“I think that’s disgraceful,” harrumphed Lady Worley. “Everyone knows the sphere of womanhood is family and home. Filling a girl’s head with books and professional matters will only weaken her constitution and ruin her morals. It’s like creating a monster.”
“If that be the case, my lady,” Callista said through lips gone numb, “I’m sure you’d agree no man would be interested in such a monster as myself, for either wife or mistress. By your own logic, those rumors to which you referred must be mistaken.”
She stood tall and straight, gripping her hands together tightly to control the trembles racking her frame. At her back, she felt Lady Mildred, Lady Beatrice, and Lady Yarborough form a phalanx of support. It proved enough, finally, to wring a grudging grunt out of Lady Worley and force her to turn away.
The dragon had backed down.
For now.
After the entertainment of that little scene, the party soon broke up, ladies whispering behind fans and casting glances at Callista as they climbed into their carriages.
Dom didn’t want to part company with his beleaguered librarian. By her tight mouth and stiff back, he could tell her nerves were badly frayed. Plotting quickly, he dragged Uncle George over for respectable cover—as if that lusty old devil had anything respectable on his mind—and insisted on the two of them escorting Lady Mildred and Callista back to their home in the Avery carriage, to spare them the hackney ride.
Upon arrival at Bloomsbury Square, Lady Mildred for her part insisted “dear Rexton” and Sir George come in for sherry, to thank them for their kindness. The lady was convinced the unpleasantness at the musicale had already blown over. She’d never before heard a word breathed against her sweet great-niece and couldn’t imagine why Lady Worley would say such nasty things except that “Hortence had always been a horrid tittle-tattler.” In Callista’s immediate “Of course, Great-Aunt, I’m sure you’re right,” Dom read her wish to keep Lady Mildred in the dark about the gossip swirling around town.
The older couple finished their sherry in record time and excused themselves after Sir George expressed the most pressing desire to tour the back garden and see “dear Mildred’s glorious hair lit up in the setting sun.” The compliment had Callista rolling her eyes, but Mildred blushed like a schoolgirl and headed out the terrace doors with something suspiciously like a giggle.
“I see now where you get your charm, my lord.” Callista’s lips curled into a tired smile. She leaned forward on the threadbare sofa, sighing deeply and reaching up to rub her neck.
Dom’s hands itched to take up the task. He’d watched her battle Lady Worley from across the room, his gut twisting with the knowledge that he had to stay away or risk making things worse. He allowed himself to move onto the sofa to sit beside her and take her hands into his. Playing with those long and elegant fingers of hers had recently become an obsession.
“My charm pales, apparently, beside that of such a notorious and torrid seductress as you.” He aimed for a teasing tone, threading his fingers through her own.
But she put a shaky hand against his chest. “Please, don’t make fun. We both know I’m a plain and simple woman, Lord Rexton.” She held up the declaration and his title like a shield.
He barked his laughter, frustration clawing at his groin and at something that felt strangely like his heart. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, love, but there’s nothing either plain or simple about you. You can hide all you want behind that prim exterior, but I see you.” He cocked his head at her, puzzling over the fact himself. “I see who you really are. You’re smarter than most of these scholars you work with. You have a better business head than most of the booksellers. And if you weren’t so afraid of your passion, you’d have a far more vibrant beauty than the pretty society matrons I waste my time with. You have a fire within you, bright as your flame-colored hair, if only you’d let it out. That is who you are, Callista.”
She pulled away from his gaze as if afraid of beguilement and hugged her arms around her chest. “You sound like Marie.”
“Yes, she sees you too, love—but not the way I do.” He tried a smile, but it only seemed to terrify her.
“Don’t smile like that!” she ordered frantically, backing away on the sofa.
“Why not?” He slid toward her. “You make me happy.”
“That’s not your happy smile. That’s your Master of Love smile.” She spit it out like a curse. “It’s the one you use on the ladies when you’re being him and charming them until they melt into a puddle at your feet.” She pushed hard against his shoulders.
