Not Proper Enough (A Reforming the Scoundrels Romance)

by Carolyn Jewel

  “Of all the rooms at Bouverie, I confess this is my favorite.” He cocked his head in that annoying way, except this time it wasn’t as annoying as usual. “Just as Camber has given Hester permissions to the conservatory, so I grant you permissions to the library. Come here whenever you like.”

  His invitation was genuine, without the least hint that he intended anything but that she be able to enjoy the library whenever she liked. She found it disturbing and, yes, flattering, that he understood she was as book-mad as Hester was plant-mad. She curtseyed her acknowledgment. “Thank you.”

  “You are more than welcome.”

  She took a step toward the shelves. “I warn you, I might never leave.”

  “We’d find a way to make do, I suppose.” He gave her a lopsided grin. “I’d have the servants throw in a bone now and again. Leave a bottle of wine outside the door for you.”

  “So gracious a host.” She’d stopped mistrusting his charm, and that was yet another disconcerting change in her feelings about him. Then again, Robert had admired him, and that would not have been the case if there were nothing to the man but his future title.

  Fenris took her arm again and walked the room with her, crisscrossing from time to time to a specific shelf in order to show her a rare or interesting volume. “Is there really a secret staircase?” she asked.

  “There is. But first, allow me to show you the orrery. We’re quite proud of it here.”

  “Please.”

  The orrery was at the far end of the library in an alcove built to display the device, a moving mechanical model of the solar system that included all the planets with any moons that attended them. Beside it stood a celestial globe, but for now, she could only stare at the orrery. It was magnificent. The base of the orrery was a freestanding piece of carved cherry into which had been set a gold plate that housed the clockwork that moved the planets and the moon. A gold ball represented the sun; the moon was a sphere of half ivory, half jet; and the other planets and moons were likewise various gemstones or other semiprecious materials.

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

  “Yes, it surely is.” He took a step forward. “This one works by means of a key.” Fenris set off the mechanism, and, with a whirr of parts and gears, the planets and their moons began to move. Eugenia watched, transfixed.

  She drew in a breath and waited for her emotions to settle. She didn’t want him to think she was overcome. “I could watch this all day.”

  “It is wonderful to see in motion, isn’t it?”

  “One feels very small indeed, imaging all this above and around us.” She gave him a quick glance, and was relieved to see he was intently watching the orrery. If he thought her maudlin, she couldn’t tell.

  “Indeed.” She felt a tug on her heart at his reverent reply. Like her, he was fascinated by the device. She looked away because she did not want to admire him, or find him attractive, nor admit he had any qood qualities.

  “If I came to live in your library, I’d stand right here for hours and hours and never move except to wind the mechanism.”

  He walked to the other side of the orrery. “You are welcome to, of course.”

  “Might I have tea once in a while?” They got on well, she had to admit that. He amused her, dash his soul. When he smiled at that, she added, “Or am I to have only wine and that rare bone on which to gnaw?”

  He didn’t look away from the orrery. “Tea as well, if you insist.”

  “I do.” She clasped her hands behind her back and rocked back on her heels. “I am a greedy guest.”

  “It’s not so much to ask. Tea, wine, and bones to chew on.” After a bit, he reached down and pressed a switch that stopped the motion. His reserve returned, and Eugenia wondered if she’d offended him. Lord, but he reminded her of his father now, the way he’d seemed when she and Hester had been here for dinner. All stern eyes and uncharitable expression. Perhaps he’d had enough of entertaining her. He lifted his gaze and their eyes locked. “I’m not often here, but I’ll tell Camber and the staff.”

  “Don’t you live here?” They looked at each other from separate sides of the solar system. Considering how passionately she disliked the man, she was aware, now, just how little she knew about him. How strange that she should be curious to know more. Stranger still that she should feel that frisson of interest. She did, though.

  He shrugged, and she found herself unable to read his expression. And here she’d fancied she would always know his feelings about her. “Bouverie is my father’s home.”

  “Yours as well.”

