“Does not a search for treasure require that someone dig holes in the ground?” The idea gave him a chill since he vividly recalled dreams in which he stood with her at the edge of a wide trench, surrounded by servants who’d been digging in the ground. Three of his footmen, staring at him from across a hole. And Lily. Beautiful, alluring Lily Wellstone.
“Unavoidable, I should think.” They remained partially in view of the shop window. Nigel had not noticed them, but Jane had. She was pretending she hadn’t, but her eyes flickered to the window too often, sliding away when otherwise she might have looked directly at Mountjoy. “My plan is to have two or three burly footmen do the digging.”
“Three?”
“That seems a proper number to me. Perhaps several energetic boys if you can’t spare us assistance from your staff, or I can hire men from High Tearing.”
“Have you reason to think there might be treasure of any kind on the property?”
“None at all.” She grinned. “But why shouldn’t there be? Sheffieldshire is rich in history, as you well know.”
“Someone will break a leg in one of those holes you dig.”
She rolled her eyes. “We’ll have them filled in. You’ll never know anyone put a spade to the earth. I promise you.”
He ought to refuse, but aside from his disinclination to allow anyone to dig holes in the ground, he could think of no objection she wouldn’t quickly dismantle. “So long as you fill in the holes after you have dug them, you are free to search for treasure anywhere on Bitterward lands.”
“Excellent.” She smiled again, that private, personal, incandescent transformation that made his heart thump against his chest. “Have you a survey map of the estate? I should like to copy it.”
“I will make a copy available to you.”
“Thank you.” She leaned in to kiss his cheek, then checked herself. He knew why. Because her instinct wasn’t innocent. Like lovers determined to hide an affair, they didn’t dare touch in public.
She was precisely the kind of tonnish woman he preferred to avoid, except she wasn’t. She wasn’t like the women he met in London, no matter her exquisite clothes and her managing ways. “Have you considered the effect of your eventual disappointment when you fail to uncover treasure?”
Lily waved a hand. “We’ll never finish before I go home, so who’s to say we failed?” She reached past him, opened the door herself, and swept inside. “Ginny,” she said in response to the greetings. “Jane. Caroline. Two hearty huzzahs for the duke. My slipper is repaired.”
As he followed her inside, the gentleman with his back to the window rose. Mountjoy passed him on his way to the table where Lily now stood. Nigel held a chair for her. The two Kirk girls smiled, but Eugenia kept a stony silence, one hand curled around her cup of chocolate.
The man who’d stood turned to Mountjoy and bowed to him. “Your grace.”
No wonder Eugenia had gone so quiet. And Lily. “Lord Fenris.”
The marquess nodded to each of the Kirk sisters, studying them with a cold eye. “Ladies. Miss Wellstone. Mrs. Bryant.”
Eugenia stared into her cup.
Lily gave him a cool look. “Good afternoon, my lord.”
Lord Fenris let a hand drift to their table. Just his fingertips touched the surface. “I hope I have found you in good health, Miss Wellstone.”
Lily inched closer to Eugenia and put a hand on her shoulder. “I’d offer my wishes for your health, but I don’t think they’d be well received.”
“On the contrary,” he replied.
The edge of Lily’s mouth twitched. “Then do accept my wishes for your continued health.”
He bowed. “Thank you.”
“Good day, sir.”
There was a moment’s awkward silence until Fenris removed his hand from the table. “Ladies.” He bowed again, his gaze sliding to Eugenia. “Mrs. Bryant.”
Eugenia took a sip of her chocolate and stared in the direction of Nigel’s shoulder. On his way out, Fenris placed a coin on his table and, after one more bow, left.
Into another awkward silence, Nigel said, “May I fetch you a chocolate, Miss Wellstone?”
“Chocolate would be delightful, Lord Nigel. And some sugared walnuts, if it’s not too much trouble. I adore them. Don’t you, Miss Kirk?”
“Yes, thank you, I do.” Jane smiled and Mountjoy had not the slightest reaction, even though Jane was pretty when she smiled. “Very much, Miss Wellstone.”
“The ones here are particularly good,” Lily said. “It is my goal to convince the proprietor to give me the recipe.”
“Sit down, Nigel. I’ll order for myself and Miss Wellstone.” Mountjoy headed for the counter.
While Nigel did so, Lily put her hands on the table. “About our ball,” she said.
He stood at the counter, staring at the table where Fenris had been sitting, wondering why a man whose family wanted nothing to do with their relative had come all the way to Sheffieldshire. And stayed.
“I am considering a Venetian theme,” he heard Lily say. “What do you think, ladies?” From where he stood, Mountjoy saw her prop her elbows on the table. “Shall we flood the ballroom and do our dancing via gondola?”
Mountjoy said nothing. He was preoccupied with the realization that Lord Fenris had not come here to exact some sort of petty revenge on Lily. He was here to mend fences with her.
