by Eloisa James
“I’m not sure I can either,” Poppy said. But she sipped it and thought it was very nice, like cinnamon and wine and Christmas, all mixed together. “I need help,” she said bluntly.
Isidore blinked at her a bit owlishly. “Do you want us to throw your husband out of the house? Jemma, you should have done better than allow that man into your party after what happened last time we were all together!”
“I invited him,” Poppy said quickly.
Isidore’s mouth fell open in a comical fashion. “You did?”
“I wanted—well—I’ve changed my mind.”
“About what?” Louise wanted to know.
“About him.”
Jemma was smiling. “You’ve decided that a bird in the hand is better than a naturalist in the bush, is that it?”
“Yes,” Poppy said.
“How can we help?” Isidore said, drinking some more.
Louise narrowed her eyes. “You’re going to have a fearful head tomorrow, Isidore. And—if you don’t mind my saying so—your face is quite rosy.”
“I always turn red as a beet when I drink spirits,” Isidore said. “But honestly, who cares? My husband is away in far off India or some such place. I could turn purple and he wouldn’t care.” She drank again.
“He’s a wart,” Jemma said bluntly. “If you want to turn red, Isidore, you go right ahead.”
“One of these days,” Isidore said, with only a little slur in her voice, “I’m going to do something wild.”
“No doubt,” Louise said briskly. “When that times comes, we’ll sober you up. It’s best never to be wild while inebriated.”
Poppy took a huge gulp of her toddy. In her view, it was likely easier to be wild with a little inebriation. “I want to do something wild too,” she said.
“What?” Isidore said, peering at her. “Is your husband going to India as well?”
Louise reached over and took Isidore’s cup away. “You’ve had enough, darling. At this rate, you’ll sleep straight through Christmas Eve and miss all the festivities.”
“I’m not sure how celebratory we can be,” Jemma said, looking worried. “My butler tells me that Villiers isn’t doing very well at all. I stopped up to see him, but he was asleep again. I think he slept most of the day.”
“Oh dear,” Isidore said, her mouth drooping instantly. “I thought perhaps I would marry him instead of my duke, but I can only do that if he survives.”
“I didn’t know you liked Villiers,” Jemma said, looking surprised.
“I hardly know him. But he’s a duke. I could just scratch out my husband’s name on the wedding certificate. It seems like a fair trade for the duke I don’t really have. A duke in En gland is worth two off in India.”
“Which reminds me,” Jemma said. “So how can we help, Poppy?”
Poppy had finished her toddy and was enjoying an agreeable warmth in the pit of her stomach. “Fletch says that men are never interested in women after a few years of bedding them,” she said. “So he’s not interested in me anymore.”
“Bastardo!” Isidore hissed, taking Jemma’s cup out of her hand and drinking some of it.
“I want to—to lure him back to my bed,” she said.
“You’re looking as red as I am,” Isidore observed.
Jemma was grinning. “A femme fatale,” she said. “Louise, Isidore, let’s go!” She grabbed Poppy’s hand. “Upstairs!”
Fletch had just decided that Jemma’s odd-looking butler was the person to tell him where his wife was sleeping when Beaumont gave an odd cough. They were playing cards. Fletch looked up to meet Beaumont’s eyes, alive with laughter. He put down his cards.
“Yes?” Fletch asked.
“I think,” Beaumont said, rising, “that this performance is likely directed at you, not me.”
Fletch rose and turned around.
She was walking in the door.
At supper, her hair had been up above her head, in one of those hair styles that women liked, albeit without the powder. She’d looked sweetly pretty. Now it was all different.
Walking in the door was the courtesan to a prince. She had curls atop her head, caught up with sparkling jewels, though a few fell to her shoulders. Her eyes were lavishly lined with black and they looked twice as big and four times as powerfully blue. Her lips were crimson and curled in a small mocking smile.
Her gown was dark crimson, a color near to black. And the bodice plunged below her breasts. There was nothing but the frailest scrap of lace covering her nipples. Around her neck she wore a dramatic, exquisite necklace, with a pendant that fell just between the curves of her breasts.
The entire drawing room went silent as a stone.
Fletch walked forward, feeling as if he should fall on his knees.
Poppy stopped and her scarlet mouth curled appreciatively.
He swept into a bow. “Good evening, madam.”
“Bonsoir.” Her voice was no sweet jangle of bells. It was husky, demanding, a woman’s voice. It was a French woman’s voice.
Jemma swept in behind them, laughing, with other women, but Fletch didn’t take his eyes from Poppy.
There wasn’t an ounce of hesitation in her eyes. Not even a tremor. She was, every inch, a woman who knew exactly what she wanted.
Him.
“I am here only for the evening,” she said.
“Visiting?” he managed.
“From France.”
“Could I get you…something, mademoiselle?”
“Alack,” she said, lowering her eyelashes. They were outrageously black and so long that his loins stirred. “I am no mademoiselle.”
“Married, are you?” he said, taking her hand and bringing it to his mouth. “I am désolé.”
Her shoulders rose in a little shrug. “Why should you be? I find that marriage is such an interesting state.”
“Truly?”
