“We are not mere girls,” Esme announced. “I have complete faith that any of us could usher a defenseless male into our bed without undue exertion. And that includes you,” she said, giving Helene a stern look.
“What will I say when he enters the room? Oh, I couldn’t!” Carola cried. “I forgot about his valet.”
“We’ll bribe his valet,” Esme stated. “With no valet, he’ll have to undress himself. All of Lady Troubridge’s guest chambers look precisely the same.” She nodded toward Carola’s heavily curtained bed. “He won’t even know you’re there until he’s unclothed and in bed.”
“But then what will I say to him?”
“Nothing,” Gina put in.
“Nothing?” Carola’s eyes were big.
Gina’s smile was full of mischief. “Nothing at all.”
Esme looked at her with admiration. “You are changing before my very eyes, Ambrogina Serrard. Whatever happened to your duchesslike facade?”
“Duchesses grow accustomed to saying nothing when the occasion calls for it.”
“So I gather,” Esme replied, twinkling.
“All right,” Carola said, bowing to the weight of necessity.
“I’ll do it.”
“Good. I shall instruct my maid to bribe his valet. And then we”—Esme cast a glance at Gina and Helene—“shall detain Lord Perwinkle in the ballroom until the right moment.”
“What moment?” Carola asked.
“Eleven o’clock. We won’t allow him to leave before that, Carola. So you must be snugly in his bed by then.”
“I have to ask you all to excuse me,” Gina said, casting a hasty look at the mantel clock and rising.
“Why so?” Helene said. “I was hoping you would take a ride with me.”
“I said I would meet Cam in the library this afternoon,” Gina said, with just a trace of self-consciousness in her voice.
“Oh,” Esme chortled. “The handsome husband!”
“He’s not my husband,” Gina retorted. “Well, he is, but not for long. I have promised to explain Bicksfiddle’s letters to him. Cam is going to take over management of the estate.”
“Well, that’s an improvement!” Esme said. “Perhaps he’s finally leaving the ranks of childhood.”
“That’s not fair,” Gina protested. “Living in Greece, Cam had no idea how much work the estate can be.”
Helene touched her on the wrist and said in her light, clear voice, “but how splendid of him to take over the work the moment he realized.”
“Humph,” Esme snorted. “If I were you, I’d keep that husband of yours on a tight leash. He’ll give all that work back if you give him the smallest encouragement.”
“I shall miss it,” Gina admitted. “You know I enjoy it. How am I going to fill my day? Sebastian tells me that he has two excellent estate managers.”
“Trust the marquess to have two when one would do,” Esme snapped. “I suspect you won’t have time for doing estate work. It will take you all day just to live up to Bonnington’s expectations of fair ladyhood.”
Gina took up her gloves. “I shall leave, Esme, before we exchange words. I will see you all for supper, I hope.”
After she was gone, Helene looked at Esme with some concern. “Why so sharp, dearest?”
Esme bit her lip. “I’m a pig, aren’t I?”
“Not quite that dreadful.”
“I’m consumed with jealousy these days,” Esme burst out. “I feel like a five-year-old visiting someone else’s nursery. I desperately want everyone else’s beaux, and I don’t want my own.”
“I don’t remember Gina’s husband,” Helene said. “I believe I met him before he left, but I was a mere child. Is he so handsome?”
“It’s not the duke,” Esme replied.
Helene reached over and touched Esme’s cheek. “Poor duck,” she said.
“I’d give you Tuppy if you wanted him,” Carola said damply.
Esme giggled. “Then we’d be a proper mess, wouldn’t we? Tuppy chasing after Gina’s trout, and you and I both chasing after Tuppy!”
Helene stood up. “Shall we go for a ride? My mare arrived this morning, and I’m eager to take her out. Carola?”
She looked up from woeful contemplation of her handkerchief. “I couldn’t.”
“You could,” Helene said firmly. “You will be unfit for the evening if you mope around your chamber all day.”
