“I’ll go flirt madly with that gorgeous friend of yours,” Cam offered. “It will mitigate the burning anxiety the ladies clearly feel about our annulment.”
“Quite a sacrifice,” Gina remarked, a drop of acid in her voice.
“Are you staring at Tuppy Perwinkle?” Cam had finally managed to locate the site of interest.
“Yes,” she admitted.
“Why on earth?”
“That’s his wife he’s speaking to.”
“I thought he lost his wife three years ago.”
Her eyes grew wide. “He told you that his wife had died?”
“Oh no, just that he had misplaced her.”
Gina nodded with some satisfaction. “I don’t think he’s overlooking her now.” In fact, Tuppy and Carola seemed to be having an animated conversation.
“You know,” Cam said, “I’m not certain that Tuppy wanted to rediscover his wife.”
“Too late,” she said. The couple were standing very close together and Carola was talking with great emphasis.
“Look! They must have found something to talk about besides trout. Isn’t that sweet?”
“Does she know anything about trout?”
Gina gasped.
The sound of Carola’s slap could be heard throughout the room.
“That’s what comes of rediscovering a lost wife,” Cam said cheerfully. “I told you he didn’t want her.”
“I think one could say more precisely that she doesn’t want him,” Gina retorted.
At luncheon, his wife was seated next to her fiancé. Just to amuse himself, Cam had started a list of epithets for the man. “Poker-faced” he’d already used. He needed something more vulgar to truly make an impression on Gina. “Uppish” sounded almost complimentary. “Wiggy” was a good one. Had a pedantic yet tedious air. Wiggy Bonnington. He liked it. He ambled over to the table where they were seated and, as luck would have it, the seat next to Gina’s luscious friend was unoccupied.
“Hello there, Lady Rawlings,” he said with just a touch more pleasure than was called for by common politeness. “Bonnington, your servant,” he remarked. “I’m afraid I didn’t register your presence immediately.” And he smiled, an indolent type of smile.
The wiggy one stiffened but confined himself to a cool nod in response.
“How’s your hysterical friend? The one who belted Perwinkle?” Cam asked, looking at his wife across the table.
“She didn’t belt him,” Gina snapped. “Carola is absolutely fine.”
Cam grinned at her and then turned back to Lady Rawlings. He felt more cheerful just sitting next to a bosom as lovely as hers. Somewhat to his surprise, he encountered a ferocious glare from the wiggy marquess. Interesting, Cam thought. Bonnington doesn’t like it when someone throws the lovely Esme a lusty look.
He decided to try a little experiment. He leaned forward across the small table and gave his wife the smile he generally reserved for his rare encounters with an exotic dancer named Bella who lived in the next village. It was a slow, heated smile that started at Gina’s sensual lips and didn’t go anywhere but down.
To his utter shock, Cam found that certain parts of his body sprang instantly into ardent attention, a level of attention that lusty Bella never received. He hastily looked back up into the startled eyes of his wife.
A tiny blush, a sweet cherry flush crept into her cheeks. For a moment those wild almond-shaped eyes caught his and turned a smoky, darker green.
Cam sat back, feeling poleaxed. Then he remembered to look at Gina’s fiancé. Old Wiggy was looking utterly relaxed and didn’t seem to have even noticed.
What he should do now was stare at Lady Rawlings’s bosom, but for some obscure reason he needed to take a breather. His wife didn’t have half the cleavage of the bountiful lady next to him and yet…and yet.
He leaned closer to Esme. She had a spicy perfume that suited her sensuous, available air. He took a manful breath and leaned even closer, giving her the Bella smile. It was rather less of a success. For one thing, in comparison to Gina’s, her bosom was wildly overfleshy and he had a sense of vertigo, as when one dives from a high cliff. And when he met her eyes, there was no surprised welcome mixed with a hint of erotic pleasure, as Gina’s had had. Instead, they were flatly amused.
She leaned forward and asked huskily, “Are you enjoying yourself, Your Grace?”
