by Eloisa James
“It’s right there,” Willa said, “but your wrapper is downstairs to be mended, I’m afraid. Oyster dragged it from the bed and snagged the fabric.”
“Oyster!” Eleanor said. He raised his head groggily and gave her a little woof before subsiding again. “Has he been outside lately?”
Willa frowned. “Perhaps I should take him for a walk as well, my lady.”
“I can put myself to bed, Willa, if you would just bring him up later.”
Willa let herself out and Eleanor returned to Shakespeare’s sonnets, which probably everyone in the world had read except for her. That fact made it all the more disconcerting to discover that she couldn’t make head or tail of most of them.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments, she read. And then read it again. An impediment was an obstacle. It made her feel a little sad, really. She and Gideon had been a marriage of true minds until an impediment came along.
She and Villiers spent their time jousting with each other, whereas she and Gideon had thought as one. They had talked for countless hours and agreed on everything, though all these years later, she couldn’t remember what those discussions were about.
He belived dueling was a terrible sin, she remembered that. Of course she agreed. There was no point to dueling. It was dangerous.
She dragged herself back to the sonnet. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.
This line was even harder. Alteration? Could Shakespeare be talking about getting older? So love is not love if a man stops loving his wife because her hair turns gray. Her love for Gideon would never have faltered if he lost his beauty. Or bends with the remover to remove.
Again, unreasonably difficult, she thought. Just who was the remover?
The thing that made her uneasy, though, was that first line. She kept reading it over and over. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. True love doesn’t admit impediments. Gideon’s father’s will had been an impediment. And Gideon obviously admitted the impediment.
Had he not loved her?
The water was growing cold. She climbed out and grabbed the towel Willa had left. Why was she going over all this old ground? But she knew why. She had to put Gideon out of her mind, fold away her memories of feverish love.
Ada was gone. But that didn’t mean Gideon wanted to marry her, that he loved her the way she had loved him.
She couldn’t delude herself any longer. Love was not love when it admitted impediments. When it bent with the remover to remove. Gideon had bent to his father’s will.
It would be far better to marry Villiers. Their relationship was not as heady, not as romantic—but what emotion they had was real.
She and Villiers would never fool themselves into thinking they had a marriage of true minds. It would be a different kind of marriage. That of true bodies.
Willa brought Oyster back; after an energetic tail-wagging wiggle, the better to show how much he missed her, he collapsed back on the floor and Willa left for the night. A moment later Oyster shot up and launched himself at the curtains covering the door leading to the balcony.
Eleanor found herself smiling. Villiers must have returned from dinner. He was likely sitting in one of those armchairs, looking at the stars. She looked down at herself. Her towel didn’t cover much more of her legs than Villiers’s had his.
But then, she liked her legs. They were shapely. And she and Villiers were getting married, after all. She tucked the towel more securely around her breasts, loving the feeling that she was playing with fire, and walked to the door, hushing Oyster.
It was pitch-dark outside. Oyster started barking again, so she scooped him up, almost losing her towel, and stepped outside.
“Is anyone out here?” she called cautiously.
“Ah, my princess!” came a response.
Eleanor fell back a step.
“She appears before me like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver.” Roland’s head came into view at the top of the balcony railing.
Oyster gave an aggressive little woof. Apparently he didn’t care for poetry.
She had to admit that Roland spoke verse beautifully. “Oh, hello,” she said, taking another step backwards toward the door to her room and wishing desperately that she had her wrapper. “Are you quite—”
He interrupted her. “She has the beauty of a virgin! She has never defiled herself. She has never abandoned herself to men, like the other goddesses.”
Oyster barked again, and Eleanor felt like joining him. “That’s—ahem—very kind of you,” she managed. Never mind the fact it wasn’t true. “Are you on a ladder, Sir Roland?”
“Certainly,” Roland said, making no effort to climb onto the balcony. “I am acting out my play for you.”
“Don’t tell me you’re standing on a silk ladder!” she exclaimed. “Please do come onto the balcony, Sir Roland. I’m worried for your safety.”
“It’s made of wood,” he said. “Now if you’ll allow me to gather my thoughts…” There was silence for a moment and then he intoned in such a booming voice that she jumped, “The night is fair in the garden, and my princess has eyes like amber.” He flung out a hand and gestured to the sky. “How strange the moon looks! Like the hand of a dead woman seeking to cover herself with a shroud.”
Eleanor looked up, but the moon looked pretty much the same as usual to her, and it had never included dead women or shrouds. In fact, that comment was in fairly poor taste, given the news about Ada…but then Roland hadn’t been there during dinner. But surely he was told when he arrived for the musicale why she had retired early.
He ascended another rung. Now she could see him from the waist up. His eyes were burning with excitement. Or desire.
That made her feel rather pleased, but unfortunately not at all as if she’d like to pull him to her, the way she felt when Villiers issued one of his sardonic jibes.
And yet Roland really was beautiful. In the light that fell from the windows behind her, he looked like the prince from an old fairy tale, climbing the tower to rescue a princess.
