“A fortnight away from London will hardly diminish Princess Irina’s prospects,” Lady Langlevit replied tightly.
If Henry had any say in the matter, he’d suggest Irina’s stay in Essex extend to a month. Perhaps even the remainder of the spring months. Anything to keep her out of the paths of those idiotic men placing equally idiotic wagers.
“I shall accompany you,” Henry said. The draw of the countryside was too much to resist, especially right then, clustered together with a dozen or more other people in the receiving room.
“Oh, but that isn’t necessary,” his mother said. He shook his head.
“I have some visits of my own I need to see to,” he said, and at her curious stare, he propped one eyebrow. She answered it with a nod, their silent exchange finished.
It was one visit, really. Rose’s reply to his written proposal had arrived at Leicester Square the day before. It had been unfailingly polite, expressing surprise and gratitude, and quite unfortunately, a request to allow her time to consider the proposition. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Rose had never been the sort to jump into anything without first analyzing all avenues of possibility.
“I will ride alongside your carriage,” he said, already growing impatient for the departure.
“You are coming with us?”
Henry turned. His gaze landed first upon Irina’s clear, dark-blue eyes, then her dusky-pink lips, and finally upon the crimson dress she wore. There his eyes stayed, a beat too long, though plenty long enough for him to experience a twin surge of annoyance and lust. The dress was little more than a silk sheath hugging her body’s svelte curves, curves he felt entirely wrong to be noticing. The short sleeves sat off her shoulders, and while there were probably a number of women in attendance with the same style sleeves, certainly none of their shoulders were as naked as Irina’s. He pictured his fingers touching the velvet skin there, then his lips.
Henry swallowed another mouthful of whiskey to try and burn away the desire.
“I hope you are not opposed to the idea,” he managed to say, and in his attempt to avoid looking at her indecently bare shoulders, his eyes tripped to where the bodice of her dress gathered at her breasts in silky ripples. Breasts that mounded into two sumptuous rises that made his groin abominably tight.
“Of course not, Lord Langlevit,” she answered, her voice light and with a matching smile. Addressing him so formally only served to remind him of how informal she’d been on that balcony when she’d touched his arm and called him Henry.
Thankfully, dinner was announced, and before he could offer to escort Irina into the dining room, Lord Dinsmore swept in and offered his arm. Henry extended his arm to his mother, who accepted with an indulgent grin.
“I hope you are not fibbing about needing to pay visits in Essex,” she whispered as they walked.
“One visit, to be exact,” he replied.
“To someone I know?”
Henry exhaled, wondering for the hundredth time if he should tell her about his proposal. He’d wanted to wait until he had a solid answer from Rose.
“Yes,” he said. “And without specifics…it involves the marriage stipulation on the inheritance.”
He felt her pull on his arm, and then her body sagged against his. Henry stopped and braced her, to keep her from slipping down to the floor. “Mother? What is it? Is something the matter?”
She righted herself almost immediately, shaking her head and pressing a hand to her cheek. “Oh, I’m sorry. Just a little dizziness. How embarrassing. Please, it’s nothing.”
She wasn’t only speaking to Henry, but to all behind them, who had stopped short in alarm as well.
“Are you certain?” Henry asked, inspecting his mother’s color. Her cheeks were not flushed, but drawn, as if she’d been about to faint.
“I must have stood up too quickly from the sofa,” she said, again tugging his arm and indicating that they should carry on toward the dining room.
He relented, his grip tighter on her arm until he delivered her to her chair at the head of the table. Henry took his own seat at the opposite head of the table, his eyes shifting from his mother to Irina, seated just two chairs down from his on the right.
Her head was turned to the man at her right, and by the man’s smug grin, she was unleashing her illuminating smile upon him. The smile that brightened her eyes and crinkled the bridge of her pert little nose. The smile that showed one slightly turned incisor. A charming imperfection in an otherwise perfect countenance.
The soup course was delivered, and Irina had still not ceased conversing with her neighbor. They chattered like magpies, their heads bending toward one another. Marginally, yes, but noticeable. At least it was to Henry.
As he glanced around the table after their soup bowls were cleared away and the main course was presented, he saw that the other guests, each one conversing with their own neighbors, seemed unaware that Irina and the fop beside her were so openly flirting. Gibbons. That was his name. Sir Lawrence Gibbons.
Henry picked at his beef tenderloin, his gaze catching on his mother’s. She frowned at him and then flared her eyes a bit, as if to tell him to stop glowering. He felt the heavy expression on his face then and tried to lift it.
Irina laughed at something Gibbons said, and the prick of annoyance returned, as sharp as that little penknife she kept in her reticule. Gibbons was a good-looking man, only a handful of years older than Irina. Henry thought back to the betting book and the columns of names he’d seen. Had Gibbons been among them? He couldn’t recall. As a baronet and landed gentry, rather than a peer, a princess would indeed be a fine catch. His blood simmered anew.
“Princess Irina.” Henry heard his own voice cut down the table, slicing into the buzz of conversation. Mouths closed and eyes turned toward him, including those that had, thus far, not glanced his way. This was his punishment, he realized. He’d rebuffed her kiss on the balcony, and now she was attempting to ignore his presence.
