“Just for show, my dear. You must tell me how you’ve managed all these years to avoid wedded bliss. I will pay you handsomely for such a secret.”
Her gaze flicked up from where she’d been staring determinedly at his shoulder. “You need a wife, Deene. You’ve only the one cousin to manage the succession, and he’s not married. Besides, I’m not avoiding anything. I simply haven’t taken.”
“Haven’t taken?” He’d heard her brothers grumbling about having to beat Evie’s swains away with muttered threats and thunderous scowls.
“I’m short. A proper English beauty is willowy, like Jenny.” She gave him the false smile again.
“You fit me well enough.” The words were out, grumbled but honest, and Eve went back to staring at his shoulder.
And they had yet to get through supper. He cast around for a harmless topic.
“What do you hear from St. Just?” As conversational gambits went, that one was creditable. Eve’s oldest brother had served with Deene, then two years after Waterloo, been awarded a Yorkshire earldom.
“He’s thriving up in the West Riding. We saw him at Christmas, and I think the dales agree with him—or marriage and fatherhood does.”
Did she sound wistful, or was she merely missing her brother?
“Perhaps I should pay him a visit.” Though it was probably still winter on the dales.
Eve was silent a minute, then she cast her gaze over him again in that assessing, female way. “Lucas, they’re just girls. They’ve been brought up to want nothing more than a man who can provide for them and give them babies. Your title, your fabulous good looks, your estates, they are so much gilt on the lily. Find a woman with whom you can be affectionate friends and propose to her.”
Affectionate friends. She described a sophisticated, practical version of marriage, such as the beau monde expected, and such as Eve likely expected, but to Deene it loomed like an extra-chilly circle of hell crafted just for titled English lords.
Though many more evenings like this one, and the choice was going to be taken from him.
***
By the time the music came to a close and Eve’s partner had led her off the dance floor, she was regretting the impulse that made her pluck the man from the jaws of Lady Staines’s ambitions. He was a former cavalry officer, titled, and blessedly good-looking. Surely the prospect of a few tittering ninnies wasn’t putting that haunted look in his sky-blue eyes?
“Shall I fix you a plate, my lady?”
He was smiling down at her, his expression genial.
She’d forgotten this about him—he was a gentleman. A significant contretemps involving Maggie’s past had been resolved directly before her marriage, but only with Deene’s willing, adroit, and very discreet assistance. A damsel in distress, or a damsel in need of sustenance, would both loom as an inescapable duty to him.
“Please, but avoid the aged cheeses and anything bearing a resemblance to red wine.” She moved along the buffet line with him while he piled a single plate high with various delicacies.
“Let’s find a quiet corner, shall we?” Her escort leaned down to nearly whisper in her ear. “The less conspicuous I am, the less I’m likely to attract a wife.”
She did not snort, but the man could hardly help but attract notice. Were she anything less than the daughter of a duke—the theoretically eligible daughter of a duke—he would be swarmed even in the buffet line.
“Perhaps in the gallery?” Eve suggested. She led him across the hall to the long, high-ceilinged space that opened onto the terraces. A few of the doors were propped open, making the place both quieter and cooler.
“Down there.” Deene gestured with the hand holding the plate. His other arm had been offered to Eve for escort, as if by her very presence she could ward off encroaching mamas.
Which, if it came to that, she could.
They found a small table beneath an arch, a blessed oasis of privacy in an otherwise dauntingly public evening.
“I believe I owe you an apology,” Eve said when they were seated.
He lounged back in his chair, a delicate little wrought iron piece that barely looked capable of holding his weight. “For?”
“Perhaps not an apology.” Eve picked up a forced strawberry and considered it. “I love strawberries, but I have this notion they taste better when they’re allowed to develop according to their own natures.” She popped it in her mouth and watched while Deene did likewise with a smaller berry.
He had a lovely mouth. She hadn’t forgotten that for a moment, blast the man.