He refused to give ground and curled a hand around her face. “Are you afraid of what might happen if you melt into a puddle?” He stroked her flushed cheek and promised in his most wicked voice, “It can be quite a lovely sensation.”
“Dominick”—she used his name and rubbed against his hand, and he felt a shot of triumph that he’d pushed her so far from her propriety—“please, don’t flirt and call me ‘love’! Not when it means nothing. I don’t want you to be him with me. I like the other you.” She blurted it out and then stopped, as if hearing her own words, eyes wide.
It seemed a rejection more than a victory and pricked at his lifetime of shame. I don’t want you to be him. The brainless golden boy. But it was all he’d ever been.
He stood and turned his back. “I am who I am, Callista,” he said. “I can’t help how I look or how I smile. My apologies if it displeases you.”
God, what an irony, if the face that got him women he didn’t want cost him the one woman he did desire.
She rose and laid a hand on his shoulder, pursuing him now. If humiliation weren’t gnawing at him, he’d have taken advantage of her about-face and made her pay in full. “It’s not that!” she said. “It’s that you use your looks to hide who you are.”
“What do you know of such things, a prim spinster like you?” He loathed his sulky tone but seemed unable to stop it.
“I can see you as well, my lord Adonis. I’m not the only one hiding.” She dragged him around to face her, a growing anger snapping fire into her accusation. “You hide your intelligence and pretend to care for naught but society balls and seductions! Why is that?”
With a growl, he backed her up against the chamber’s near-empty bookshelf and kissed her. He had to stop her from talking, from saying things he wasn’t ready to hear. And he had to kiss her, damn it, because he wanted her more than he needed to breathe. He needed that mouth under his, and God, she felt so good. He crushed her body to his with one hand tight on her round derriere and the other palming her breast through her gown, rocking into that sweet V between her legs, knowing he was shocking her, pushing her too far too fast, but beyond stopping. Her scent filled his head like a long-forgotten memory of home. He felt her resistance and her response war with each other as he used every bit of his control and technique to force what he wanted out of her: surrender to the waves of pleasure he sent crashing over her.
“This. Is. Who. I. Am.” He ground out the words as he slanted his mouth across hers and lashed her with his tongue.
She broke away to twist her head to the side. “No, it’s not! It’s only part of what they’ve made you. You’re more. I want the real you!”
Her words scared him so much he let her go. She swayed on her feet, panting loud against the quiet ticking of the mantel clock.
He drew on a lifetime of skill to master his raging lust and pretend calm indifference. “What did you say, my little librarian?” he managed to say in his best aristocratic drawl.
She blanched and took hold of the bookshelf, her mouth tightening.
“Does the Honorable Miss Higginbotham finally admit she wants me? Have you fallen so low as to dally with the likes of me?” He hated the scorn in his voice and the shame he watched it etch onto her lovely open face. His contempt was for himself—not for her, never for her.
But he felt himself upon a precipice. He wanted her so much, it was all he could do to resist taking h
er right here in her shabby morning room. He paced about and seized blindly upon the only tack to distract him from such madness. “That was an interesting move at my sister’s—your trying to salvage your reputation by proclaiming your strange intellectual proclivities to all.”
She looked at him, frowning at his change of direction. He watched her work hard to master her breathing and gather her composure. “It did appear to work, at least for the moment,” she said. “And ‘strange’? Isn’t that a bit harsh, coming from the patron of a group of philosophers?”
“But you’re a female. People don’t expect such interests from a woman. It makes you a bit of an oddball, don’t you think, to let everyone know how interested you are in books and such?”
She blinked. “I suppose I am a bit odd.” Her shoulders stiffened up again, and her hands clenched into fists. “Many people certainly seem to think so.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?” He kept his voice light, but suddenly nothing mattered so much as this question. It was somehow the key, he sensed, to the quandary tying him in such knots. How could it not bother her? How could she make a life, craft a self, where it did not bother her?