Chapter Thirteen
LILY PACED BEFORE THE FIREPLACE IN HER ROOM. IT was three o’clock in the morning, hours before she would be able to sleep. There was no moon out or she might have thrown on her cloak and gone for a walk. What she wanted to do was wander the house until she met with Mountjoy. Handsome, magnificent Mountjoy.
She hated feeling she was confined to her room when she wanted to be moving. To be doing something. Anything. Anything to take her mind off Ginny’s brother. She did so hate to be alone with nothing to divert her from her thoughts.
She plucked her shawl off the chair where she’d left it after she’d retired to read and discovered she could not concentrate. Her situation was desperate indeed if she found no solace or distraction in a book. She knew the reason for that. There was no point denying she was infatuated with Mountjoy or that her attraction to him was the cause of her current unrest.
Even now, so many hours after their return from High Tearing, she felt the warmth of his fingers on her ankle, sliding, caressing, that quick slip of his fingers along her calf. If she closed her eyes she could see again the flash of heat in his eyes.
Thoughts like hers were not appropriate for a lady. Her father had once told her she’d been born wicked, and she suspected he was right. What proper lady, never married, took a lover, regretted nothing, and dreamed of taking another? Even as a girl, she’d dreamed of men who fell in love with her and to whom, in those dreams, she yielded all. Until Greer, naturally, her imaginings had been vague on the details of her surrender to passion.
Now that she’d kissed Mountjoy, touched him, tasted him, heard him groan in the passion she’d brought him to, she wanted more. Solitary enjoyments no longer sufficed. She wanted to caress him, to stroke his body and see his face when he reached his pleasure. Even more, she wanted the duke to touch her and kiss her and, yes, do some of those beastly things he’d alluded to when he’d fixed her slipper.
Mountjoy was nothing like Greer. He hadn’t Greer’s easy manner or his passion for history or his flights of fancy. Not his way with words either. The duke did not and would never love her the way Greer had, and she would never feel about Mountjoy the way she’d felt about Greer. She would always have that place in her heart where Greer still lived, and all the joy and happiness and the black despair of his loss remained locked away there. Safely guarded.
The only sounds in the house were the typical ones heard in a large and very old building. Syton House had inured her to such creaks and groans, the distant sound of the wind. She faced the door to the corridor, and tried to breathe, but the stale and thin air was
suffocating in here.
She walked away from the door to unlatch and open the window. Night air whooshed over her, damp with the promise of rain. The hooting of owls stopped then started up again. She breathed in deep draughts of air and still felt she could not pull enough into her lungs and that she would never be able to catch her breath.
The sky was utterly dark. No moon, no stars, and no promise of dawn, and that wet heaviness of impending rain. She leaned out the window and let the breeze riffle through her hair. Her skin rippled from the chill. It was spring, for God’s sake. Not winter.
She stayed at the window until she could bear the cold no longer. Or the solitude. She could not stay here with the walls closing in on her and the air going away and her wicked, wicked mind whispering that she could find Mountjoy’s room and settle entirely the question of what it would be like to make love to someone other than Greer. If she remained with nothing here capable of distracting her, she would reach a point where staying became intolerable, and she then really might search out Mountjoy’s room.
Self-denial, she’d found, was the unfailing precursor to overindulgence in the very thing one sought to avoid. Her father excelled at denying himself and those around him, and she had always rebelled against his strictures.
She closed the window and pressed a palm to one of the panes of glass until the cold seeped into the bones of her hand. Hers was not an aesthete’s character. That was, frankly, a truth to which she had long ago been reconciled. Her nature was, quite simply, not a proper one for a woman.
Lily picked up her sketchbook, pencil, and an oil lamp. She would wander the house looking for architectural details to sketch for her collection of oddities and grotesqueries and if, by chance or purpose, she and Mountjoy met? Well.
The moment she stepped into the corridor, the tightness in her chest released. Thank God. She walked to the Armory Hall, so called because the walls were hung with medieval weapons and there were at least ten separate suits of armor, including one for a horse. The door she’d entered through was at one of the short ends of the rectangular room. Three double-branched candelabra decorated a long oak table in the middle of the hall, gleaming silver in the lamplight. There were twenty-two chairs around the table and overhead a crystal chandelier, though with just the light of her lamp, there were no prisms of color to be seen.
A sideboard sat in the middle of the wall opposite the windows, but all along the rest of this long side were the suits of armor, in various attitudes of martial valor as was possible through the clever use of wire. Some held weapons: a sword, a dirk, or a pike. Another had a mace at its feet, yet another an axe.
