by Eloisa James
“What did he look like?”
“I hardly noticed. The room is poorly lit, and he is nondescript, really. It’s not that important,” she said shakily. “I know what they think of me. I know—” Her eyes filled with tears again and she groped for the handkerchief, forgetting she had it. It fell to the ground, and without thinking she bent to pick it up. And stopped with a small oof as her corset almost sliced her in half.
Mayne plucked it from the ground with an easy sweep. “What on earth?” he said, and then glanced about. “We’re far too public here.”
“Could we possibly leave the ball altogether?” Josie said. “I—I am not having a pleasant evening.” But then she remembered his fiancée. “Yet Sylvie will wonder where you are.”
Mayne’s whole face lit up when he smiled. “May I say how happy I am to hear you use her first name? And of course I shall take you away. Sylvie is, as I’m sure you recognized immediately, a singularly self-sufficient woman. She actually came to the ball with another party. My only fear is that she has little use for me at all, and she certainly won’t notice if I disappear.”
“That can’t be true,” Josie said. If Mayne were her fiancé—though the thought was inconceivable, because of course he was far too old—she would never let him out of her sight. The thought made her feel a little queer in the stomach, so she allowed Mayne to tuck her hand under his arm and concentrated on making her smile as rigid as her back.
They walked through the crowd at a leisurely pace. They were only stopped once, by Lady Lorkin, who put a thin hand on Mayne’s arm and crooned something to him.
She glanced once at Josie, but didn’t bother to greet her. Mayne bent toward her and she breathed something in his ear. Her eyes were bright and avid, like a child who sees a puppy running free on the lawn.
Mayne laughed a low, intimate kind of chuckle and murmured something. Then he gently removed Lady Lorkin’s hand from his sleeve and they walked on. After that Josie noticed the way women kept turning to look at Mayne, their eyes dancing over him in a manner that made her acutely aware of how prized he was. And yet Sylvie, who had won him, didn’t mind if he disappeared for a while. It was an odd fact of life, she had to suppose.
“We should find Griselda,” Mayne said, looking about. “After all, she is your chaperone and I must tell her that we are fleeing.”
“No!” Josie said, remembering suddenly that Griselda was presumably carrying out Sylvie’s order that she seduce Darlington. “Absolutely not.”
“Why not?” Mayne said. “Isn’t my sister a good chaperone?”
“Of course she is. I simply wouldn’t wish to bother her,” Josie said weakly.
“There’s a great deal that I do not understand about you, Miss Josephine Essex,” Mayne said. “I suppose I can send her a note. A young lady should not trot away from a ball without informing her chaperone, you know. The chaperone might well assume the worst.”
“Not if I’m with you,” Josie pointed out.
“While your confidence in me is touching, I can assure you that there is many a mama in the room who would not wish her daughter to gallivant out of a ball by my side.”
“Don’t be foolish, Mayne. I’m the woman least able to be compromised at this ball.”
He raised an eyebrow but scratched a note on his card and told a footman to give it to Griselda. “Where would you like to go?” he asked once they were seated in his carriage. It was a gorgeous little vehicle, a dark glossy red picked out with his coat of arms on the door.
“Anywhere.”
Mayne was eyeing her in a peculiar way. “It would be thoroughly improper, but—”
“No one will believe I’m doing anything improper.” She said it flatly, because it was true.
“In that case,” Mayne said with a wolfish grin, “welcome to my parlor, young lady.” He rapped on the roof, shouting “Home, Wiggles!”
“Wiggles?” Josie said, feeling better the moment the carriage started to move away from the ball. “Wiggles?”
Mayne grinned at her. “Presumably the son of Papa Wiggles…one day the proud father of William Wiggles, Wilfred Wiggles, and perhaps even a Wilhelmina Wiggles.”
Josie smiled back, rather wanly. “Your house?” she asked. “Do you live in this vicinity?”
“All of two blocks away,” Mayne said, and even as he spoke the carriage slowed. “You will be unchaperoned, but I assure you that my house is absolutely awash with servants.”