“Thy body is white like the snows that lie on the mountains of Judea, and come down into the valleys,” he said. Eleanor could feel her cheeks getting a little warm. She refused to glance down at her bare legs, but of course her body was white. Why wouldn’t it be?
“The roses in the garden of the Queen of Arabia are not so white as thy body,” Roland said feverishly. “Nor the feet of the dawn when they light on the leaves, nor the breast of the moon when she lies on the breast of the sea…”
“Too many breasts,” came a deadpan voice at her left shoulder.
Eleanor jumped and uttered a little scream. “Villiers!” Then she looked back at the poet. “Don’t mind him, Sir Roland.”
But Roland wasn’t there any longer. “Oh, no!” she cried, dropping Oyster and running forward. Sure enough, the ladder was slowly swinging away from the house, the poet clinging to the top of it.
“He’ll be all right,” Villiers said.
“No, he won’t! He might—he might—”
The ladder gained speed as it went down and finally crashed. There was a sound of splintering wood. Eleanor peered into the dark, trying to figure out where Roland had landed.
“Help, someone!” she shrieked. “Go see what happened! Go get help. Don’t just stand there—are you laughing?”
“Of course not, princess. Just wait a moment. Your swain liveth.”
She couldn’t see exactly what was happening, but someone was cursing and it sounded like Roland.
“I estimate that he landed in the raspberry bushes,” Villiers said. “He probably hit them dead on. Not good for his clothing. Or,” he added thoughtfully, “delicate parts of his anatomy. But the good news is that he landed rump down rather than the other way around.”
“Sir Roland!” Eleanor called, ignoring the jaundiced commentary at her shoulder. “Are you all
right?”
There were thrashing noises.
“Do you want help? Shall I call someone?”
A door had opened onto the gardens now, and a couple of servants were cautiously emerging.
“Go help Sir Roland out of the raspberry bushes,” she called over the balcony.
They peered up at her and then set out across the lawn.
“Why don’t you go help?” she asked crossly, turning to Leopold.
“I’m holding up your towel,” he said. She could just barely see his smile in the light from the doorway. If Roland looked like a troubadour, Villiers looked like Lucifer himself, all dark shadows and pure lust.
He dropped the grip he had on the back of her towel and fell back a step. All of a sudden she could feel the place where his hand had touched her skin, burning as if he had branded her.
Below them, Roland was being hauled out of the raspberry bushes. Eleanor tore her eyes away from Villiers and tucked her towel more securely around her. “Sir Roland, are you quite all right?” she called, turning to lean out over the balcony.
He was limping across the lawn, supported by one of the footmen. A lock of hair had fallen over his face, making him look like a beautiful, fallen warrior.
“Your poetry is sublime,” Eleanor called, hoping Villiers would keep himself out of sight. “I’m so sorry that you were startled and the ladder slipped.”
“I was pushed,” he said.
Eleanor blinked. “Oh, no, I assure you—”
“Pushed by words!”
“Words?” she repeated.
She couldn’t see Villiers. She couldn’t hear him or feel him. But she knew that he was shaking with laughter.
“The force of sarcasm pushed me from the perch of love.”
“Ah. Well…”
“They jest at scars that never felt a wound.” He limped past and into the house without another word. She was still bent over the balcony, looking down, when a large male body encircled hers from behind.
He was warm, burning…hard…strong. She suddenly felt, as if through his body, the provocative tilt of her bottom as she leaned over the balustrade. Where his body touched hers, she felt the impress of his desire, as if she were experiencing her curves through his skin.
“You could drive a man insane,” Leopold said. His lips were on her neck, but it wasn’t his lips that she felt most acutely. She wriggled against him. “Don’t move.” His voice grated in her ear but she moved anyway, straightening.
He allowed her, of course. She turned around, hitching up her towel once again. “Now I know why women wear such large panniers,” she said.
“To repel their admirers?”
“Precisely. Now if you’ll forgive me, I shall retire for the night.”
He caught her hand. “Are you marrying me?”
“I thought—”
“What?”
“I thought,” she said, picking her words carefully, “that you were rather admiring of Lisette, and might wish to make her your duchess. And I say that without prejudice, Leopold, as one intelligent person to another. I hope we can speak to each other without tempests of emotion.”
His smile was all the more welcome for being so rare. “You are an unusual woman, Eleanor. Though I don’t think I like that name.”
“Tell me it’s heavy and I’ll push you directly off the balcony.”
“Maybe I’ll take a leaf from the poor poet’s book and call you princess.”
“I’m no princess,” she said, laughing. “Though my mother tells me that you live in a castle.”
“Since I never go to that particular estate, you’d have to settle for my other houses.”
She laughed as if he’d made a joke, because there was something odd about his voice that didn’t welcome any further questions.
“I will admit, then, that I’m torn between the two of you,” he said abruptly.
Something in her heart, in her chest, in her stomach—somewhere—fell with a resounding thump. She managed to keep her voice light and even. “Between myself and Lisette?”