“What would you be apologizing for?” He picked up another strawberry, drawing Eve’s attention to his hands. Without his gloves, their strength was obvious. Those hands had been on her person, they’d offered her relief from misery, and at Christmas…
She frowned at a section of orange. “You haven’t tattled, so to speak. You have my thanks for that.”
“Tattled.” He sat forward, a predator catching a scent. The strawberry had disappeared, Eve knew not where. “Tattled, regarding your headache? What kind of gentleman would I be if I bruited a lady’s distress all around the clubs? How would that—?”
Eve shook her head. Men were obtuse. Her brothers claimed that women were too indirect and subtle, but it was a bona fide fact men were thickheaded about certain important matters.
“At Christmas,” she said very quietly. The walls had ears, after all. “You didn’t”—she stared at another section of orange—“kiss and tell. I appreciate that.”
She felt compelled to state her thanks for his discretion. The words put something right between them that Eve had been allowing to drift in the wrong direction. The spatting and skirmishing was all well and good, but this needed to be said too.
“Now this is interesting.” He addressed a luscious strawberry, red-ripe all over, the exact shape and size a strawberry ought to be, but when had his chair shifted so close? “I am trying to do the pretty without being caught in parson’s mousetrap, I suffer a small lapse of propriety while under the influence with a lady whom all esteem, and you think it’s your name I’m protecting?”
He popped the strawberry into his mouth and considered her in a lazy-lidded way that had Eve’s insides pitching in odd directions.
“Why are you bristling, Deene? I’m offering my thanks.”
He finished chewing the strawberry, though his blue eyes had bored into hers as he’d consumed it. “Did you enjoy our kiss, Evie?”
Evie. Only her family called her that—and him. He said it with a particular intimate inflection her family never used though.
She sat up very straight. “Your question has no proper answer. If I say no, then I am dishonest—I flew at you, after all, and you had to peel me off of you—and if I say yes, then I am wicked.”
“Because if you did enjoy that kiss,” he went on as if she hadn’t spoken, “for I certainly enjoyed it, then perhaps you might be thanking me for the kiss and not for keeping the silence any man with sense or manners would have kept.”
With him staring at her like that, it was hard to grasp the sense of his words, but Eve made the effort.
He was offended that she’d thanked him.
Any man admitted under her parents’ roof would have been discreet about such a moment.
He had enjoyed that kiss.
He leaned forward, so close Eve could catch the scent of his lavender-and-cedar soap, so close she could…
Feel his lips, soft and knowing, against her cheek. Oh, she should turn away. There was no convenient tankard of spiked punch to blame, no holiday cheer, no reckless sense of yet another sibling slipping away into marriage.
His hand came up to cradle her jaw, then to shift her head slightly so she faced him. Those soft, knowing lips teased their way to her mouth, gently, inexorably. He did not use force or even anything approximating force. He supported her into the kiss.
That other kiss had been different. They’d started off observing a silly holiday trad
ition and ended up breathless and—she hoped—mutually surprised.
This kiss was—God help her, it was tender, deliberate, as delicious as the strawberries she could taste when Deene’s tongue seamed her lips. Her hand cradled his jaw, too, not to keep him close but to complement the sensation of his tongue easing into her mouth.
“Deene, I don’t know what to do.”
He said nothing, just covered her mouth with his again, openmouthed, and then his tongue came calling, teasing her to taste him in return. When she did, she felt a shudder go through him, felt him hitch closer physically, and felt her own sense of balance desert her.
Now she kept her hand on him as a point of reference, a way to keep the concepts of up, down, north, and south—his body and hers—all in an understandable relationship. He’d shaven recently, and—
He took her lower lip between his teeth and didn’t exactly bite, but closed his teeth over her flesh. The sensation was not of being trapped but of being held. Eve felt his other hand, large and warm, settle on her neck. The contact was lovely, comforting, intimate, and reassuring, while the kiss was anything but.
Maybe he sensed she was reaching her limit, because he took his mouth away and rested his forehead against hers instead. “Tell me you enjoyed that, Evie. One kiss doesn’t have to mean anything. It isn’t a great scandal. It’s just a small pleasure between two people who likely have little enough pleasure to call their own.”