“But of course! Only a married woman can truly know what she wants.”
Behind him Jemma laughed, but Fletch’s heart was beating too hard for laughter. Every inch of him had turned to fierce prowling hunter, to the kind of primitive male who throws a female to a pallet and has his way with her. He wanted to toss Poppy over his shoulder and take her upstairs, every delectable inch of her. Her breasts were visible to the whole room; he could see one pink nipple peeking at him through the white lace.
“And what did marriage teach you about desire?” he asked, the huskiness in his own voice startling him. “What do you want, madame?”
Something changed in her eyes, went serious for a moment.
“Poppy?” he said. “What do you want?” He brought her hand to his lips again. Even touching his lips to her skin made him start shaking a bit, like a race horse waiting at the start line.
“You.”
She said it softly, and then shot him another one of those liquid dark, dangerous looks out of her beautiful eyes.
“I want you.”
Fletch’s only explanation was that he lost his head. Right there in a drawing room full of giggling peers, at least two or three footmen, not to mention a butler with hair like the rise of the sea…
The Duke of Fletcher swept up his duchess in his arms—or perhaps it was just a wild Frenchwoman paying a visit—and stalked out of the room.
And up the stairs.
Chapter 47
Dying was not an easy business. Villiers pretty much thought he had reconciled himself to it but he wasn’t enjoying the process. The Scottish doctor had stopped dropping turpentine in his wound, but the man’s mouth drooped when he looked at him. Plus, Villiers could feel the bad news. The fever didn’t wrench him this way and that as much, but the exhaustion was like an undertow, pulling him out to sea.
“I’m not going to live much longer,” he told Charlotte. She’d suddenly appeared after supper and told him a story about Lady Flora and a young servant that he didn’t believe for a moment. Now she was sitting beside him reading from one of Mr. Fielding’s novels. Vill
iers hadn’t listened for pages. He liked lying there and watching the way her mouth moved as she read, and the delicate bones in her hand as she turned the pages.
“Why aren’t you down there with the philosophers?” he added. “I specifically requested philosophers.”
Charlotte raised her eyes. “The duchess said that there are no philosophers in her circle of acquaintance. And you are going to live. The doctor feels the infection is gone from your wound.”
Villiers smiled faintly. “You are the one who told me not to pay so much attention to my doctors.”
He had been absolutely right about the house party. The so-called standards of polite society didn’t operate here. Jemma had challenged him to a chess game and he even played a few pieces before he realized that he didn’t care about chess anymore.
Then Jemma got a droopy look around her mouth and looked as if she might cry, so he closed his eyes and pretended to go to sleep. Except that closing his eyes was dangerous these days: he closed them and woke up to find that the light had moved straight across the room and it was night. Or the night was gone and most of the day as well.
No one cared if Charlotte sat with him, and she never looked droopy. Sure enough, she was scowling at him. “You’re going to die looking like that?” she said pointedly.
He almost laughed but it took too much breath. “Appealing to my vanity won’t do it. May I use your name, oh sage Miss Tatlock?”
She turned up that long nose of hers. “Private names are far too intimate.”
“I want to be intimate,” he said.
There was a moment of silence.
“Though I won’t be around long enough to marry you,” he added.
“You wouldn’t want to marry me.” She picked up the book again. “Shall I continue?”
“Yes, I would,” he said, saying it because there was no reason not to. “I like you, Charlotte. I thought perhaps I could only love Jemma, but I’m fairly sure I’ve come to love you.”
“Very foolish of you,” she snapped.
“Yes.” But he was watching her under his lashes, and he saw a watery gleam in her eyes. He didn’t mean to make her droopy. The idea made him feel panicked. “So think about that. What a shame I’m dying. You could have inherited a fortune!”
She rallied instantly. “Don’t speak too soon. I might call in a priest and marry you to night.”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
Now her mouth was definitely wobbling. It was a soft and pink mouth, too. Anything to do with physical intimacy was farthest from Villiers’s mind, but he had noticed her mouth. She said bruising things, but with a sweet little mouth.
“Yes, you would!” she said fiercely. “I would never marry you for your fortune, and don’t forget it!”
“Would you marry me for other reasons?” He watched her from under his lashes. Of course, she would say no. He was a wreck of a man, dying, stupid, foolish, alone. She was—
“And not just because you’re desperate for a wedding ring?” he added. He didn’t have time for social niceties, not here in the very shadow of death.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. She reached out and her warm fingers curled around his.
He felt the tide of exhaustion again. He was so tired of the pain. It was all over his body now, an ache, more than one ache. “Who would think that a foolish little sword wound could come to this?” he said.
Her hand tightened on his. “Don’t die.” She said it quietly. “Don’t.”
But he didn’t think he had a choice. “Do you know what I feel like, Charlotte?”
“No.”
“A torch. Nothing more than a torch borne in the wind.”
And then the blackness came quickly, before he had a chance to say another word.
Charlotte sat next to Villiers and watched him sleep. He was gaunt, his face as white as parchment. And yet she could still see that glorious scrap of life that makes up the soul. It wasn’t hard to grasp how fragile the place was in which the soul resided.