“How are you enjoying the London season so far?” he asked. It was a bland question, one that would not elicit anything more than a bland answer, but at least it had worked to sever her conversation with Gibbons.
“I’m finding that I like London,” she said, pausing briefly to glance at Gibbons, “very much indeed.”
The bastard accepted the compliment with a lecherous smile. Henry throttled his fork.
“Do you not wish to return home to St. Petersburg? You’ve been away for years now,” Henry continued, wishing he could pick her up and carry her aboard a ship heading back to Russia right then and there.
She glanced at him coolly before again looking to the man at her right. “Not yet, my lord. I am rather taken with your city.”
What was the chit doing? She would make a spectacle of herself if she kept addressing Gibbons so openly, a man she had just met this evening, most likely when they sat down to the dinner table.
“Well, in that case, Your Highness, you really must not stay in Essex for too long,” Lady Vandermere put in. “It is such a pity that you must go so early in the season.”
Why the woman was so distraught over Irina’s plans to leave, Henry could not fathom. She did not have a son in want for a wife. Perhaps a nephew? Or, more likely, she was just a busybody matchmaker living vicariously through the young debutantes every season, especially as her own daughter remained woefully unattached.
“I enjoy London,” Irina replied. “However, even when I return from Essex, I do not intend to parade myself around with the sole hope of procuring a husband the way I might a side of beef.”
She gave a little laugh, though it was the only sound in the marked fall of silence. Even Lady Vandermere did not seem to know what to say. Henry watched Irina’s smile fall off and her eyes round a bit as she realized that what she’d meant in good humor had not been received as such.
“I only
mean to say that marriage should not be treated as if it were a commodity,” she said with a shrug, in an attempt to explain herself.
It only served to stiffen the backs of nearly every guest around the table.
“Marriage is a commodity, Your Highness,” Henry said, sitting forward and setting his fork down for good. “For those of our set, people must make connections that benefit not only our own positions but those of the tenant farmers who work our lands.”
Irina lifted her chin, as if in preparation of battle. Henry braced himself.
“I understand how your system works here in England—”
“Then you should understand that a loss of income or a poor match resulting in a lack of funds could devastate hundreds of families we are charged to protect and cultivate. I would have thought a young woman of your position would have learned that by now.”
The last cutting remarks had slipped out, born of pent-up anger and her flirtation with Gibbons, nothing more. He regretted the words the moment they were said, especially when the apples of Irina’s cheeks grew splotchy and the tips of her ears went red. He might have thought she was merely furious if not for the sheen of tears causing her eyes to glisten.
Oh hell.
“Thank you for that illuminating lesson, Lord Langlevit,” she said, her voice barely audible. She placed the napkin that had been in her lap upon the table, and a footman rushed forward to pull out her chair. “If you will excuse me, I am not feeling entirely well.”
The men around the table all shot to their feet, though none faster than Henry. He threw down his napkin, too, but as Irina whisked out of the dining room, her chin held just as high as before, he remained where he was. To rush out after her would have caused a display much larger than the one that had just passed.
He took his seat again and avoided his mother’s glare, spearing him from the opposite end of the table. He didn’t need to meet it to be able to feel it. The next few courses dragged by, held back, it seemed, by the mundane conversation that slowly filled the awkwardness of the princess’s departure and Henry’s poor temper with her.
She hadn’t meant anything by it, and yet he’d bit into her as if she’d disparaged the entirety of the English Crown. Because she’d been ignoring him. Flirting with another man.
Henry stood up the very moment the last guest finished their lingonberry torte and suggested the men retire to the billiards room. As they filed down the corridor to the gaming room, Henry did not intend to stay for more than one round. It was excruciating to carry out and he played badly, but once he excused himself and slipped out of the room, he felt a rush of warm anticipation loosen the muscles in his legs and back. He had to see her. Knew she would be furious and he’d have to apologize, but…he had to speak to her.
If she was not with the other women in the salon, he had a sneaking suspicion where he would be able to find her.
As he descended into the kitchens, footmen and kitchen maids bowed and bobbed, the maids gasping in surprise to find him trespassing in their realm. He did not often do so. But he’d remembered something from the time Irina had been staying at his Cumbria estate, when she’d been disappointed that a bundle of her sister’s letters had been nearly ruined in a drenching rain on their way up from Essex. Two had been destroyed, the ink having run into illegible blurs, and the other two were only partly intact. Irina had gone into the kitchens and convinced the cook with her tears to let her sit down there and eat an entire lemon curd pie. Henry had found her hours later, asleep on a bench, crumbs still on her cheek.
“Her Highness is in there, my lord,” a young kitchen maid whispered as she dropped into an untrained curtsy and pointed toward an arched doorway.
He nodded his thanks and entered.
She was seated on the table, which was set in the middle of the pantry, with her back to the door. Irina’s legs swung forward and back lazily, and in the light of the room’s simple, four-arm chandelier, he noticed she’d toed off her slippers. Henry heard the clinking of a spoon against a glass dish.