  He seemed both a stranger to her and a man she knew well, and that, too, was odd and unexpected, and it made her question whether she’d been fair to him. Not about what he’d done in the past, but about what he was now. He continued to watch her, and she felt another shiver in reaction. “I keep quarters elsewhere that are less formal and more to my liking.”

  She put a hand on the celestial globe and gave it a turn. Yes, a man like him would need privacy. “Bachelor quarters, you mean.”

  “As I am a bachelor, I suppose so.” He joined her on her side of the solar system. “I like to think I’ve moved beyond the sort of apartments you mean. I have a house on Upper Brook Street.”

  “Upper Brook Street?” He meant nothing by standing so close. If that was so, why was she so horribly aware of him?

  “Mm.”

  “You could walk to Hyde Park from there.” The chill that pervaded most of Bouverie seemed to have lodged in Eugenia’s bones, and she shivered.

  “I often do. Cold?” He stood so close. Too close. “Or did someone just walk over your grave?”

  She brought her shawl over her shoulders. “Mountjoy says I’m always complaining it’s never warm enough.”

  “And I never can convince Camber that we Talbot men seem not to feel the cold as others do.” He held out a hand, and she happened to tilt her head at just the right time such that their gazes locked. He wasn’t a boy; not that he’d ever been. He was a grown man, and she could not stop thinking about what that meant. That Fenris should be a man, with a man’s needs and appetites. He held her gaze. “Come, I’ll show you the secret passage.”

  “Is there one?”

  “I told you there was.”

  “Men say all manner of things.”

  “Allow me to prove it, then.” He put a hand to her back, and the contact sent a disturbing shiver through her. Not from cold, this time, but because of him. Lord Fenris. Thank goodness, she thought, that he did not notice. He guided her to one of the staircases where the carpet that covered most of the floor ended and exposed a rim of polished oak floor. There were two upholstered chairs here, as well as a desk, behind which were yet more shelves of books. Twenty thousand volumes. There were probably more books than that here.

  Fenris stepped up to one of the shelves, and Eugenia moved with him, intensely curious. She studied the wall for any sign of a doorway. She pointed to one of the shelves. “Is this it?”

  “No. Here.” He rested a hand on a set of shelves that looked no different from the others.

  She moved in for a closer look. “It’s cleverly hidden. I don’t see anything at all.”

  He made room for her, and she stood beside him while she examined the shelf. “As a boy, I often used this passage to confound my nurse regarding my whereabouts.” He lit a lantern on the table and picked it up. “I suspect now that she was humoring me. The longtime staff is aware of the location of all the secret rooms and passages.”

  She touched a spot on the rim of the shelf that seemed to her to be a slightly lighter shade than the surrounding wood. Nothing happened. What he’d just said penetrated and she looked at him. “There’s more than one?”

  “The house is riddled with them.” He pressed a carved spot on the other side from where she stood. There was a hollow click, and an entire section of shelf swung out. Their eyes met, and once again she had that odd impression of him as a stranger and someone famili
ar to her. He held the door and gestured. “Shall we explore?”

  Not for the world would she refuse such an invitation. “Oh yes, let’s.”

  Fenris closed the secret door after them. If not for the lantern, they would have been in pitch dark. As it was, she could see the walls were carved with columns intended to look like tree trunks. The floor was bare plank. The ceiling was carved with leaves and branches, and even birds and other small animals.

  She stood in the passageway and turned in a circle. “You must have been in raptures as a boy, having such a hideaway as this.” She, as Fenris well knew, had been raised by a maternal aunt and uncle. On a farm her eldest brother had, until the lawyers found him, fully expected to take over one day. The house she’d grown up in had a mere seven rooms, without a single inch of gilt wood and not even one single secret passage or hidden room.

  “I was.”

  “I wish I’d lived here when I was a girl.” She took a step forward and looked around again. “Think of all the adventures one could have in a house like this.”

  He took her hand. “Come. I’ll show you the Turkish bath. It’s quite beautiful.”