His hand moved around to cover her nape, as if to encourage her to remain in this forehead-kiss until he’d had her answer, while she wanted to hide her face against his shoulder. “I enjoyed it. I should not have, but I did. The other, too. At Christmas. I enjoyed that.”
Such an admission was stupid, but in the privacy of their odd embrace—her other hand had come up to grasp his lapel—honesty felt safe. Honesty with him.
He eased away but kept his one hand on her jaw for a last, fleeting caress. The loss of him left Eve chilled and bewildered. What had she just permitted?
What had she just admitted?
“Have the last strawberry.” He pushed the plate closer to her, his expression inscrutable. He’d tasted like strawberries.
“Perhaps a bit of ham and melon,” she said, helping herself. Was this how sophisticated people conducted their kisses? Between bites of fruit while half the beau monde chattered itself insensate a few rooms away?
She was saved from having to scrounge up some credible inanity to serve as conversation by the approach of Jenny and Louisa. Her sisters should have been a welcome sight, a source of relief.
Amid all the other emotions rioting through her, Eve could not identify either relief or welcome.
***
Deene knew for a fact Eve Windham had been out at least a good five years. She’d had beaus, followers, and admirers, and even several offers, but she kissed like… like an innocent.
At Christmas, she’d flung herself into a kiss with such abandon, Deene had wondered who was holding onto whom under that sprig of mistletoe. When he should have stepped back and turned the moment into a holiday superficiality, she’d cupped a hand around his neck and made a sound of longing and pleasure in the back of her throat, and that—more than the rum, more than the holidays, more than too many months of celibacy—had him diving right back into the kiss.
Burgeoning lust alone had made him step back.
It was no better now. She sat across from him, eating daintily, as if all the fire and wonder shared a few moments before had never happened.
“You two are hiding.” Lady Genevieve Windham smiled as she advanced down the gallery, her expression confirming that she was teasing more than accusing. Lady Louisa’s—Lady Kesmore’s—expression was far less congenial.
Which, in fairness, was not unusual for the fair Louisa.
Deene rose. “Ladies, welcome. Shall I fetch more chairs?”
“No need for that.” Louisa still did not smile. “We’ve come to retrieve Evie. Mama has a breakfast to attend tomorrow, and we’re taking our leave.”
Eve rose, looking neither relieved nor upset to be going. When had the little hoyden he’d known turned into such a composed woman?
“Deene, good evening.” She cocked her head to meet his gaze. “My thanks for a lovely waltz, and for… everything.” She smiled slightly, a very different smile from any he’d seen her give out previously. This smile was sweet and a trifle mysterious. “I hope the rest of your evening is as pleasant as mine has been.”
She linked arms with her sisters and departed, a petite blond bookended by taller siblings, and yet Deene had the sense Eve was the one establishing the direction of their progress.
He did not dare linger here alone in the shadows, not with the likes of Lady Staines ready to unleash their daughters on him in any unguarded moment. He picked up his plate and headed directly for the card room.
***
“I fear I’m going to be next.”
Eve waited to make this prediction until the footmen had left and the tea trays were on the low table before the sofa.
Louisa looked up from her book—Louisa’s nose was always in a book—and frowned. “Next? Next as in what? We’re supposed to divine the context without any further clues, Evie?” She set the book aside and leaned forward in her chair. “Food is next, and about time too.”
“What did you mean, dearest?” Jenny was sitting at the other end of the sofa, slippers off, back resting against the arm and her knees drawn up before her.
“Next to get married.”
Eve’s sisters were silent for a few moments, but they exchanged the most maddening of older-sister looks before Jenny leapt into the breach.
“Is Mr. Trottenham your choice then? He’s a very pleasant fellow, I must agree.”
“Not Trit-Trot,” Louisa said, picking up a chocolate tea cake. “He’s a ninnyhammer.”