He blinked and remembered to look at Bonnington. Sure enough, the man appeared to be on the verge of exploding from rage. He had turned dark red and was visibly clenching his teeth.
If Sebastian had ever seen death in another man’s eyes, it was in those of the marquess. In the oh-so-civilized Wiggy’s eyes was the promise of murder: swift and unrepentant murder.
“I believe so,” Cam said, pulling back from Lady Rawlings. He had no intention of going to grass for the sake of a well-endowed Englishwoman. But he did have a question or two that she might be able to answer.
She jumped in before he could formulate a question. “How is your memorization of Much Ado coming?” There was a warning in her tone. Obviously she knew exactly what he was thinking, but she was not going to admit it. A good girl, Cam thought suddenly. Loyal to Gina. And damn beautiful as well.
“Would you do me the honor of allowing me to make a sculpture of you?” he asked impulsively.
She looked surprised. “Do you sculpt real people then? I have heard of your work, as it is very well known in London. But I didn’t know that you sculpted actual people rather than mythological figures.”
“I don’t. I would probably sculpt you as Diana.” He had decided on the moment.
“Diana? Isn’t she the goddess who hated men?”
He considered. “I think of her as the goddess who tempted men by bathing outdoors, and turned them into animal life if they succumbed to the lure of bare flesh.”
There was more than a gleam of laughter in her eyes. “You’re not as blind as the average man, are you?” she said, lowering her voice so she could not be overheard.
Cam smiled. He liked Gina’s lusty, not-so-lusty friend. “Would you like to be shaped in pink marble?” he offered. “I guarantee a scandalous response from the ton.”
Esme cocked an eyebrow. “And why would I be interested in creating yet another scandal in the ton? I assure you that I do scandals quite well on my own.”
Cam bent closer. “The wiggy marquess will particularly dislike the idea.”
Esme gave him a guarded look. “Hush.”
Cam glanced up to find his wife and her betrothed looking at them with matched frowns. “Lady Rawlings has just agreed to be a model for my next work,” he said.
Something flashed across Gina’s eyes and disappeared. “Esme will make a beautiful goddess.”
Cam nodded. What was that look in her eyes? She wasn’t hurt, was she? Damn it, he probably should have thought about it before making such a rash offer. An hour ago he had decided to shape Gina into Aphrodite, and here he was with a Diana instead.
Bonnington was looking more starched than he’d ever seen him. He was obviously longing to scold Lady Rawlings, but he turned to Cam instead. “I thought you specialized in less-than-respectable statues. Are you broadening your focus?” His tone indicated that it wasn’t possible.
“In fact,” Cam said, “Lady Rawlings and I have just agreed that she would make an admirable Diana.”
Bonnington’s nostrils flared.
“I am so looking forward to it,” Esme cooed, leaning forward so that her bosom brushed Cam’s arm. “The duke suggested Diana in the bath…but I think that would be a wee bit too scandalous, don’t you, Lord Bonnington?”
Cam privately thought that if looks could kill, his half of the table would be stretching their length against the ground.
“Not at all,” the marquess bit out. “It sounds remarkably appropriate. I saw a piece of yours in Sladdington’s entryway, Your Grace.” He turned his scathing eyes to Esme. “I’m certain that you will enjoy being depic
ted in marble. Sladdington uses the statue as a hat stand. Perhaps Lady Rawlings could become something so…useful.”
Cam felt Esme’s body go rigid next to his arm. He gave her an encouraging nudge. “Touché!” he whispered. “Your turn.”
But before she could speak there was a sharp squeal of a chair pushing backward. Cam looked up to see his wife looking icily detached. “Please excuse me,” she said. “I must have eaten something amiss. I’m feeling a touch of nausea.” She turned and walked off. Bonnington stalked after his betrothed.
Esme snorted. “Touché! Your turn.”
Cam surveyed his remaining luncheon companion with a raised eyebrow. “You’re playing with fire, you know that?”
She picked up her fork and stirred her mushroom fricassee. “Not in truth,” she said. “I am—” But she caught herself and snapped at Cam: “This is a most improper conversation.”