Carola swallowed. “Every time I think about this evening, I feel ill,” she whispered.
“Let’s go for a ride. I shall work off my evil temper, and Carola will lose the doldrums, and Helene will stay her calm self…” Esme grinned impishly. “Someday you will behave as nitwitted as the rest of us, Helene, and I shall be there to crow over you.”
She smiled. “Not I.”
Gina entered the library with the firm conviction that there would be no more dalliance with her husband. Enough was enough. The mortifying truth was that she found Cam’s kisses nearly irresistible. But she hadn’t spent the majority of her life waiting to be a real wife, to be part of a real family, only to fall prey to a few kisses. The idea of going back to Girton House by herself while her husband sailed away chilled her blood. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t live that lonely, duchess-life without a husband or children even a day longer. She wanted the things Sebastian offered: a family, stability, faithfulness, and love.
After all, she’d seen many a marriage begin with passion and end with nothing. Helene and her husband were a good example. When they were both young girls, she’d been green with envy after Helene ran away to Gretna Green with a handsome nobleman. Gina nourished that envy for at least a year, until the countess moved out of her husband’s house and he promptly replaced her with a bevy of Russian singers.
Cam was waiting for her at the long table. There was a streak of chalk on his temple.
“Have you been drawing again?” she asked.
He nodded. “It was a fine morning. I have an idea or two for Stephen’s marble.” But he didn’t say anything more, and Gina felt hesitant about asking. After all, he was sculpting Esme. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to know.
Cam took the stack of papers she had brought. “Inquiries from Bicksfiddle?”
She nodded. “Some of them he simply forwards. Others he writes himself. I’ve sorted them into piles.” She lifted off a good third of the stack. “These are questions to do with land improvement and farming, these have to do with the house itself, and the last are a motley assortment.”
“Let’s do the motley ones first,” Cam said. He held out a chair for her, sat down, and picked up a letter. “Why does he want to trim the hedges? Why not simply let them grow?”
“The fields are separated by hedges,” Gina explained, “and if they are to be negotiated by fox hunters, they must be jumpable.”
Cam scowled. “Who hunts our land?”
Gina raised her eyebrow. “You?”
“I do not hunt!”
“Oh. Your father was—”
“I know,” he said, a tired note to his voice. “My father was a great hunter. Enjoyed it even more if he could trample someone’s kitchen garden while pursuing a small wild creature. Have the hedges been kept at a jumpable height?”
Gina hesitated for a second and then said, very collectedly, “I allowed the hedges to grow after your father was bedridden in 1802. Bicksfiddle greatly disapproves, and therefore he issues an annual plea that we trim the hedges.”
His smile made her blink and she quickly pulled forward the next sheet. “These are the plans for the harvest dinner in the village.”
“I don’t remember a harvest dinner,” Cam said.
“Well, 1803 was a terrible harvest year,” Gina said. “So I instituted the dinner. And,” she added firmly, “I opened the forest for gaming as well. I’m afraid that Bicksfiddle will complain about that rather bitterly when you see him next.”
“Why would he bother one way or the other?”
“B
icksfiddle has firm ideas of the ducal role,” Gina explained. “He particularly disliked it when I let the gamekeepers go. But really, there was no point to retaining them, given that I had no intention of allowing hunting parties on our land.”
Cam’s lopsided smile made her feel warm to her toes. “Let me guess,” he said, putting a finger on her nose for an instant. “The gamekeepers left in 1802, which just happens to be the year my father was bedridden.”
The intimacy of the situation was unnerving Gina. She could feel a little flush rise up her cheeks. “Let’s begin with the house,” she said.
Cam looked at her for a moment, and then nodded. “Of course.”
And so they sat side by side, the duke and duchess, and worked their way through a large stack of papers. At some point, a footman brought them tea; they kept working. Finally Cam stood up and stretched. “Lord Almighty, Gina, my back is breaking. We’ll have to return to it tomorrow.”
