But he had caught something in her voice, or her eyes, now.
“No,” he said suddenly. “I will not allow it.”
“I will not allow anything else.”
They stared at each other for a moment.
“You know nothing about me,” he finally said hoarsely. “My mother—”
“I look forward to meeting her.”
“You will never meet my mother. My mother was a kept mistress to the duke for years. And I am no secretly illegitimate child, as Mary will be. Everyone knows my parentage. You would be ruined to even—to even—”
“Yes,” she said, smiling at him. “I suppose so.”
“No!” he said again.
Men were so foolish. She’d always thought so, and thus she’d never been able to bring herself to feel any affection for one of the poor creatures. So how did it happen that she had fallen head over heels in love with this one, who was showing just as much blind stubbornness as the rest of his gender?
She put her palm to his cheek. It was an angular cheek, a strong sweep of slightly prickled beard under her fingers. He was everything she ever wanted: a true scholar, a person with whom she could talk for hours, a man who made her blood race.
“As far as I can see there is only one no about it,” she told him, her fingers clinging to his cheek.
“I can see a hundred,” he said harshly, obviously determined to hold his ground, like that silly bulldog her father had owned.
“You don’t like Shakespeare,” she said. “It’s a grave fault.”
“Don’t play with me.” He growled it.
“I’m not playing,” she said, smiling more brilliantly than she had ever smiled before. “I’m taking you, Gabriel Spenser. I’m claiming you. I’m marrying you. I’m—”
But he broke into her thoroughly arrogant list by trying to leave, so she had to kiss him again. And then she found herself backed against the wall, and his fingers raked into her hair. A while later there was a smile in his somber eyes, and Gillian knew without asking that she was the only one in the world who had seen that particular smile.
“I shan’t take you,” he said, belying the smile.
“I’ll build a willow cabin at your gate.”
“My house is in Cambridge,” he said, adding “more than a few people would see you. And they do not know Shakespeare as well as you do.”
“Shakespeare’s heroine threatens to sing love songs in the middle of the night. It will ruin your scholarly reputation.” She said it with relish.
“I have no reputation.”
“You have your own reputation,” and she said it gently, because he so obviously needed to be told. “That of a brilliant scholar and a man of honor. A man who loves his daughter and will do anything for her, even going against his own instincts and introducing himself to a distant family member, a duke who knew nothing of his existence.”
“Shakespeare’s hero was not such a fool as I, to go where he should not have been welcomed.”
She felt as if her smile were warming both of them from the inside out. “Rafe welcomed you.”
“I took advantage of his hospitality to court you.”
“Were you courting me?” she asked with some curiosity. “I thought you were merely passing time by kissing me.”
“I most certainly was not courting you,” he said, reversing himself. “I would never ruin your life in that fashion.”
She put on a mournful face. “I suppose I will go back to my first plan.”
“And that is?” he asked warily.
“To marry Rafe, of course. Why, Imogen and I planned it quite carefully: she is to have an affaire with you, and I am to marry your brother.”
He made a sound in his throat that sounded dangerously like a growl.
“If I have your assessment correctly, you think that I should marry an appropriate aristocrat, no? Why not Rafe? After all—” and her voice stilled—“if I can’t have you, Gabe, I don’t suppose I will care very much. Rafe and I will have a wonderful time…do you suppose he has read Shakespeare?”
“At some point.”
“Philosophers? Because I was very interested to read of the new manuscript of Plato’s dialogues that the Bodleian Library just acquired.”
“We are negotiating to acquire a twelfth-century manuscript of the Discourses of Epictetus.”
“Do you suppose that Rafe knows that?”
He shook his head.
“Perhaps I can learn to talk about horses. Did you know that I’m afraid of riding?”
He shook his head again.
“I’m a paltry rider, and horses dislike me. Do you suppose that might impinge on Rafe’s and my happiness once we were married?”
“You could learn,” he said, feeling as a drowning man does when the water closes over his head.