  “A Turkish bath?” She did not pull away from him. “Yes, I should like to see that. Nigel went to the Levant after he finished at Oxford. He wrote us the most wonderful letters of his adventures. Robert went, too, when he was young. I suppose you know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “He gave me his journals to read. Sometimes he’d read passages to me. They were wonderful. I feel as if I’ve been there myself.” She hesitated because it occurred to her that perhaps she ought not talk about Robert, and just when had she begun to care about his feelings? “Have you been to the Levant?”

  “When I was a young man, yes. But my grandfather had the bath installed here after he visited Anatolia. Long before I was born.” Still holding her hand, he walked the corridor without hesitation. They passed three steep and narrow staircases leading higher and lower into the house. There were two branches of the corridor he ignored. At the end of the passageway, he took a set of stairs down and then a second until they reached a doorway that opened into a small wood-paneled cabinet. He closed the door after them. The opening vanished into the scrollwork that decorated the walls there.

  He waited while she examined the area of the wall they’d just come through. “Here. This leaf here. Do you see?” He reached around her to press a spot on the wall. After the click, he pushed and the outline of the doorway appeared. “So you can make your escape if need be.”

  Eugenia laughed. “What a grand adventure this is.”

  “Onward then?”

  “Yes.” She followed him out of the cabinet and into a corridor. From there, he opened a door that took them into a tiled room with a portal at the other side. The ceilings were high and arched, and everywhere she looked were beautiful Arabian patterns set in tile. The air here was warmer than upstairs, and there was almost no sound but what noise they made.

  “The baths haven’t been used since my grandfather passed. I’m told he returned from his travels with a Turkman servant who’d been employed in a private home with baths in a similar arrangement to this.”

  She touched the tiles, cool underneath her fingers. “Why not? You have this magnificent place and you’ve never had a bath here yourself?”

  “I have.”

  Eugenia looked at him over her shoulder. He tipped his head to one side.

  “When I was a boy. My grandfather brought me here. We used the bath, and it was really quite the most splendid immersion of my young life.” He held up the lantern and adjusted the screen to widen the glow.

  She took a few more steps inside. “How old were you?”

  “Ten, I think. The Turkman scrubbed me within an inch of my life, but the warm water afterward? Bliss.” He picked up the lantern and crossed the room so as to enter a second, larger room with empty scalloped fountains set into the wall and three empty pools.

  She absorbed the austere beauty and tried to imagine what it must have looked like when the pools were filled and the fountains working. “This is marvelous. Simply marvelous.”

  “It is. And how relaxing to soak in the water after that scrubbing. In here”—they passed into a third room—“we were dried off with the softest towels you can imagine. Our skin was rubbed with oil, our hair combed. I don’t think I was ever so clean and presentable in all my days before or since.”

  Eugenia pictured not a boy, but a grown-up Fenris. Naked. Which was not a proper place for her thoughts to wander. “Why doesn’t your father use the baths? Or you, for that matter?”

  Rather than answer, he walked her out of this last room and into another corridor with the same ornate scrollwork in the tiles. The decor, she supposed, was after the Ottoman fashion.

  “After our bath, we took tea in here.” He opened another door and held it for her. This room, like the corridor, had intricate scrollwork and lattices in the shape of inverted teardrops. “I’m told it’s copied after a salon in the sultan’s palace in Constantinople. I was served tea. My grandfather had coffee and let me try it.”

  “And?”

  He grinned, and there was nothing austere at all about his smile. She shivered inside, in a hot, disturbing way that did not feel at all proper. Not for her. Not for a widow who still missed her husband. Not for a man she’d disliked for so long. “I discovered Turkish coffee was not then to my taste.”

  “I expect not.” There was, incongruously, a gold-framed painting of a spaniel hanging on the wall. She stood before it, head tilted. There was something off about the painting, but she couldn’t decide what it was. The dog did not seem to properly fit on the canvas. She couldn’t help the impression that the animal might actually slide off the canvas and onto the floor.

  He pointed at the nameplate affixed to the bottom center of the frame. “Delilah. My grandfather’s favorite bitch.”

