But Gabby looked up at him, her beautiful eyes appealing. “Do you honestly think that Peter wants to kiss me, Quill? The way you do, I mean?”
Quill recoiled. “How the hell do you know what I want?”
Gabby shrugged a little. “You never say much,” she observed. “But you look at me.” She fell silent.
“Every man under the age of ninety was looking at you,” Quill tossed off. “Your gown is designed to make men look at you.”
“When you look at me,” Gabby persisted, “it makes me feel—uneasy.”
“That doesn’t sound very pleasant.” Quill could feel a black cloud descending on his chest.
“It isn’t. I feel as if ants are dancing on my skin.”
“Truly unpleasant,” Quill growled. “I apologize. I shall endeavor not to cause you any further discomfort.” His tone had grown polite and remote.
Gabby frowned. “I’m not describing it correctly. Your look is like your kisses,” she whispered, mortified by her own temerity in speaking such a thing out loud. “They make me feel quivery—here.” She put her hand on her stomach. Her words drifted in a cloud of embarrassment inside the carriage.
She felt a light touch on her ear and turned. Quill had dropped a kiss there and was grinning at her.
“Feel quivery yet?”
“No!” Gabby said indignantly. “Stop funning, Quill! I never should have told you.”
“True,” Quill agreed.
“Peter doesn’t look at me in the same way.”
Quill bit his tongue before he agreed again. Finally he said, “I’m sure that he wants to kiss you, Gabby. Peter is only being mindful of your reputation.” He hoped to God that he was right. And he hoped the opposite as well.
And then…and then Gabby looked up at him with her lovely wide-set eyes, and her look said, Kiss me. Quill smiled.
“Will you always be the one to ask for kisses?” he asked in a casually conversational way, bending over her.
He swallowed her indignant denial with his mouth, stilling her with the fierce sweetness that overcame him every time he looked at Gabby’s lips, every time he saw her eyes shining or heard her husky voice tripping on and on…. He took her mouth, then took her head in his rough hands, shook out those curls, came dangerously close to pulling his own jacket from around her shoulders. But he stopped himself.
What was the state of Gabby’s bodice now? If her bodice was still at her waist, if he would tug off that jacket, only to find creamy flesh…Quill shuddered at the thought and deepened the kiss, turning it to a dangerously passionate entreaty.
Gabby uttered a little moan, a throaty sound, and twisted up against him, her arms sliding around his neck. And the jacket slipped, fell from satiny smooth shoulders, dropped to the carriage seat.
AN HOUR LATER, as he stared blindly at the crumbling ashes on the hearth, Quill could only think that madness had struck him. Yes, he thought, in an inspired sort of way, perhaps he could excuse himself by referring to a sudden fit of insanity. He pictured Peter’s scandalized face. Or perhaps not. It was too late for buying tickets to Persia or the North Pole now.
One does not caress the disrobed figure of one’s future sister-in-law and hope to escape scot-free. Quill just hoped he could talk to Peter about it without going into details. Even remembering that moment—all right, more than one moment—before Quill regained his sanity, made his pantaloons uncomfortably tight and his breathing quicken.
The study door opened quietly.
“Codswallop said you wished to speak to me.”
Quill turned about. Peter had already walked into the study and closed the door behind him.
Before Quill could open his mouth, Peter spoke. “It’s off, Quill.” His voice was defiant. His brown eyes were glowing with anger.
Guilt rolled through Quill’s stomach. He had betrayed his brother, his only brother.
“I’ll admit—”
“I can’t do it,” Peter continued with a fierce vigor that was strange to him. “I won’t do it.”
“Won’t? Won’t do what?”
“I won’t marry that—I won’t marry Gabrielle Jerningham,” Peter managed jerkily. “I thought I could. But she’s—” He broke off again.
Quill saw that Peter was descending into one of his hysterical, sullen sulks, where he could stay for days.
Peter’s bitterness spilled out like acid: “She’s gawky, and overfleshy. And she practically—”
Quill’s breath caught in his chest. “Gabby is not gawky or overfleshy!”