“Yes,” she said. Then she came closer, right up to his body, and looked up at his face, his dear face. “I will learn to kiss him…the way you taught me?”
He seemed to be struggling to say something, or perhaps to hold his tongue.
She didn’t allow herself to smile. Instead, she ran her hands up the muscled planes of his chest. “I’ll learn to enjoy talk of horses and stables; I’ll forget that I was ever interested in Shakespeare and philosophy; I will learn to kiss Rafe the way you kiss me…” That last part trailed off in an aching whisper because his hands had closed on her waist.
“You’ll be the death of me,” he said. But he sounded resigned, and her heart sped up.
“Yes,” she whispered, and then, her eyes on him, “no?”
“They call it a petit mort,” he said, and his mouth came down on hers.
32
A Chapter for Which Brazen Jokes About Holes Would Be Appropriate (But Your Author Refrains)
Imogen was going to be late for rehearsal. She had fallen asleep after luncheon and had a delicious set of dreams in which masked men with huge mustaches did various delightful things to her, while she weakly said “no,” and then, “yes.”
All of which concluded with Imogen waking up and dressing, aware of a not uncomfortable but quite new feeling between her legs. It was a funny feeling. A rather—
She wrenched her mind away, ran down the stairs, and began to rush along the corridor toward the theater. But just as she neared the end, a deep voice suddenly said: “Imogen!”
She turned around. “Yes?” And then in a circle. There was no door from which someone could have spoken to her. And yet—she whirled back. One of the painted panels that lined the corridor was ajar. Apparently that was a door, a secret door.
No one emerged.
“Come here.” It was unmistakably the grave, low voice of Mr. Spenser. Imogen bit back a grin. Suddenly she knew precisely why she was rushing toward the ballroom, and it had very little to do with whether she was at the rehearsal precisely on time.
“Yes?” she said, walking toward the wall cautiously.
Silence. But the painting was ajar.
She reached out and opened the slender panel, but she didn’t have time to peer inside. His arms scooped her up and backwards, and his mouth was on hers. Her eyes fell shut, and she melted against him as if no time had passed between the night and this kiss. It was as if they had both been simmering all day and burst into flame at the same moment.
When she opened her eyes they were in thick, warm darkness. His mouth was tracing fire on her neck, his hands shaping her breast almost roughly, thumb rubbing across her nipple so that she gasped and forgot her own questions, which had to do with the dark—
But he knew. “It’s the priest’s hole,” he said, his voice rasping.
She couldn’t see anything, and neither one of them wanted to. This was about feeling: the rasp of his beard across her skin, the silk of her hair on his fingers. The weight of her breast in his hand, and the way she squeaked when he suckled. The softness of her skin and the shaping of his fingers. The muscles in his legs when her hands dropped that low, and the way he trembled when she dropped kis
ses: bolder here, in the darkness, with the memory of the night before between them. The priest’s hole was like the Horse and Groom inn, apart from the world.
By the time he poised himself over her, she was sobbing, pulling him closer with all her strength, wrapping her legs around his body. And when he came to her, she closed her eyes against even the dark, so that her whole body focused on the way he was surging into her, the way her body was melting around him, the way—
“Oh God!” she choked.
He bent his head to kiss her just at the moment when she almost blurted out something fantastical, something about love.
But he was kissing her, and the words got lost in her throat as her body clutched his, feeling him ride higher and harder, increasing her pleasure, driving her higher…until a groan burst from his lips, and he surged against her one last time.
And then he brought all his rough, silky hair into the curve of her shoulder, and she wound her arms around him.
33
A Chapter Including a Performance…or Two
It wasn’t that Rafe strutted into the theater. He would never do such a thing, even after dispatching his future wife back to her bedchamber for a nap (and carefully waiting a good period of time before stepping out of the priest’s hole himself, so that she didn’t catch sight of him).
He’d done it. She was his, bought, signed, and paid for. She had sighed, there in the warm dark, after they lay together a few minutes, and said, “I never even thought.” That was all, but it was enough.