“He is a ninnyhammer.” Eve’s best decoys were always ninnyhammers. “I don’t know who. I just have a feeling I’d better choose someone, or Her Grace and His Grace will start nosing about, and then all is lost.”
“Lost how?” Louisa put three more cakes on her plate. “If being married means all is lost, then I’m finding it a rather agreeable end.”
“Louisa, you’re supposed to eat some sandwiches first,” Eve observed.
“And hope there are some cakes left by then, when you two will have had at them first? I intend to eat a deal of sandwiches. What do you mean, all is lost?”
Jenny swung her feet off the sofa and set aside her copy of La Belle Assemblée. “Their Graces want only to see us happy. Maggie had offer after offer, and Papa turned every one of them down.”
“Maggie’s situation is different,” Eve said. “She made it to thirty. She was safe. Sophie has gone and married her baron too, though, and Louisa’s led Joseph up the aisle. We two are all our parents have to focus on.”
“Not all.” Louisa frowned at her only remaining cake. “Papa has the Lords to run. Mama has Polite Society. Then, too, they’ve grandchildren to consider.”
“But they still have us too.” Eve made a little production of pouring tea all around: plain for Jenny, sugar for herself, cream and sugar in quantity for Louisa, which was an injustice of the first order. Louisa never gained weight and never seemed to stop eating.
Eve sat sipping tea, but the sense of impending marital doom gathered like a pressure in her chest. An inkling of a solution had come to her only last night, when she’d been coming home from the ball with her mother and sisters.
A white marriage.
They were not as fashionable as they’d been in old King George’s day, but Eve suspected they weren’t entirely unheard of anymore either. Lord and Lady Esteridge had such an arrangement, and his lordship’s brother was tending to the succession.
“Shall we help you look for prospects?” Jenny asked. “Kesmore wasn’t a likely prospect, but Louisa is thoroughly besotted with him.”
Louisa shot Jenny an excuse-my-poor-daft-s
ister look. “Kesmore is a grouch, his children are complete hellions, he can hardly dance because of his perishing limp, and the man raises pigs.”
“And you adore him,” Jenny reiterated sweetly. “What about that nice Mr. Perrington?” Gentle persistence was Jenny’s forte, one learned at the knee of Her Grace, whose gentle persistence had been known to overcome the objections of Wellington himself.
“Mr. Perrington has lost half his teeth, and the other half are not long for his mouth,” Louisa observed as she moved on to the sandwiches. “Thank God he hides behind his hand when he laughs, but it gives him a slightly girlish air. I rather fancy Deene for Evie.”
“Deene?” Eve and Jenny gaped in unison.
“You fancy Lucas Denning as my husband?” Eve clarified.
Louisa sat back, a sandwich poised in her hand. “He’d behave because our brothers would take it amiss were he a disappointing husband. Then too, he’d never do anything to make Their Graces think ill of him, and yet he wouldn’t bring any troublesome in-laws into the bargain. He needs somebody with a fat dowry, and he’s quite competent on the dance floor. He’d leave you alone for the most part. I think you could manage him very well.”
Jenny’s lips pursed. “You want a husband you can manage?”
Eve answered, feeling a rare sympathy for Louisa, “One hardly wants a husband one can’t manage, does one?”
“Suppose not.” Jenny blinked at the tea tray. “You left us one cake each, Lou. Not well done of you.”
Louisa turned guileless green eyes on her sister. “You left me only four sandwiches, Jen.”
They all started laughing at the same time, then ordered more sandwiches and more cakes, while Eve wondered if she had the courage—and determination—to find herself a man who’d be a husband in name only.
***
“It’s like this.” Anthony lounged back in the chair behind the estate desk and steepled his fingers. “You aren’t poor, exactly, but you haven’t a great deal of cash.”
Deene paced the room, wondering if his own father had felt a similar gnawing frustration. “Give me figures, Anthony. The marquessate holds at least sixty thousand acres, and I have another ten thousand in my own name. There’s a soap factory in Manchester, a distillery on some Scottish island. How can I be poor?”
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