“More to the point, you’re in love with Sylvie,” Josie said.
“That fact will likely curb any fiendish plans I have for your ravishment,” Mayne agreed.
She scowled at him. “Don’t you dare make fun of me, Garret Langham.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
She stared at him a moment, eyes narrowed, but his face looked genuinely surprised. “I know that I am not to anyone’s taste when it comes to ravishment. There is no possible way anyone would ever think that you had such plans—you, the man who has slept with every beautiful woman in London—so we can dispense with worries about my reputation.”
A butler was holding the door open, and Mayne swept her up and into the house without a word. “Ribble, we’ll have champagne in the turret. Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin, old and cold, if you please.”
“The lamps aren’t lit, my lord,” said the butler.
“Not a problem, Ribble. I’ll see to it.”
Josie was struggling out of her pelisse. Mayne scowled at her again and then snatched it from her shoulders, handing it to a footman.
“Do you have a turret? How lovely!” she said, trying to avoid questions about why she was so awkward.
“Would you like something to eat?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“I’m feeling peckish, so you’ll forgive me for eating something, I trust. I’m afraid that Rafe made a mistake by asking Fortnam and Mason to cater his wedding ball. Did you see the sandwiches stamped with huge H’s for Holbrook?”
Josie shook her head again. She never allowed herself to eat in public, thinking it would simply fuel the talk about her waistline.
“Stamped in liver paste,” Mayne said, taking her arm and heading up the stairs. “Looked as terrible as they tasted. Bring us something delicious for a light supper, Ribble, if you would.”
They walked up the stairs, past the main floor and through a small door. Mayne pulled a tinderbox from a small shelf, and so Josie saw the room in the flickering light of a small flame. The ceiling was domed and painted deep blue with faded gold stars. The walls were paneled, and painted with curious winding vines on which grew an occasional rose. The only furniture in the room was a small chaise longue, two cozy chairs, and a tea table. High on the walls there were small windows, eight of them for each of the eight sides. Moonlight filtered down into the room in a lazy kind of way that made the vines on the wall look charmingly mysterious.
“Oh, this is lovely!” Josie said, clasping her hands. “It’s utterly magical.”
Mayne was lighting one of the Argand lamps attached to the wall. “You’ve discovered its secret,” he said, laughter running through his voice.
“It must be the only turret outside the Tower in the whole of London,” Josie said. “How on earth did it survive the great fire?”
“Oh, this house isn’t that old,” Mayne said. “My grandfather had a daughter whom he loved very much, by the name of Cecily. Aunt Cecily was born early, before she should have been. Apparently she was lame from birth and had weak lungs as well. She loved nothing more than to read books. She fancied herself a princess, you see, and this was the perfect chamber from which to be kissed into wakefulness.”
“She was absolutely right. Was she wakened?”
“Unfortunately, Cecily died before I was born.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“There were no other children in the family for years, until finally my father arrived. He loved her more, he said, than his own mother, because he spent hours and hou
rs of his boyhood here, listening to her tales of knights, dragons, and fanciful monsters. You see, she had some of her stories painted on the walls.”
He held up a lamp, and sure enough when Josie looked closely at the twining vines, a small unicorn with a curious smile was dancing up the vine, and hanging insouciantly from one hand was a small boy. “My father,” Mayne said, touching the little imp. Josie recognized that mop of wild hair and the aristocratic nose, even in a youthful version.
Josie longed to ask when his father died, but didn’t dare.
“He died some ten years ago,” Mayne told her.
“Oh dear,” she said, taking his arm.
“He told me many of Cecily’s stories,” he said. “And Griselda remembers even more than I do.”
He put the lamp down rather abruptly on the small table. “Are you able to sit down in that contraption you’re wearing?”
Josie felt a flood of pink coming up her neck. “Yes, of course,” she said, striving for a casual tone. But she could hardly mention the word corset in front of him.