She cast him a hurt glance. “There’s no shame in a love of books, and my parents believed that to be true for girls as well as boys. It’s who I am,” she said simply. “If people can’t accept me, I simply ignore them.”
“But that strategy doesn’t work, does it?” he asked persistently, coming to a stop in front of her. He rubbed a thumb pad across the bow of her wet top lip—that sweet curve constituted another recent obsession. The woman seemed never to allow herself the easy way out with a smooth lie, even when the truth left her vulnerable and open in a way that terrified him. He knew himself a coward compared to her, pretending to be someone he wasn’t by donning the Master of Love mask and, when he did act true to himself, hiding it behind an anonymous mask so no one would know it was him. She, however, seemed unable to do anything but reveal herself as she was, even when the ridicule of society followed. Lord knew he admired her courage—the woman could beard lions in their den. To his shame, he also felt a stab of resentment for how it threw his own cowardice into such sharp relief. “People refuse to accept you as a lady book dealer. That’s why they’re besmirching your reputation and shunning your trade. You make your family suffer; you could all end up in the poorhouse as a result.”
She stood trembling under his touch as the blood drained from her face. Her silver eyes were huge and smudged against the stark porcelain of her cheeks. “Why are you saying this?” she whispered.
He knew he was prodding too hard, thrusting a hot poker into her sorest wound, yet he couldn’t stop. How could she do what she did, live true to her ideals—when he couldn’t? “Because you should have hid your intelligence long ago and used it to find a gentleman to marry who’d support your sister and Lady Mildred! Wouldn’t that have been smarter than getting you all thrown into the street?”
A sheen of tears appeared. “You’re being cruel.”
“Perhaps. But it’s true, isn’t it?” he retorted, staring down at her. “Can you deny any of it?”
“No.” She swallowed hard. “I cannot deny the worldly wisdom of what you say. But I chose instead not to deny who I am, to be true to myself and what I believe to be right.”
“That decision may be the ruin of you all.” A bitter demon drove him now. He felt her example pushing him toward something he wanted but feared. He bridled at the envy she made him feel. “You’ve already missed the point when you could’ve married. Now your reputation is too far gone and your eccentricities too obvious.”
A tear did fall then, and she bit her lip. “We’re not ruined yet.” She stood ramrod straight before him, defending herself to him and, he knew, to herself.
He’d had the same inner debates for years—for an eternity it seemed—yet he’d never found a way to defeat the voice of self-doubt and shame he cudgeled her with now. How did she, this slip of a woman, do it?
She cleared her throat against a quaver. “The world is not all as shallow and judgmental as you say. I’ve found some new clients. There are those who accept me for who I am, people of worth whom I admire, like your circle in the Philosophical Society. Those men and their wives accept me, as does your sister and perhaps Lady Beatrice.” Her chin wobbled again as uncertainty entered her eyes. “Don’t they?”
Words choked within him—so much he wanted to say, so much he knew not how to express.
She misread his hesitation. “Did any of them say otherwise to you? Is that why you’re going on like this?” And then she gasped. “Your sister’s decided to blackball me, hasn’t she, because of that scandal at her party!”
It was too much for her. She turned and buried her face in her hands as her shoulders shook silently.
He’d won.
He’d covered her in the humiliation and insecurity he’d felt his whole life over his failure to live as his true self.
And he felt the lowest slime for doing it.
Which meant—he suddenly realized—he was wrong.
He was wrong, so wrong, to treat Callista this way. His father had been wrong for doing it to him. And Callista was right to live as she did, true to her nature. With a little help to make the right connections, she could make a reasonable go of it and keep her family in sufficient comfort.
Which meant that despite his face, despite his lothario reputation cultivated over a lifetime, he might be able to do it as well.
Be true to himself.
Maybe.
“Callista, listen.” He clasped his hands around her shoulders, but she shook him off with a choked sound. “My sister’s on your side; none of them have said anything against you. You’re right to live as you do. You are making it work. And I can help.”