She looked up, surprised to find that the thin ribbons of sunlight coming through the library’s mullioned windows had long since faded.
“I still cannot believe that the household consumes so much oil,” Cam remarked. “Six hundred gallons seems excessive.”
“There are a great many oil lamps,” Gina pointed out. “We could consider putting in gas lamps in the town house, I suppose. The banqueting rooms at Brighton Pavilion are being fitted for gas, but what if it explodes? Someone told me that gas is terribly dangerous.”
“I know nothing about it,” he said.
“What do you use for light in Greece?”
“Candles…the sun…the skin of a beautiful woman.” He bent down and kissed her cheek, so swiftly that she hardly felt the imprint of his lips.
Gina looked down at her hands for a moment. She’d managed to get an inkstain on her wrist. “Cam,” she said quietly, “we must stop this—behavior.”
He turned around from where he was standing, surveying Lady Troubridge’s books. “What behavior?”
“Kissing.”
“Ah, but I like to kiss you,” said her reprobate husband.
Gina shivered. That would result in a lonely bed, tending to all of Bicksfiddle’s letters while her husband bathed in the Greek ocean. She looked away, tightening her lips against the sight of him.
But he was moving, pulling her to her feet. “Gina,” he said, and his voice was deep and full of passion. He kissed her just at the corner of her mouth, and her whole body trembled. “Gina,” he said. “May I accompany you to your chamber?”
She trembled in his hands like a bird caught on its first flight. He trailed kisses down her high cheekbones. “I want you,” he said, in a voice burnished and dark, a voice that spoke of laughter, irresponsibility, naked statues, and the Greek sun.
It was all wound up in Gina’s mind: the statues, the naked women, his Marissa waiting for him—
She pushed his hands away. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips trembling, but her voice was firm. “That is not a good idea.”
His face became instantly guarded and casual. “Why not? We could both find pleasure without anyone being the wiser.”
Her eyes were scornful. “You would like to take pleasure, and leave without injury. That’s just like you, Cam.”
“I don’t see anything wrong with it.” He fought to keep his temper.
“Perhaps there isn’t anything wrong,” she said, “from your point of view.”
“That’s quite a little moralistic statement.” His voice was cruelly polite. “May I remind you, lady wife, that I have had every opportunity, and legal right, to take your body wherever I please? But I have chosen to ignore the signs of your oh-so-willing character, although I have had the distinct impression—”
She interrupted. Duchesses never interrupt, but this one was losing all claims to dignity. She was rosy with pure embarrassment. “I enjoy kissing you.” Her voice shook. “I enjoy the way you, the way you…”
He stared at her, silenced by her truthfulness.
“But you’re just talking about pleasure, not anything else,” she continued, meeting his eyes.
“What more do you want?” he asked, genuinely bewildered.
“I am twenty-three years old. I want to live with my husband and have children together, which is not an unreasonable request. What you offer is pleasure alone. You are too good at ignoring unpleasant truths, such as the fact that you’ve had a wife sitting at home for twelve years while you dallied with your Greek mistress.”
Cam frowned. “You never said that you cared about where I was. You never asked me to come home until you requested an annulment.”
“And would you have returned, had I asked?” She waited but there was no answer.
“Would you have given up Marissa, had I asked?”
He just looked at her, jaw set.
“I believe that marrying is not in your nature.”
Cam had always said he wasn’t the marrying kind. He had made a joke of being the earliest-married among the never-meant-to-be-married. But he didn’t like the prickling feeling it gave him when Gina pointed out his unsuitability.
He rallied quickly, the veteran of a thousand unpleasant family battles. “None of this started with a question of marriage,” he remarked, deliberately pulling down his sleeves and readjusting his jacket. “It is merely a question of desire. Since you are honest, I shall be as well. I want you, Gina.”
He walked a step closer and stared down at her. “I want to plunge inside you.”
