has told Parth about my mother’s theft of the emeralds, have they?”
“Tell him what?” Diana asked, fastening the emeralds around her neck. “I lost some jewels two years ago, and now they have been found. What luck for me, since my mother regards the set as my dowry.”
“I don’t want him to know.”
“Not ever?”
“I’ll tell him when my mother comes out of the sanitarium. I will need help keeping her from stealing again.”
“Why not simply tell him now?”
Lavinia fiddled with a button. How could she explain how fragile his respect for her felt? And yet it was everything to her. To have him look at her with admiration was like a drug, as powerful as Dr. Robert’s drops.
Just imagining the conversation in which she confessed her mother’s crimes made Lavinia’s skin chill. She was bringing nothing to the marriage, other than a mother tucked away in a sanitarium. No dowry, just debt. Of course she had to tell him, but perhaps not right away?
“Don’t you agree that my mother should have the chance to confess?” she said, equivocating. “He’ll be her son-in-law.”
Diana dropped into a chair and frowned at her. “He already knows the worst, Lavinia. He knows she squandered the inheritance your father left you, and he knows she’s addicted to laudanum. Parth would never respect anyone who spent her daughter’s dowry, so you might as well tell him now.”
Was it so awful to want a little more time, just enough to make him truly appreciate that she had good things that outweighed the bad? Make love a few more times?
If she closed her eyes, she could see his cold expression, the one that had assessed h
er and found her lacking. Even imagining it made her heart pound with sick dread.
“I can’t allow him to know that my mother is a thief, when he already knows she is addicted. Not yet.” The words came from the deepest part of Lavinia’s heart. “She’s my mother, Diana, and the only relative I bring to this marriage, other than you. He brings all the Wildes.” She held back more tears.
She was allowing fear to govern her actions. Instead, she should remember the moment when she saw respect, genuine respect, and admiration in Parth’s eyes.
“Parth doesn’t need a family,” Diana stated. “He has one. He needs you. You must promise to confess once you’re betrothed.”
“I promise,” Lavinia said quickly. “I shall need his help to determine whether my mother was involved in other thefts, and to keep her from going to prison in the future.”
Diana snorted. “Not usual son-in-law duties.” She brightened. “But if anyone can do it, Parth is the man.”
“I know,” Lavinia said. “Prince Oskar and Lord Jeremy are rich, but that’s not good enough. Parth was the only one who could really help me.”
“I told you Parth was the man to marry, Lavinia, back when I sent you in to propose marriage.” Diana’s voice was deliberately cheery.
“He refused me,” Lavinia pointed out.
“But you didn’t give up,” Diana said, grinning widely as she grabbed Lavinia’s knee and squeezed it. “My cousin never gives up!” She narrowed her eyes. “Now I am hoping that you don’t end up with a three-month baby because you traded your virginity for that victory.”
“It wasn’t like that!” Lavinia protested.
Diana hopped up and adjusted her emeralds in the glass. “May I wear these with my wedding dress?”
Lavinia gaped at her. “Are you jesting?”
“It would be fitting to wear them. Perhaps the tiara as well. Though you made that beautiful flowery pouf. Maybe we could fit the tiara over the pouf.”
“You will not wear green stones with a silver and white dress with rose accents,” Lavinia said, her voice rising. “You will wear the set of diamonds that Her Grace inherited from her mother.”