“Is it a corset?” he asked.
“That’s none of your business!” she snapped, sitting on the edge of her seat. She couldn’t sit back; the corset was let in with clever little grommets around her bottom so that she had just enough space to sit elegantly, as long as she kept her legs close together.
Mayne threw himself into the chair opposite her. He was all broad shoulders and strong legs, and he looked utterly comfortable. “How can you stand that?” he asked with some curiosity. Before she could answer, there was a scratch at the door and he shouted, “Enter!”
Josie bit her tongue as footmen brought in champagne and a tray of food. In fact, she waited until she had a glass of cool, apple-bitter champagne in her hand to give her courage, and then she said, with just the right air of sophistication, “Ladies never discuss their undergarments with gentlemen, Mayne.”
“But you and I are friends.”
“We are not friends!”
“Yes, we are.” He was grinning at her, and there was something in his eyes that was very hard to resist. “I assure you that you are the only lady of my acquaintance ever to ask me to take part in a farce like that you arranged in Scotland. You must be a friend, because I’d be afraid to make you my enemy.”
“You mean when Annabel’s horse bucked?”
He threw back his head and laughed. “Annabel’s horse didn’t just buck, you little witch! You put something under that poor nag’s saddle to make it dance in the air.”
“It was in a good cause,” Josie protested, feeling a smile curl her lips. “I merely thought that if Ardmore was scared for Annabel’s life, he might realize that he was in love with her.”
“He had realized that all on his own,” Mayne said. “A man comes to that sort of insight slowly, believe me.”
Josie felt the champagne slide down her throat. It was reckless, delicious, sitting here in a gorgeous little jewel-box of a room with one of the most desired men in London for company. It made her feel sophisticated. As if she, Josephine Essex, weren’t the least desirable debutante on the market. She pushed the thought away and drank more champagne. “How did you realize you were in love with Sylvie?” she asked boldly.
His face changed the moment she said Sylvie’s name. Naturally, she felt a fierce pang of envy; who wouldn’t? To tame a man of Mayne’s reputation, and to tame him so thoroughly that his eyes almost changed color when one’s name was mentioned…what a feat.
“I walked into a ball in Terence Square,” he said. “I had no intention of going, to be truthful. Lucius was out of town, and Rafe was rusticating in the country. I had just returned from our trip to Scotland—and if my sister lost her breakfast one more time in my company, I had vowed to disown the family and flee to Moscovy. At any rate, I came straight to London, and of course there were a hundred invitations. I’d lived so long in those benighted rags that Rafe calls clothes that I felt like being splendid. Do you know what I mean?”
Josie shook her head. For her, going to a ball was an agonizingly tedious process of strapping and lacing and wiggling into clothes that felt too small. Being worried that she would sweat in them, that she would have to bend over, that she wouldn’t be able to survive without a trip to the privy.
She could feel Mayne eyeing her corset again, but thankfully he didn’t say anything.
“As it happened, the Queen was receiving that afternoon. So I went to the Drawing Room. There was the usual flock of debutantes waiting to be received, and there, just in the middle, was an exquisite woman. I knew immediately that she was French, of course. It wasn’t her voice, but the way she carried herself. There’s nothing common about a Frenchwoman, do you know what I mean, Josie?”
Josie had probably read a few too many French romances for her own good. “Do you mean that Frenchwomen aren’t loose?” she asked dubiously.
“Oh, they misbehave with true joie de vivre. But they never look at a man with an invitation in their eyes,” he said, stretching his feet out. His legs went so far across the small floor that his feet almost touched her slippers. “They wait for a man to approach them, or they shrug them off. Do you see the difference?”
Josie thought about the eager way that Lady Lorkin’s eyes had skated over Mayne’s face. She took another swallow of champagne. It was a vastly improper thing to say, but: “Lady Lorkin, one must assume, is not of Gallic origin.”
She was rewarded by a snort of laughter. “Not a bit of it.”
“Are you carrying on an affaire with her?”