“I am persuaded that she would be a truly superb mother for my children. She seems to have no regard whatsoever for the circumstances of their birth, either in the way she treats them here, in her house, or in her daily work with orphans.”
“I have never known Lisette to display the least prejudice toward any sort of person,” Eleanor said, adding, “Though she is quite unreasonable toward dogs.”
Villiers smiled. “Poor Oyster has not made an admirer there, it’s true.”
Eleanor thought that the way people acted toward dogs, especially innocent puppies, said a great deal about them, but she held her tongue.
“But then when I think about marrying you,” Villiers said, his voice deepening, “well…”
“You think about bedding me,” Eleanor said.
He didn’t move toward her, but the flame that was always between them suddenly leaped higher. “It’s impossible not to do so,” he said. “I think about you first thing in the morning when I wake, and last thing at night. And,” he added thoughtfully, “a good deal in between as well.”
All Eleanor could think of was dropping the towel and moving toward him. But she had succumbed to pleasure before, and it had ended in heartbreak. Not that she could ever love Villiers the way she had loved Gideon, but she must have learned something from her mistakes. Hadn’t she?
She should return to her room. She didn’t move.
“There’s something about the way you move, the way you laugh, the way you snap at me that I find—appealing,” Villiers said.
He was making her sound like a warmed-over apple tart.
“Yet I swore to myself that I would find the best mother possible for my children. This evening, Lisette was wonderful in the nursery. The girls adore her already. I asked her how she would handle the ton when the children grew up.”
“What did she say?” Eleanor asked, feeling that she ought to make some contribution, or else she might give voice to a scream: Are you as cracked as Lisette?
“She snapped her fingers and said that she would teach them to care nothing for such foolishness. Of course, she herself doesn’t care. She lives here so happily, without being caught in the absurd farce that makes up our social life.”
Several things came to mind, but they all seemed too severe, so Eleanor said merely, “Lisette truly does not care for societal conventions.”
“It’s as if she’s designed to mother these particular children,” Villiers said.
“You are not bound to me in any fashion,” Eleanor pointed out. “I announced our betrothal merely to placate my mother, as I’m sure you realized. Or perhaps I meant to irritate her. I’m quite certain that one would do better not to initiate a marriage on such flimsy grounds.”
“Probably not,” he agreed.
His smile twisted something inside her, so she said, rather quickly, “Well, now that we’ve settled that, I really should retire. It’s growing chilly and I’m not properly dressed.”
But he didn’t move, and neither did she.
“Damn it,” he said finally, very quietly.
And when he crossed those two steps between them, she wound her arms around his neck as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Neither of them moved for a moment. She could feel the heat and hardness of his body.
Finally she leaned in and simply touched her tongue to his lips. “Hello,” she whispered.
“What’s my name?” he whispered back.
“Lucifer!”
The lines by his eyes crinkled and she knew he was smiling at her, but it didn’t matter because he bent his head and kissed her. It was slow, it was possessive, it was voluptuous. He was a master of the kiss…and the master of her.
With one slow movement, he brought his palm down over her hair and hooked a finger under the edge of her towel.
“Leopold!” she said, breaking away from his kiss.
“Ah, you remembered my name.” He
looked so much younger, grinning at her in the moonlight. His teeth were very white; his hair was out of its ribbon and he looked free.
She suddenly realized that the way he loved to play with her, to provoke her to call him by other names so he would kiss her harder, was dangerous—not only to her reputation, but also to her heart.
Even now his finger was tracing a little flower on her back, inside the dip of her towel.
“I must go inside,” she said. “I really must.”
“Say my name one more time.”
“Villiers.” She met his eyes. “Let go of my towel, if you please.”
With a rueful smile in his eyes, he left one final touch on her back, a touch that burned like fire, and stepped back.
“I’ll inform my mother tomorrow morning,” she said.
She could tell that he’d forgotten the subject, and it gave her a queer spasm of female pride. “I’ll tell my mother that we shall not marry,” she clarified. “So that you can speak to Lisette. Unless…you already have?”
His eyes cooled. “I have many faults, but bigamy has never been one of them.”
“We’re not married,” she protested.
He bowed and turned away, but she wasn’t going to allow that.
“Leopold!” she snapped, reaching out for his arm. “We are not children, and I won’t tolerate your silent reproach merely because I queried you.”
He opened his mouth, shut it, said finally: “I would never speak to another woman about marriage while betrothed to you.”
“I didn’t know if you considered yourself betrothed. After all, I simply announced the fact.”
“Oh, I considered myself betrothed,” he said, the chill in his eyes easing. “In fact, I’m still betrothed.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Until you leave the balcony, and I leave the balcony.”
She laughed, but something in his face made the laughter fade.
“I’m a man, princess, nothing more, nothing less.” With one movement, so swift that she didn’t even see it, he plucked her towel away and dropped it to the ground. She was so startled that she didn’t even squeak. Didn’t try to cover herself or run for the door.