  She tried looking at the painting from the corner of her eye. “She’s lovely.”

  “You are entitled to your opinion.”

  “Thank you.”

  Fenris crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall by the painting. She had the eerie sense that the dog’s eyes followed him. “Camber—my grandfather, that is—fancied himself an artist. As you can see from his effort, it was mere fancy.”

  She craned her neck and squinted.

  “I’m afraid, Mrs. Bryant, that there is no angle from which this picture improves.”

  Fenris was right. The painting did not improve at any angle she could see. “Perhaps oils were not his medium.”

  “Assuredly not.”

  She was entranced by the thought of a not very talented duke taking the time and effort required of an oil painting, all to preserve the likeness of a beloved dog. “Why does no one use these rooms?”

  “My father disapproves.”

  “Of what?” She looked around. She knew the long estrangement between Fenris and Lily had begun with the previous Camber. She knew as well that Lily’s suspicions of Fenris had proved unfounded. For the first time, she wondered if Fenris didn’t deserve a great deal of credit for refusing to continue two generations of resentment. “Of anything exotic or not English?”

  “He’s not quite that bad. But not so far from that, either.” He moved to the doorway and put a hand on the jamb, which was not the usual shape but, rather, had a pointed top with rounded sides that sloped toward the more usual, to her, straight-edged door shape. “I don’t wish to shock you.”

  She gave him a quick look and saw the gleam in his eyes. “There’s a scandal involved in these rooms, isn’t there?”

  Fenris nodded, and she couldn’t help a smile. “This is vastly more amusing than listening to Hester and your father discuss the proper composting of manure. Please do shock me. I won’t tell a soul, I promise.”

  “On your honor?”

  She placed a hand over her heart. “Yes, Fenris. On my honor.”

  “Very well, then.
Prepare to be shocked to your very proper toes.”

  “Go on.”

  “My grandfather is reputed to have engaged in immoral conduct in these rooms. Camber, the current one, was furious when he learned my grandfather had brought me here for any reason. My father was certain I’d witnessed one of Grandfather’s orgies and that I was corrupted for life.”

  “Orgies.” She looked around the room. “Under the watchful eye of Delilah? No, this does not seem an orgy sort of room. It’s rather a pleasant room. I don’t believe you, sir.”

  “Not here. In the Turkish room.”

  “The Turkish room.”

  “It would be wicked of me to show you.” A smile flickered at the edges of his mouth, and then his gaze landed on her rather than their surroundings. Another image flashed through her head. His pale brown eyes locking with hers after he’d come, his arms tight around her. A ridiculous and personally humiliating mental slip. He was laughing, though. Or nearly so. Taunting her with that sly smile. Daring her.

  “I feel I can withstand the shock.”

  “If you’re sure.”

  “I am.”

  He picked up the lantern again and headed for the door. “Have you a vinaigrette on hand in the event your delicate sensibilities are offended?”

  She snorted and felt very wicked, which was, she imagined, precisely what he intended. “Lead on.”

  With a hand on another door, he said, “I’ve seen the bills for the construction of this room. No expense was spared. I daresay that’s the real reason for Camber’s objection.”

  Eugenia put her palm to his chest and pushed her fingers off that broad and solid expanse. He didn’t move. “You, sir, are an awful tease. There weren’t any orgies, were there?”

  He did not open the door. “There were.”

  “You were ten. Honestly. How would you know? No one would tell a ten-year-old about orgies.”

  “As Miss Rendell would undoubtedly point out, I did not remain ten.” Fenris opened the door, and they went in. He set the lantern on a low table. “Voilà. My grandfather’s folly.”

  The Turkish room was a quite large square with a divan constructed along most of three sides of the walls. The chimney glass stretched from the fireplace mantel to the ceiling. The fireplace had been carved in an Ottoman motif, with the same exquisite scrollwork and curlicues worked into the tiles around it. Crimson velvet curtains with gold tasseled ties draped along the walls between the mirrored walls, single pieces of glass that must have cost the sky.