“She is, she is,” Peter moaned, starting to walk restlessly about the room. “She’s a dowdy, Quill, a veritable dowdy. It’s worse than that: She has no instinct, no sense of delicacy. I cannot bear the notion of being tied to her for my entire life. You must not have spent any length of time with her, whereas I escorted her about all evening. God, she talks. She talks like a spigot. I’ve never heard anyone talk so much. I swear to you that my friends Tiddlebend and Folger were silenced, absolutely silenced. Folger made a little joke after she left, told me her manners were absolutely unaffected.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It was clearly a hint to me,” Peter explained. “She’s a gabbleface, and he didn’t want to say it straight out. Thank God Folger wasn’t in the parlor when Gabby lost her bodice.” He broodingly walked over and kicked the burning log in the fireplace. Then he swore and jumped back, his voice rising. “Do you see? Do you see my boot?”
Quill didn’t answer. He never answered that sort of question from Peter.
“I do not wish to marry the woman,” Peter said. “I will not marry her. Father can’t make me marry her, you know.”
“Certainly not,” Quill observed, “given his current condition.”
Peter looked relieved. “I forgot for a moment.” Then he went back to kicking the log, regardless of the built-up soot on his shining boots. “I’ve been thinking about it since you took her home,” he said finally. “I know it shows a lack of propriety in a gentleman to break an engagement. But I am persuaded that I would not be judged too harshly under the circumstances. It’s not that I don’t like Gabby. She’s a pleasant person. Normally I would be quite taken by her. I would even enjoy bringing her in fashion.”
Quill waited.
Peter suddenly looked very young. “But I can’t bear the idea of marrying her. I simply can’t bear the idea of living with a woman like that forever!” His voice was rising again. “I will not marry her! And Father—” He broke off, clearly recalling the viscount’s state of health again.
“When are you going to grow up, Peter?” Quill asked in some disgust. “You act as if you are being sent off to the salt mines.”
“It may be amusing to you,” Peter flashed back, “but it’s hell for me. Fiend seize it, I don’t wish to marry. And now to marry such a fleshy—”
Quill cut him off. “Why don’t you wish to marry, Peter? You must have expected to wed at some point, didn’t you?”
Peter had turned back to the fireplace. He was leaning against the bricks, his head propped up by his arm. He seemed to be watching his shining boot as it grew more and more encrusted with black ash.
“Even if I thought I could go along with Father’s scheme to match me to an heiress,” he said, “I’ve found that I don’t give a hang about money. I’ll starve! I’ll—I’ll start trading in stocks, the way you do.”
Quill shuddered visibly at the thought of Peter speculating on the market.
“Oh, stow it!” Peter shouted. “When am I ever consulted about anything? When did you last ask my advice? Never! I can assess quality just as well as you can, Quill. I may have spent my time in a different way, but I am extremely successful at what I do!”
Quill walked across the room and stood next to his brother. It was true that their six years’ difference in age tended to cast Peter’s achievements in the shade.
“Father would be mortified if you began speculating on the market,” he said. “
He only allows me to do so because I am lame and so he doesn’t think of me as an able Dewland. And he consults me about the estate because he doesn’t want me to feel like a burden.”
“Who cares if Father thinks you’re lame? He consults you about the smallest thing to do with the estate. He never speaks to me about anything.”
Quill opened his mouth and shut it again. “Father doesn’t mean to disregard your opinion.” God, what an evening. He seemed to have spent the whole night making weak excuses for the behavior of family members. “Stop kicking that log, Peter. Rinsible will go into apoplectic arrest when he sees your boots.”
“Rinsible can go hang!” Peter said, consigning his dearly beloved valet to the dark depths.
But there was something that Quill still needed to know. “I don’t understand, Peter. Why don’t you wish to be married—to another woman, if not to Gabby?”
For a second, he thought his little brother hadn’t heard him. But then Peter turned his head and looked at him, that familiar face white, his curls tossed as if he’d been in a high wind.
Then he knew that Peter had heard his question. And suddenly Quill understood something he had certainly known, without thinking, all along.