She looked away to escape the intensity in his black eyes. He forced her chin back up. “And you want the same from me.” She didn’t answer, unable to balance the scorching glow in her belly and the shrinking humiliation of hearing such a thing said out loud.
“Desire is a normal, human emotion,” he said. “I can certainly understand if you would rather experience it with your future husband than with me.”
It didn’t take a genius to realize that she and Sebastian would never share anything of the sort.
“But there is no need to insult me. As an eighteen-year-old, I did not indicate a wish to marry you, Gina. If I ever have a real wife, a wife I myself chose, I will not leave her for twelve years, nor take a mistress, for that matter. It is not fair to criticize me for breaking vows dictated by my father.”
He let his hand drop.
She felt a wave of shame so profound it was as if she’d been dipped in hot water. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for. We’re both victims of my father, two of the many.”
Gina looked at him and knew, in that instant, that she loved him. He stood in the last rays of dying sunlight and there was chalk in his hair. He stood smiling that lopsided smile of his, and she wanted nothing more than to hold out her arms and say: Come. Come kiss me. Come love me. Take me to your chamber.
The words wavered on her lips but she couldn’t say them.
He met her eyes. “Marissa is married to a nice fisherman,” he said. “She was my mistress, but I danced at her wedding some three years ago. We had an enjoyable time but our friendship was of no great consequence to either of us.”
“Oh,” she breathed. And she knew that what mattered was love, her love for him. Not the future: the present.
He had her hands again. “I have no right to ask. But may I…may we…” He didn’t seem to know what he meant, or how to phrase it. He cleared his throat and put out his elbow. “I will be a sometime husband, Gina. But I would like to be yours. May I escort you to your chambers?”
Gina took a deep breath.
“I believe you may,” she said. Her voice was faint but clear.
He looked at her for a moment and then bent his head and kissed her. Gina’s whole body sang at his touch. He turned and wrapped an arm around her waist, and they walked toward the library doors.
25
In Which Mr. Finkbottle Proves
Himself a Worthy Employee
Phineas Finkbottle was not having a pleasa
nt evening. It was very kind of Lady Troubridge to invite him to the house party, and goodness knows he needed ready access to the duke and duchess if he were to carry out Mr. Rounton’s instructions. But how the devil was he supposed to ensure that the duke and duchess remain married? He had spent the morning shut in his room, miserably aware that he ought to be talking the duchess out of an annulment. Except the duchess was so very duchesslike. He couldn’t imagine bringing up the subject of whom she should or should not marry. At any rate, after yesterday, when he walked into the library and saw the duke kissing his wife, he was hopeful that the man would take care of the matter himself.
Still, it was better to sit glumly in his room than sit silently at the supper before dancing. The three elderly ladies to whose table a footman had escorted him responded to his introduction with the briefest of nods and turned back among themselves with a little titter. He ate wafers of ham and thought loathful thoughts about Mr. Rounton. If the man wanted his clients to fall in bed together, why the devil couldn’t he arrange it himself? Phineas’s ears grew a little pink even thinking about it. The duke was at least ten years older than he, and far more sophisticated and experienced. He could hardly urge the man to visit his wife’s bedroom. His skin crawled at the very thought.
The ladies’ conversation drifted into his thoughts.
“Indeed, my dears,” said an elderly woman named Lady Wantlish, “I can tell you quite honestly that her tears were soon dissipated. Why, I believe she mourned the man for all of a fortnight, if that!”
Phineas sighed. He was discomfited by the fact that the ladies ignored him, and mortified by the realization that they were right to do so. He wasn’t dressed in the first stare of fashion. He was only a solicitor, even if his father was a gentleman. Worse, he didn’t know a soul at the party except for his clients and his hostess.
“They were in the conservatory together for at least two hours!” shrilled the plump woman named Mrs. Flockhart, to his right. “Two hours, my dears. I had it on the best authority. There are those who say that her mother locked the door until enough time had passed. Her father demanded satisfaction, of course.”