“True enough. Do you have a husband, then?” he asked, with some curiosity.
“Oh yes,” Esme said, just the faintest shade of bitterness to her voice.
“Is he here?”
“Naturally.” She nodded toward a table to the left.
“Which one?”
“Miles has brown hair,” she said dispiritedly.
“Don’t you mean that he used to have brown hair?”
“Well, he still has some,” she said, looking over. “He’s the one snuffling Lady Childe’s shoulder.”
“Snuffling is a nice word for it,” Cam said thoughtfully.
“It has a gently porcine ring that pleases, in the context. Would you like me to get his attention and then snuffle your shoulder?”
“No, thank you,” Esme said, eating a mouthful of fricassee.
Cam felt she didn’t have to sound so completely uninterested. But he suspected that the audience for most of Esme Rawling’s scandalous behavior had just stalked out of the room.
“In that case, would you like to help me memorize my lines?” he asked, putting on a pathetic tone. There wasn’t any point in letting the woman lapse into a melancholy.
Esme sighed and agreed.
And that was how Gina found them, thirty minutes or so later when she came looking for Esme. Her husband and her best friend were snuggled before the fire in the library, heads bent over a copy of Shakespeare. Esme’s black curls looked like glossy silk next to Cam’s unruly locks.
She was giggling.
“Stop laughing, wench,” Cam said. “I’ll try that line again: What, my dear Lady Disdain: are you yet living?”
Gina turned and walked out of the library without disturbing them. Mr. Wapping would be expecting her. And the fact that she had a headache beating in both temples had nothing to do with what she just saw.
Esme deserves some happiness, she told herself.
Cam doesn’t deserve any, she told herself just as fiercely.
By the time she reached the third floor and prepared herself to learn about the escalating difficulties of city-states in the thirteenth century, she was fairly certain that she’d never suffered such a terrible headache in her life.
She was also absolutely clear about whose fault it was.
Her degenerate husband had decided to seduce her best friend. Never mind the fact that Esme was married and had already gotten herself into enough scandals. Never mind the fact that she was only hanging on to her place in the ton because, to Gina’s private knowledge, Esme’s men rarely managed to get her into bed, try as they would, and therefore she had never actually been caught in a compromising situation.
Cam would have no such problem. There was no point in thinking about how quickly any woman would succumb to his large, relaxed body and laughing, seductive eyes. He looked at one and made the world spin crazily, if only for a moment. Wait until he started sculpting Esme in marble. Looking at her. Naked?
Mr. Wapping tidied his mustache and his beard and set a stack of books on the table. “I have some very exciting information to share today, Your Grace,” he said with a good deal of self-importance. “I believe that my research will shed an entirely new light on Machiavelli’s place within the Florentine government. You do remember what we talked about last week, don’t you?” Sometimes Mr. Wapping tended to forget that he wasn’t instructing a class of undergraduates.
“Yes, of course,” Gina said obediently. “The Medicis took over Venice and Machiavelli was exiled.”
“Not Venice—Florence,” Mr. Wapping said, with a faint air of disapproval.
He snapped open his books. “Now I’m sure that you’ll find this discrepancy between Sandlefoot’s and Simon’s hypotheses regarding Machiavelli’s attempt to gain a place on the Medici council as interesting as I did, Your Grace.”
Gina nodded. She was having trouble breathing—due to pure rage, she assured herself. It was because she didn’t wish her best friend to fall into the trap of the first lazy and degenerate duke to come along.
That was the only reason.
“Your Grace? Your Grace? Are you feeling well?”
“Of course,” Gina snapped.
Mr. Wapping blinked. “I only mentioned it because you are uncharacteristically inattentive.” Then he clearly recollected to whom he was speaking. “Shall we return to the subject? Machiavelli, of course, was a profound strategist, especially when it came to war. He favored an indirect approach, what he called a ‘silken and indirect appeal.’ Of course, he also noted that some situations warrant a blunt and forceful attack.”
Gina smiled weakly and thought dark thoughts about her husband.