Peter acted as if the question had never been posed. He leaned his forehead against the arm he had draped on the mantelpiece. “I’ll go to America,” he said, his voice half stifled.
“I’ll marry her,” Quill said quietly.
But Peter was too absorbed in his own misery to hear him. “I thought perhaps—but I cannot do it, Quill. I’ll kill myself first.”
“I will marry Gabby,” Quill repeated.
Peter dropped his examination of the undoubtedly ruined boot and swung about so quickly that he almost unbalanced. “You! That’s impossible.”
“Actually, it is quite possible.”
“Father said—Father—you said that you were unfit for marriage,” Peter stammered, “that you couldn’t consummate it.”
Quill could feel an errant and mysterious cheer rising in his heart. He felt like laughing aloud. Peter’s mouth had actually fallen open. “I can consummate a marriage,” Quill explained. “And I would enjoy doing so.”
Peter gaped. “You would?”
“I like Gabby’s flesh.” Quill couldn’t stop himself from grinning, an unfamiliar but not unpleasant sensation. “I like her, too. Of course,” Quill pointed out, “if I marry and Gabby has a child, you would never become a viscount.”
Peter’s face grew stony. “That is the most offensive thing you have ever said to me.” His body was rigid.
The smile fell from Quill’s face. “I didn’t mean it as it sounded, Peter. I know you are no title-hound.”
Peter still looked bleak. “You told me to marry Gabby so that I would have money for clothes. I was drunk at the time, but I remembered it clear enough the next day. You and Father both think I’m nothing but a fribble. In fact, Father is incapable of distinguishing between a man of mode and a mindless fop!”
“That would imply that we ignored your First in Classics from Cambridge, Peter. I was trying to make you fall in with Father’s scheme so that I wouldn’t have to be married,” Quill admitted. “I apologize.”
“Why did you tell us that you were unfit for marriage?” Peter asked bluntly. “You know what Father assumed. Was that a lie?”
“It isn’t so far from the truth,” Quill admitted. “My sexual encounters of the past few years have been entirely enjoyable, but followed by a three-day bout of migraine headache.”
“Oh.” Peter’s face was shocked into sympathy. “Your headaches are due to that? Can’t the doctors do anything for you?”
Quill shrugged. “It seems to be a remnant of the head injury. It might go away spontaneously, but likely not.”
“That’s the devil. But if you marry Gabby …” Peter said. “Well, how are you going to marry Gabby?” He looked discomforted. “I could be wrong, but I’m fairly certain that she has a penchant for me.”
“Oh, she fancies herself in love with you,” Quill replied cheerfully.
“Well, then, how will you change her mind? We can’t tell her that I refused to go through with the wedding.”
Quill stopped himself from inquiring what Peter had been planning to tell his fiancée when he left for America. “She’s a romantic,” he said. “She’s a storyteller. Half the time she’s dreaming up some improbable tale.”
“You don’t have much in common,” Peter remarked dubiously.
Quill shrugged again. “It’s only a marriage. I’ll tell her I fell in love with her at first sight. The moment I saw her on the dock. And I’ll tell her that my passion is too great to ignore.”
“Do you think she’ll believe it?” Peter’s tone indicated acute disbelief.
In Quill’s estimation, Gabby was well-aware that his self-control was at the breaking point, given the recent carriage ride. “She’s a romantic,” he repeated.
Peter bit his lip. “I feel like a shabster, passing her off like that.”
“Only because you don’t want her,” Quill pointed out. “I’m perfectly willing to marry Gabby. And clearly marriage between the two of you would be a disaster.”
“What will we tell Father and Mother?”
“We’ll give them the same story I’ll tell Gabby. That I fell hopelessly in love and couldn’t—”
“No one is going to believe that tarradiddle,” Peter broke in. “Gabby might, since she doesn’t know you, but no one else will.”
“I don’t see why not.”
Peter smirked, a little brother’s smile. “Forget it, Quill. No one in his right mind would ever picture you in love. Why, you never even get angry. Men in love are hopelessly irrational, you know. Remember how Patrick Foakes behaved when he fell in love with Lady Sophie York? He was the picture of a lovelorn mooncalf.”