The laughter died in his eyes immediately. “I am affianced to Sylvie.”
“I didn’t mean to imply—”
But he wasn’t angry anymore. “I did have a tryst with her, some three years ago now. I’m afraid that she may have built it into a treasured memory.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
He looked faintly embarrassed. “I feel like an ass even saying such a thing in front of a young lady.”
“I may be young, but I’m not stupid. And if you remember, one of my sisters was engaged to you, so I’m fully aware of your scandalous background.”
His eyes fell and he was studying his boots again. “I should never have stood up Tess at the altar—”
“Not only that but you almost had an affaire with my other sister,” Josie interrupted. She was feeling blissful, for the first time since the season began. She grinned at him. “You spell nothing but trouble for the Essex sisters. We shall all be very glad when Sylvie ties you up nice and tight at the altar.”
“Unfair!” he protested. “All the Essexes have married without a protest from me. And I did not have an affaire with Imogen.”
“I know that,” Josie said smugly. “Though not for lack of trying on her part.”
He looked startled at this but said nothing.
“Why didn’t you allow her to seduce you?” Josie asked, holding out her glass so he could fill it again. “Imogen is very beautiful. She was widowed, so there wasn’t a husband to worry about. What on earth stopped you?”
“Do you think that I just gallivant around London, sleeping with any woman who throws me a lure?”
Josie thought about it for a moment. “Yes.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“If you’d had world enough and time…” she said mischievously.
“No, you little devil, that scrap of poetry won’t work. Marvell says his lady might remain coy if they had world enough and time—”
“The coy Mayne,” Josie said, interrupting him again. “Ah Mayne, how the ton has misjudged you! Why, you’ll hardly credit it—” she opened her eyes wide—“but they seem to think you are the greatest seducer of women ever to grace the ton.”
“Well, I’m not,” Mayne said sharply, draining his glass and filling it again.
He seemed a bit peevish, so Josie dropped the subject. There was nothing worse than being nagged about one’s bad traits. It was so much more pleasant to pretend they
didn’t exist. Like overeating. She was going to eat one of those delicious sandwich squares, even given that she had sworn that very morning never to eat again.
She leaned forward from the waist, carefully, reached out for a sandwich and bumped Mayne’s hand. He was smiling at her, and suddenly Josie knew to the bottom of her toes why all those London ladies made fools of themselves over him. He must be well over thirty years old, but his eyes had a devilish smile in them that made her feel—
She dropped the sandwich as if it stung her.
Mayne was already sprawled back in his chair, but he bent forward and picked it up for her. “I’m afraid of what would happen if you tried to lean farther forward,” he remarked.
She scowled at him and edged back in her chair.
“So are you going to tell me what you’re wearing?” he asked, eating half the small sandwich in one bite.
It was all so easy for him. Women falling at his feet, and not a bit of guilt no matter what he ate. It just wasn’t fair. “No, I am not going to talk about my undergarments.”
“You look absurdly uncomfortable,” Mayne cheerfully observed.
Josie ate a bite of her sandwich. It was wonderful, a burst of salmon flavor with a touch of cucumber. “Your chef is marvelous,” she said when she finished.
Mayne leaned forward, grabbed two more for himself and one for her. “Don’t forget your champagne,” he said. “Champagne was designed by God to go with smoked salmon.”
There was a moment’s reverent silence while they both ate. Then Mayne emptied the last of the champagne bottle into Josie’s glass. “Have we drunk all that?” she asked, slightly alarmed.
“No, it was half empty when opened,” he said sarcastically. “If you won’t talk to me about your undergarments, will you talk to Sylvie about them?”
“Certainly not!” Josie squeaked, picturing his slender fiancée.
“One of your sisters, then?”
“Naturally, Imogen took me to her very own modiste, a Frenchwoman,” she added pointedly. “Madame Badeau. I have entirely new clothing for the season, and while you may not approve, I assure you that Madame Badeau is the very best modiste in London.”