She might not think to marry Rafe, but she was intoxicated by Gabe. Or by who she thought Gabe was. All he had to do was reveal his true self, and she would say yes.
The stage was teeming with people. Gillian Pythian-Adams was darting everywhere at once. “There you are!” she cried, when she saw Rafe. “Where’s Imogen?”
“Terrible headache,” he said promptly. “She’ll be here as soon as she can.”
She hesitated for a moment, and then nodded, turning to answer a burly groundsman who wanted to know where to place the potted shrubs.
Rafe strolled onto the stage with a remarkable sense of well-being. All he had to do was get through the weekend’s performance of Man of Mode, kick the guests out of his house, and then tell Imogen that she was marrying him.
I never…He could hear her soft voice in his mind, and the very memory made him stiff as a board.
“Mr. Dorimant, Mr. Medley,” Miss Pythian-Adams said.
“Here!”
“We’ll start now, if you please.”
Rafe dropped into the seat before a dressing table taken from the old green chamber on the third floor. Miss Pythian-Adams was pushing Mr. Medley, otherwise known as Gabe, into place beside him. Rafe was to sit next to his dressing table, lazily leafing through a book, while his friend Mr. Medley sprawled in a chair.
Gabe wasn’t much of a sprawler; Rafe could have told Miss Pythian-Adams that.
Two minutes later, he could have told the world that Gabe was a terrible actor as well. He sounded like a scholar, reciting the lines of a rake. It was almost humorous. Rafe amused himself by wondering if he could play Medley, as Gabe playing Medley. After all, he did a good job of stealing Gabe’s voice.
“No, no,” Miss Pythian-Adams said with anguish, for the fortieth time. “Mr. Spenser, you really must try to relax.”
Rafe narrowed his eyes. Gabe was laughing at Miss Pythian-Adams…they…they couldn’t! If Imogen caught the glance that just passed between those two, she would think Gabe was truly a Dorimant—sleeping with Belinda while he courted a young lady—or she would know instantly that he, Rafe, had tricked her.
And he wasn’t ready to tell that yet.
Suddenly he realized that he had to make love to her…oh perhaps once or twice more. Enough so that he was absolutely certain that she wouldn’t refuse him, once she found out who was under the mustache.
Miss Pythian-Adams ran off to talk to Griselda, who had a query about Act Three, instructing Rafe and Gabe over her shoulder to practice their lines. “Please, teach your brother how to relax,” she told Rafe.
“Relax,” Rafe growled, and then bent over, pulling Gabe by the sleeve. “What the devil are you doing, smiling at Miss Pythian-Adams like that?”
Gabe didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. “I’m going to marry her,” he said simply. “Even though I shouldn’t—”
Rafe cut him off. “You can’t go around looking at her like that! Imogen will see you.”
Gabe looked at him.
“Yes, I am still wearing the mustache,” Rafe hissed.
“And that means that you, dear brother, are engaged in an affaire at the same time that you are courting Miss Pythian-Adams! If you weren’t such an appalling actor, I’d say you should be Dorimant, not I.”
“Ah, but it is in fact you who are Dorimant,” Gabe pointed out. “After all, you are having an affaire. And you are courting a young lady at the same time. If Imogen doesn’t happen to know that she is the object of both kinds of attention, it would be hardly polite for me to point it out.”
“Exactly! So you must stop looking at our stage manager in such a besotted fashion.”
“I will do my best,” Gabe said tranquilly. “Would you like to run through the rest of the scene?”
“No. I know the play, and no amount of practice is going to turn you into anything but a professor masquerading as a rake.”
“Whereas you are a rake masquerading as a professor?”
Rafe scowled at him.
“When do you think to reveal the truth of your charade?”
Miss Pythian-Adams flitted back to them, and Rafe almost groaned aloud. So much for Gabe keeping his secrets to himself. His eyes said everything, and what’s more, Miss Pythian-Adams got a little pink every time she looked at him.