“Patrick seemed perfectly rational to me.”
Peter snorted. “You do remember that Foakes stole his wife from his own best friend, don’t you? The word was that he demanded to have the marriage a mere week after Lady Sophie broke her engagement. Of course her parents scotched that plan. But believe me, in the fortnight before they married, everywhere you turned you were sure to find Foakes stealing kisses from his betrothed. The man acted as if he were deranged. He showed no self-restraint whatsoever. Let alone respect for the rest of us!” Peter looked properly appalled.
Quill quite liked the idea of stealing kisses from Gabby. “I can certainly kiss Gabby in public, if that’s what it takes to prove that I’m in love.”
Peter gave a little shudder of distaste. “I could never do it myself. Why, just this evening she—” He broke off.
“She told me,” Quill drawled. “Gabby wanted to kiss you and you refused.”
“Well, for God’s sake,” Peter snapped. “The door to the balcony was wide open. She simply pitched herself into my arms. Tiddlebend was looking right at us. I was like to die from mortification.”
Quill grinned. “I’ll be sure to inform my intended bride that she is not allowed to kiss other men in public.”
“Thank God for small favors,” Peter muttered. He had gone back to kicking logs. “Are you certain, Quill? Because you’ll have to keep up the farce, you know. You will have to play lovesick for at least three months, since it will destroy Gabby’s reputation if you marry in haste.”
“Absolutely.” Quill turned and walked to the door. “I shall inform Miss Jerningham of my, er, my hopeless adoration for her at breakfast.”
“At breakfast! You will do no such thing! You don’t have a romantic bone in your body, Quill. She’ll smell a rat in a moment.”
Quill paused and gave his brother a look of polite inquiry. “Why?”
“Because no one—not even Patrick Foakes—could fix an interest at the breakfast table!”
Quill had an enlivening conviction that he himself would happily brush aside the coddled eggs and make love to Gabby on the table itself, but there was no reason t
o elaborate the point.
“You must wait until after supper,” Peter declared. “We shall have to serve champagne, lots of champagne. Wait until she’s properly muddled, Quill. That way Gabby won’t be in a position to think rationally about what you’re saying.”
“I think Gabby should be sober when I ask her to marry me,” Quill suggested mildly.
“No. If she’s not drunk, she’ll never fall for the idea that you’re in love.” Peter said it with total conviction. “Once she’s half-seas over, you can launch your story, and perhaps she’ll believe you.”
“Hmmm,” Quill said. He opened the door to the hallway.
“Quill!” Peter’s voice was shrill with urgency.
“I shall take your suggestion into advisement,” Quill replied gravely.
He had no intention of making Gabby dizzy with drink before asking her to marry him. As he had said, Gabby was a romantic. He had the shrewd idea that she had talked herself into falling in love with Peter, and she could just as easily talk herself into falling in love with him. Anyway, telling her barefaced lies about being in love was bad enough; he didn’t want to compound his sins by drinking his future bride under the table.
It had been a long night. His leg was throbbing now, and he had a perceptible limp as he climbed the stairs.
Still, as he passed the door to the Blue Room, Quill only barely stopped himself from turning the door handle and walking in. Into Gabby’s bedchamber. The bedchamber where he would be master in just a few months. Quill shook himself like a dog emerging from a puddle. He could wait.
It wasn’t until six in the morning that Quill came to a realization: His assumption that he would be able to wait for three months before entering Gabby’s bedchamber was dangerously shaky.
Part of the problem was that moment when his coat had fallen from Gabby’s shoulders and he had swept his hands down her back. Down that beautiful, smooth, naked stretch of skin. He had brought his hands in a slow and dreamy dance around to her front. And only then had Quill allowed himself to draw back from Gabby’s lips and look at what he held.
Now desire rocketed down his body, shocked him awake again and again, filled him with the conviction that he—no less than the besotted Patrick Foakes with his Lady Sophie—could not wait three months to marry Gabby. He could not wait a week to touch Gabby’s satiny skin, the silk of her shoulders, let his hands drift lower, and lower still.