Dautry came in quietly. He had just arrived, having missed supper.
It took her a moment to understand what had happened to him. He was no longer a slightly shabby sailor. He looked magnificent, clad in a coat of periwinkle blue that fit his shoulders like a glove. His shirt was of the finest linen. Only two things betrayed him: his hair still tumbled like a pirate, to his shoulders, and his feet wore the same scuffed, comfortable boots as before.
“Goodness,” she said faintly. “You look ducal.”
“I look like a blasted peacock,” he said, striding around the bed. He picked up his Villiers’s other hand. “Damn.”
There was no point in pretending that she didn’t know what he meant. Everything about the duke signaled that the time was near.
“It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow,” she said. “I had hoped he would be here for Christmas.”
“He may surprise you yet.”
“He just did,” she said.
Dautry glanced at her.
“He asked me to marry him.”
A look of black rage crossed his face and then it was as expressionless as ever. “Did he?” he drawled. “And did you take him up on his idea?”
She stood up and shook out her skirts. “You’re an ass.”
“A fine English gentlewoman using such a word!” he said, mockingly.
“Ass,” she repeated, loving the sound of the word on her own lips. There was something about this trip, her acquaintance with the Duke of Villiers, that was changing her. Making her more like him, perhaps: combative, fearless. She reached out and smoothed Villiers’s fingers, lying on the counterpane.
Dautry strode around the bed. “I can see that you are fond of him,” he said.
She had to tip her head back: he was standing just beside her and he was so tall. “You are—”
“I know,” he interrupted. “You already told me.”
His eyes looked at her with such disapproval that she actually felt a thrill. As if she, Charlotte Tatlock, would do something immoral. It was practically a compliment. “So you think that I would seduce a dying duke into marriage in order to become a duchess?”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
She loved the image of it, if only it didn’t include Villiers’s death.
“His name is Leopold, did you know that?”
He looked furious again. “How did you come to meet the duke?” Suddenly his hands were on her shoulders.
He’s going to shake me! Charlotte thought. It was all she could do not to smile. Dautry really thought she was a fatal temptress…not just a plain old maid who lived in Gough Square.
“How long have you known him?”
“Long enough,” she said, prolonging the deliciousness of it.
But she didn’t know enough about men. Or perhaps she just didn’t know enough about Dautry. He didn’t shake her; suddenly he bent his head and before she had any idea what was happening, his mouth was on hers.
On her mouth!
His lips were warm and firm, and she suddenly smelled him. He smelled like a sailor: like the clean wind and faintly of cloves. Stray thoughts whirled through her head, about temptresses who kissed strange men…
The idea was so delicious that she did precisely what he wanted and opened her mouth.
But then the kiss changed and she couldn’t think as clearly anymore. He stopped holding her shoulders and pulled her against his body. He was warm and hard, and the spicy smell of him went to her head so she wound her arms around his neck and hung on.
They didn’t stop until there was a noise on the bed. She pulled away and swung around, but Villiers was still sleeping. Her whole body was tingling. No wonder, she kept thinking. No wonder men and women…
She reached out and pulled up his coverlet a little, thinking about it.
“Has the local doctor anything to say?” Dautry said it quietly, in case Villiers was sleeping lightly.
The doctor had said no more than she had guessed for
herself. “If he survives the night…but Dr. Treglown doesn’t think he will. Do you?”
She saw the answer in his eyes, and it echoed the truth in her own heart.
“What will you do when he dies?” His voice sounded different. The drawl was still there, but roughened by desire.
“Nothing,” she said, turning around to face him. “Weep.”
“I’ll come sit with him to night,” he said, turning to the door. “I need to eat. Keep me company?”
She looked at Villiers but he was sleeping in that profound way he had, as if every breath were too much and he might just slip away. It was tiring, watching a man die.
“Come sit with me,” Dautry said, his voice a little softer. He held out his hand. “You can return later. We’ll both come back later.”
Blount disapproved. He did his butlering duty, of course. He placed the couple at a snug table in the morning room. He served them himself, because he saw the lay of the land, the way Dautry smiled at Miss Tatlock, and the way his hand lingered on her shoulder. No point in allowing that Jezebel to corrupt one of the young footmen.
But he was aware of a great uneasiness. He had identified the woman as a concubine of the Duke of Villiers, and here she was with the heir. Laughing. Talking. What sort of woman was she?
He lingered as much as he could while bringing in the courses, intent on learning her secrets. The conversation didn’t seem particularly salacious. They talked of India (godforsaken place, to Blount’s mind), and pirates (godforsaken people), and then about whales (he had no particular opinion, but he was suspicious).
He was pouring the second bottle of wine before he discovered what made Miss Charlotte Tatlock so irresistible. It was the way she talked back to Dautry. Talked back! Inconceivable for a young woman. Yet she did. He refreshed their wine glasses during a conversation in which she was arguing in the most lively way about smugglers. Defending them, if you please!
Blount made up his mind on the spot. They got no more wine. None! Not even if the Jezebel herself rang the bell.
So it was disappointing when they sauntered back to the Duke of Villiers’s bedchamber, almost as if they didn’t notice that their butler had forsaken them.