“It’s not a charade,” he said the moment Miss Pythian-Adams was called away again. “I shall tell her—soon.”
“Why not immediately?”
Rafe opened his mouth, and stopped. He couldn’t tell her. Didn’t Gabe see that? She wasn’t entranced enough yet, not enough to look over what he was…what he had been. “I’m not ready,” he said shortly.
“Are you afraid that she will refuse to marry you?”
“Any sane woman would.”
Gabe’s eyebrow went up. “A duke with an estate and—”
“Imogen knows me. She’s seen me drunk time and again. She knows precisely what a hopeless excuse of a duke I am.”
Miss Pythian-Adams darted up, and somehow they found themselves launching into Act Two. They bumbled through the play. Rafe didn’t fool himself that it was going to be a wonderful performance. That actress of Gabe’s, Loretta Hawes, was brilliant. When she was on the stage, the play took flight.
After an hour or so, Imogen walked in, with apologies for her delay. A while later, Rafe had to say that the little barbed exchanges between Dorimant (himself) and the pert young lady he was courting (Imogen) went pretty well too.
Miss Pythian-Adams seemed happy. It was dark before they finished the rehearsal, and she looked flushed and exhausted, but triumphant.
Gabe turned to him, just as the cast was leaving the stage. “You’re quite good at playing someone else. Anyone would think you were making a practice of it.”
Rafe’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to be thinking about fratricide quite often.
“It’s quite wonderful,” Miss Pythian-Adams’s mother declared from the front row, where she had been knitting all afternoon. “You’re far better than that mingle-mangle of a Shakespeare play Lady Bedfordshire put on last season.”
Of course, Miss Pythian-Adams couldn’t stop herself from smiling at Gabe when she heard this, but luckily Rafe nipped Imogen around and had her out of the room before she noticed.
The theater was bursting with guests who’d come from London and the surrounding counties. They sounded like a crowd of self-important bees, more curious about who didn’t receive an invitation than the performance
itself.
“This young actress,” Lady Blechschmidt said to her companion, Mrs. Fulgens. “Is she that red-haired piece who made such a remarkable hash of Lady Macbeth at the Olympic Theater last year?”
“No, I believe she is quite new,” Mrs. Fulgens said. “Everyone is saying that Holbrook discovered her, whatever that means.” She said it with the clear hope that the discovery did not involve intimacy; Mrs. Fulgens was having a difficult time launching her only daughter into matrimony, and she was holding out hope for the newly sober duke. But if that duke was exhibiting his mistress to the ton in his family theater…well, even a desperate mother would reject him as a potential son-in-law.
“Is that Lord Pool over there?” Lady Blechschmidt said. “My goodness, his hair seems to have quite changed color: from gray to black. It must be from grief at his wife’s passing.”
“I heard he was acting like an old fool, but I can’t see him,” Mrs. Fulgens said, squinting. “Lady Godwin is in the way. Could she really be carrying another child?”
“It seems so,” Lady Blechschmidt said with the severity of someone who was rather more pleased than not when no children graced her marriage. Just look at how much difficulty Mrs. Fulgens was having with Daisy. Of course, the girl’s spots made the whole business of marriage thorny.
“They are remarkably devoted,” Mrs. Fulgens said, watching Lord Godwin help his wife to her seat with the possessive air of a man whose wife has grown more dear to him with each day.
Lady Blechschmidt counted it as a sad failing in herself that she found Lord Godwin far more interesting when he had Russian dancers prancing on his dining room table. Happy marriages were so rare in the ton that one would think they should be fascinating, and yet they were remarkably tiresome to watch.
Just then there was a peal from a trumpet played by a footman.
“Finally!” Lady Blechschmidt said. “I must say that I am all agog to see dear Lady Griselda in costume. I would never do such a thing myself; so lowering to one’s dignity.”
The curtain rose and there was a collective sigh at the sight of the Duke of Holbrook, dressed like a Restoration rake and sprawled at the dressing table.