“I don’t want your help!” She twirled around and pushed against his chest. “All you care about are these questions of reputation and the games of seduction you play. I won’t be toyed with anymore!” She advanced against him with another hard push. “Who are you?” she cried. “What do you want?”
He reached for her again, but she tore herself from his grasp and ran from the room.
He was left alone, staring at his hands, her questions ringing in his ears.
Who was he? What did he want?
His parents and tutors and all of polite society had drilled into him from childhood that he was what his face fated him to be. He could be no more.
But now he wanted Callista. And he very much feared the only way to have her was to shed the mask.
The problem was that while he’d grown to hate it, he knew no way to live without it.
The week after Lady Yarborough’s ill-fated musicale, commissions started to roll in for Callista: scholarly and foreign book orders from the Cambridge crowd; a stream of philosophy titles from Messrs. Plumptre, Claremont, and associates; and even a fair number of novels and forbidden French love stories from some ladies.
She knew the orders must have come from Dominick’s influence but was unable to ask him. He stayed away from the library and, as best she could tell, was rarely home at all, save sometimes to meet with his protégé the instructor Mr. Thompson. The luncheons came to an abrupt end. She saw Dominick only for the briefest interchanges in the hall—chillingly polite—when he returned in the evenings on days she’d stayed to work late.
He was avoiding her.
She told herself she was glad.
As for the book orders, it galled her to accept them. But she’d fallen so far behind with their creditors, she had no choice. The family finances were desperately shaky. To refuse the commissions simply to spite Dominick would be tantamount to shutting down her trade and sending her family to the poorhouse. Although it wounded her deeply to accept assistance from one as iniquitous as he, she sent out confirmations on all the orders. Then, after returning from work and supping with her family, she lit her tallow candle—to save on the cost of lamp oil and because they’d long ago given
up beeswax—and sat up deep into the night writing out commissions and invoices, renewing contact with their book dealers on the Continent. She worked till her eyes could focus no more.
Beatrice paid a call. Callista returned it and took both Beatrice and Marie into her confidence about the rumors concerning her reputation. From her friends’ different sources, they pieced together that Callista’s situation had stirred up quite a debate about whether an unmarried young gentlewoman could be excused from the requirements of full chaperonage and pursue professional trade without being suspected of unsavory conduct. Lady Yarborough was mounting a strong defense on her behalf, but opinion swung both ways in the drawing rooms and ballrooms of polite London. Bets, Callista shuddered to hear, had been placed in the men’s clubs on whether she would continue to be received in polite society.
Fresh rumors sprang up as well. Lady Barrington appeared at balls sporting a stunning diamond necklace and spreading new stories about Lord Adonis. The necklace, she hinted, was his last-ditch effort to win her hand. The lady, however, was reported as saying with a laugh, “The man has become really too tiresome and not at all like his old self. That odd woman book dealer in his employ, it turns out, truly is a respectable spinster librarian with whom he consults about the collection. Books are apparently the Master of Love’s new passion! Can one credit anything so ludicrous?”
One morning, the post brought two startling letters at once: the first, a highly reputable banker’s offer to advance her a loan on favorable terms for the capital expansion of her trade, and the second, an inquiry from a lawyer handling a large estate sale asking whether she’d be interested in first rights of acquisition to the estate’s excellent library. She had to sit down, almost dizzy with excitement, when she got to the part of the letter detailing the collection’s Gutenberg Bible and other incunabula, finer by all reports than specimens in the library of the British Museum. It would be a significant coup to handle the sale of this beautiful Bible, the first major book printed after Gutenberg’s invention of the press. Only a few dozen copies still existed in the world. It and the other fifteenth-century books in the collection were among the earliest ever printed. She’d been unable to purchase anything at auction or estate sales for many months, as she had no capital to work with and refused to endanger the family by buying on credit. She agonized over what to do, as the letters must have originated through Dominick—just how much power did a well-connected viscount have?—and to take up their offers would render her very indebted to him. But in the end, both offers were too wonderful for the book dealer in her to refuse.
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