According to Ginny, the Armory Hall was sometimes called into use as an informal dining room. The knights faced the windowed wall, and she fancied they had each come to know their separate views quite well. Every few feet opposite the knights were tall, multipaned windows inset in a bowed area topped by a small dome. Each dome contained a different carved ivory medallion: a face, a medieval beast, an open book with an inscription in Latin. One of the medallions was a swan with a broken chain around its neck, the very beast from Mountjoy’s coat of arms.
To a careless glance, the last wall appeared to be nothing more than a wall that ended without a passage into yet another room. But Ginny had shown her the concealed doorway there that opened if one knew just where to press.
She set her light on the table and considered sketching each of the windows. There were seven. Enough for one a night for a week. Or, perhaps she’d sketch one of the suits of armor. There were eleven of them. As she was deciding that she would begin with a sketch of the swan, the hair on the back of her neck prickled.
She turned in time to see the concealed door swing open.
Lily’s breath caught in her throat. Mountjoy had denied there were ghosts here, but if ever a house ought to have a ghost or two, it was Bitterward. But it wasn’t a ghost that entered the hall. It was far, far worse than any spectral apparition.
The duke halted when he saw her, and they stood there, she fancied, in mutual disbelief that they should meet. Again. At this hour. When they had agreed they must avoid each other at such times as this.
“You,” he said.
She curtseyed. “Your grace.”
He wasn’t wearing that lovely banyan of his. Alas, tonight he was dressed in his usual inelegantly fitted clothes. He put down his candle and pointed at the frescoed ceiling that, at the moment, was not possible to see. “Doyle tells me that in fourteen hundred something, my ancestor hired an Italian master to paint the ceiling.”
She looked up as if she could see that far in the darkened room. She did recall from her previous tour that the paintings were sublime. Her heart thudded in her ears.
Why encounter him now when she was not feeling at all virtuous? On a night when she’d been entertaining salacious thoughts about the man across from her? She was already weak where he was concerned. “Do you know who he engaged?”
“Family legend is that it was Fra Angelico, but I’ve seen nothing to prove that. The claim seems suspect at best.”
Lily stood close enough to the table to put her hand on it. The wooden surface had been polished until she could see her reflection. In her room, she had imagined herself taking actions that she was now barely able to contemplate. Not with the duke here in the flesh, with his guarded eyes and somber expression.
It seemed another time and place entirely that she had unfastened his trousers and his fingers had been buried in her hair.
But then, disaster.
Mountjoy left his candle where it was and crossed the room to her. He ended standing mere inches from her.
Oddly enough, her nerves settled. “Your grace.”
“I have decided,” he said in the manner of a man who was used to deciding a great many things, “concluded, that we cannot be lovers.” He drew a fingertip along the line of her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, but it just can’t be. You and I.”
She leaned in to him, and his eyes swept downward to fix on her bosom, which she found a gratifying reaction. “I’m sorry, too.” She curled an arm around his neck, which required that her upper torso press against his chest. His arm snaked around her waist, and she gave a little tug of her arm and just like that, his mouth was in reach. She kissed the side of his jaw.
Mountjoy laughed, a low, velvet sound of ironic mirth, and he dipped his head toward hers. In return, she brushed her lips across his. So soft, his lips were. Again, nearly a kiss this time.
And then a kiss.
That was all the two of them needed. She’d known the moment he’d come in that she hadn’t the strength to continue in a ladylike manner. He was here, and she wanted him to stay.
His lips parted, and he nipped at her mouth, soft kisses that turned into heated kisses, and Lily melted against him. She adored the way he kissed. The Duke of Mountjoy knew what he was about. His other arm went around her waist, too, pulling her tight against him. His tongue dipped into her mouth, caressed, beguiled, turned her bones to jelly.
He lifted her up, and she did not know what he intended until she was sitting on the table, close enough to the edge that had he not stood between her legs she would have worried about falling off. He planted his hands on either side of her thighs and returned to kissing her mindless. Which he did very, very well.
Lily returned his passion, accepted everything he did, and tightened her arms around his neck. She pushed her fingers into his hair. She gave a moan of protest when he lifted her up a second time, but as she learned, it was only to lift her skirts and set her down with her bare bottom on the table. Cool against her skin. Thrilling. One of his hands ended up on her knee. Just above her garter.
“Lily,” he said, shaking his head. “You and that damned medallion. You’re constantly in my thoughts. My dreams. I can’t keep my damned hands off you.”
His fingers curved around her leg as potent proof of that. Her belly tensed and a quiver of arousal spr
ead upward from her breasts to her throat, and lower, too, between her legs. She felt her need for him there especially.
She gasped when his fingers slid higher. Oh, heavens, higher yet, until he was touching her exactly there. She was wet and slick, and he knew where and how to stroke her, and she angled herself into his hand. They weren’t kissing anymore; she hadn’t the breath for it now. For a time, he watched her face while his fingers were busy.
Not Wicked Enough Page 13