“How are the truffles?” he asked, and Irina jumped, twisting around to see him and receiving a glob of chocolate on her upper lip for it.
She set the plate and spoon down and wiped at her lip, turning away from him. Not fast enough, though. He’d seen the red rims of her eyes.
Damn it all to hell. She’d been crying.
“Irina,” he started to say, stepping into the room and closing the door behind him. The last thing he needed were servants peering in and listening around the corner. The wood of the door was a heavy slab and would muffle their voices well. Especially handy for when she shouted at him, which she was certainly going to do.
“Don’t,” she said, getting down from the table and gathering the hem of her dress so she could slip back into her shoes. “Please, just leave me alone.”
“I can’t. I need to apologize for how I acted.”
“Apologies won’t change anything. They are useless. Just like my being here,” she said and once slippered again, started for the door.
He was blocking her path and did not move.
“They aren’t useless, not when a person means them. And I do. I shouldn’t have spoken to you like—”
“Like I was a brainless ninny. How could you humiliate me that way?” Irina’s eyes flashed, and Henry suffered a cramp in his chest. He hadn’t wanted to humiliate her, and yet…he had.
“I meant it as humor,” she went on. “But I should have known better with all of you sitting there in your starched cravats, perched upon your high morals, blinded by your own importance—”
“Irina.”
“I don’t belong here; you’ve made that perfectly clear, Lord Langlevit. I don’t know London. I don’t know anything I thought I did—”
“Irina.” He took a step closer, trying to meet her fevered eyes, but they seemed to be pinned somewhere around his chest.
“You think I’m a fool, but I am no such thing.”
Every word out of her mouth was a fist closing tighter around his heart. “I do not think that.”
“I won’t pretend to be someone I’m not. I’ll say what I please and…and…”
And for the moment it appeared she had run out of steam.
Henry lifted his hand and touched one of her bare shoulders, his palm resting gently on her velvety skin. A hot sweep of blood coursed through his veins.
“I like that you say what you please,” he said, attempting to give her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. However, when it came time to pull his hand away, he couldn’t. Instead, his fingers trailed down her arm, lightly brushing the underside of her wrist.
“You weren’t pleased tonight,” she replied, her voice catching.
His other hand rose to her other shoulder, but instead of trailing down her arm again, Henry’s fingers drifted to her neck. Her skin was as soft and smooth as the silk of her dress.
“I am,” he murmured, his mind wandering as his eyes and fingers did, as well. He cupped her cheek. She was warm and so beautiful, and those cheeks were now flushed with passion from shouting instead of embarrassment.
“You’re pleased?” she asked, her eyes finally rising from where they’d been staring at his chest.
All Henry could see were her lips, forming that word. Pleased. Pleasure. He wanted it. Craved it. And before he could stop to think, he took it. Henry crushed his mouth to hers. The moment his lips made contact, the tight coil that had been twisting and twisting inside of him all evening snapped free. He surged forward, pressing her against the table. Irina’s lips parted on a soft sound of surprise, and without hesitation, Henry’s tongue delved past them. Instead of shyly retreating, she met him with equal fervor, matching his intensity beat for beat.
Passion.
She was brimming with it, her own tongue trying desperately to mimic and twine around his, her small hands wrappi
ng around his neck, her fingers spearing into his hair and anchoring him closer. He needed no further invitation. The determined press of her warm, wet mouth consumed his every thought and made him senseless. Heedless of anything but satisfaction.
Lost to a wild swell of lust, Henry swept his hands down her ribs and over her hips, and with a fast jerk, lifted her from the floor. He set her on the edge of the table, his mouth ravaging hers, relishing the sinful remnants of chocolate on her lips and her heated breath. Kissing Irina was like nothing he’d ever experienced. It was like racing through a summer thunderstorm—exhilarating and alarming in equal measure—and despite knowing the obvious danger, he only craved more. Henry felt as if he were falling into something warm and soft, and he wanted only to breathe her in, taste her, pleasure her with the same sweet torture barreling through him.
As he parted her thighs and shifted forward to place himself right at the crux of her, Irina’s answering moan made that snapped coil even looser. He pulled away from her mouth and nuzzled her neck, his tongue and teeth and lips skimming feverishly over her skin.
“Henry,” Irina sighed, her fingers pushing at the collar of his dinner jacket.
The sound of his name on her lips made him want to claim them again. Henry couldn’t decide which he liked more—the velvety soft skin of her throat or the chocolate glazed decadence of her lips.
Cupping her chin in his hands, he ran his thumb over her plump bottom lip and kissed her again. Gently this time. Sipping from her mouth and slowing his pace to something more tender, as she deserved. But Irina wanted no part of it. She tugged on his lapels and scraped his lip with her teeth. Her eyes met his, and desire shot through him in scalding bursts when she openly sought his mouth with hers. Matching his hunger equally, her uninhibited silken tongue stroked over his as if she, too, could not get enough of him. There were no walls, no pretenses in her desire. She met him with more honesty than any other woman ever had. He liked it. Far more than he should.
My Hellion, My Heart Page 7