“Would you care to recapitulate Sandlefoot’s hypothesis regarding Machiavelli?”
“Not at the moment,” she admitted.
So Wapping did so himself, which was by far his favorite mode of instruction.
She needed a strategy. Nothing came to mind but attack. I’ll go to his room and brain him with the piece of marble, she thought. Blunt, forceful, and effective. The thought made her feel better and she nursed it for the next hour, finally refining her strategy into a plan to brain her husband with the pink Aphrodite. That attack had a silken and indirect resonance that she found immensely soothing.
“Mr. Wapping,” she said, breaking into a learned demolition of Sandlefoot’s conclusions, “what do you know about Aphrodite?”
He broke off with an oddly strangled sound.
“I’m so sorry,” Gina cried. “I did not mean to interrupt you, Mr. Wapping. I am simply concerned about something—”
“Not at all,” he said. “Aphrodite.” He paused, stroked his mustache, and rolled back on his heels. “What would you like to know?”
“She is a married goddess?”
“Exactly. Aphrodite was married to Lord Hephaestus.”
“And was she unfaithful?”
“Homer has it that Aphrodite slept with Ares, god of war, in her husband’s bed. But she had several other lovers, including two mortals, Adonis and Anchises. Is there any particular reason that you wish to know about Aphrodite?”
Gina shook her head. “So Aphrodite is not a very respectable goddess?”
Wapping smiled. He had a rather secret and irritating smile; Gina had noticed it before. “There I would have to agree with you, Your Grace. Aphrodite is the goddess of eros, or physical love, often confused by careless scholars with the Roman goddess Venus. She is not respectable by any means.”
Later Gina sent her apologies downstairs and ate supper in her room. Carola wasn’t eating either. She had declared that she would rather die than sit next to her husband, although she wouldn’t tell Gina what Tuppy had said that drove her to the point of violence. And Gina had no wish to watch Cam smiling at Esme.
She took a leisurely bath and sat in a chair by the fire to tackle a pile of estate papers that had been delivered that afternoon. After an hour or so she took the Aphrodite from its box. The statue certainly was beautiful, in a luscious, depraved type of way.
She was starting—just starting—to relinquish her dream of braining her
husband. He’s not worth it, she told herself. Let him go back to his squalid little island and shape squalid naked statues for the rest of his life.
She was going to be a marchioness and raise hundreds of children who would all have blond hair, gold as the sun, and godlike beauty. Certainly none of them would have unruly hair and snapping black eyes.
When the knock sounded on the door, she hastily stuck the Aphrodite under the ruffled edge of her chair. It was unusual for Annie to return once dismissed, but perhaps she had forgotten something. Gina stood up and turned around, calling out, “Enter.”
The moment she saw who it was her entire body was swept by a wave of sensation that was as hot as flame and as embarrassing as it was hot. She reached up to draw her robe closed over her thin nightrail and realized she’d left it on the bed.
He cleared his throat. For some reason, he sounded almost hoarse. “May I come in?”
There was silence while she contemplated her plan to brain him with the Aphrodite. He looked entirely too endearing and delectable to live. It would be unfair to married women everywhere. She took another swallow of brandy.
“Gina?” he said. “I’m in the hallway. May I come in?”
She stepped back. “If you must,” she said ungraciously. After all, she could hardly inflict bodily harm if her husband and the Aphrodite weren’t in the same room.
It was the kind of tangled reasoning that Il Segretario Machiavelli would have deplored. Chapter Ten of his treatise The Prince spelled it out. One should only consort with the enemy under conditions of extreme caution, given that the danger of secret attack was so great.
Alas, with the tumult of the last few days, the Duchess of Girton hadn’t read past Chapter Five, “The Virtues of the Blunt and Forceful Attack.”
15
A Duchess in Dishabille
Cam told himself that the tentlike effect in the front of his knitted pantaloons was not a concern. Gina was obviously a virgin, given Bonnington’s sense of propriety, and so she likely wouldn’t even know what caused it. If she noticed. Everyone knew that virgins had no practical knowledge of the male physique.