what exactly had occurred with the Earl of Thanet. All the more galling was the fact that he had taken as much notice of her as he would of a dishrag and that given their respective positions in the world this was in no way momentous. If a small green man had arrived on her doorstep and told her he was made of cheese from the moon she would not have been more bewildered or suspicious than if someone had said, “At the Mortimers’ ball you will dance with a man and you will think of nothing else from that moment until the time you see him again.”
Which would be never, she hoped, made cantankerous from lack of sleep. At the same moment, like a badly cast spell, none other than Robin Tufton appeared in the open doorway of the library, preceded by Lucy in her plain gray homespun. “Begging your pardon, ma’am—” she dropped a brief curtsy “—but the lady is in the garden…”
She looked so worried that Pen smiled, closed her book, rose and said pleasantly, “Of course it’s fine, Lucy. Please have the tea brought in.” Though why he couldn’t have been left to wait for Prudence in the drawing room, where earls belonged, was a mystery for the ages. But her heart was beating too fast and she was horribly aware that she was very glad to see him.
“I take it I’m not intruding?” He smiled, making her think that he was quite sure he was. “Lucy made an honest attempt to install me in the proper location, but I asked for you.”
Pen wanted to throw her book at him. She wanted to put her mouth against his. She did neither; simply watching him as he prowled the room, broad shouldered and lithe. He sent her occasional sidelong glances from the bookshelves, from the double doors opening onto the flagstone walk, from the vase of roses Pru had picked the day before: intent, without particularly seeming to be so. Having spent the first half of her life in a whorehouse and the second in a convent, there was little in the way of events Penelope could not reconcile. This man was the first, and the extremity of her reaction to him deprived Pen of the meaningless conversational banter in which she often took refuge. Her silence did not dissuade him. “Is it true you were raised in a convent?” he asked, fingering the drooping petal of a rose.
“Yes,” Pen answered truthfully. Then, thinking of the Swan, said “No,” and then “Yes,” again, but too quickly. She meant to answer firmly, “Yes, I was raised in a convent.” But the indignant words that emerged from her mouth were, “You rob me of my wits and I don’t care for it in the least.” His head came up, the fine nostrils flaring. He moved quickly to where she stood, following when she fell back a pace and then another, until she was spine against spine at the bookshelves. He brought one arm up, his hand coming to rest near her left ear, on Plato’s Republic. The other wrested the book from her nerveless fingers. She jumped a little when it hit the floor. “One should never abuse books,” she said primly. “They are valuable for the knowledge contained therein.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t the one abusing it. If it were alive you would have strangled it. And as for losing your wits—” he leaned closer, until they were not quite body to body “—that would only be fair, my little cat, because you have certainly robbed me of mine.”
He was so close she could smell him—bay rum and soap and something else that was only him. She took a deep breath, drinking him in, and as she did his fingers began to play with a loose tendril of hair at her temple, coiling and sliding it along his index finger. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, not wanting to move, but it was too much, and to forestall anything further she said, as drily as she could manage, “You seem perfectly sane to me.”
“Deceptive,” he said, and went on with her hair. His chest lifted and fell with his even breathing. On each breath his chest brushed hers. Pen knew a fragmentary irritation that she had produced an entire sentence and he had answered with one word. Surely this was not fair? But that light, tugging touch dissolved it and her body began to warm and open to his. The hand that was not in her hair was toying with her fingers. Shorn of the book, they curled uselessly until he touched them with his own. In response, she tucked her elbow defensively into her side and he noted the gesture but kept hold of her hand, stroking the palm, touching each one of her fingers in turn until she shivered and linked her hand with his. He loosed her hair and the broad palm shaped itself to her skull. His fingers tightened, caressing, and he dropped his head so his lips were near her ear.
“Do you know why I left the Mortimers’ ball?”
“No.” It was breathless, almost a moan. Needing an anchor, she brought her free hand up to his chest, fingers skimming across the striped silk of his waistcoat to the smoothly shaven jaw and the soft skin beneath, where jaw merged into neck.
“I left the Mortimers’ ball,” he went on, his breath a rhythmic huff against her ear, “because I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t think. I went outside and put my head into the nearest fountain.”
A startled gasp of laughter escaped Pen and she felt his lips curve into an answering smile before he—quite gently—bit her neck. She shuddered, and shuddered again when he laved the spot with his tongue. The low, roughened voice went on. “‘Have her,’ a voice in my head kept saying, as if I could lift your skirts right there and bury myself inside you and keep dancing until we both came.” His breathing was no longer even, but even so, the mildest suggestion of humor entered his voice. “A ridiculous notion, I know, but my whole body broke into a sweat and I couldn’t imagine anything I’d ever wanted more.”
Mesmerized by his words, Pen turned her head and opened her mouth against his skin, desperate to taste him. His hands closed with sudden force on her waist, he tipped his head to catch her mouth with his, and Pru’s voice, clarion-loud, rang out from the flagstone walkway adjacent to the library. “No, Lucy, the blue vase,” she called. Pen was across the room and halfway out the other door when Pru entered the room with a basket of roses over one arm, talking as she came. “There you are, Penelope. Lucy is bringing your pelisse. We’re going for a drive in the park. And we need to pick up Meredith on the way.”
Though he had been staring at the pointed tip of Pen’s parasol for the better part of twenty minutes, Robin was having a tremendously good time. Women who swooned at one’s feet were not amusing. Women who took their clothes off in return for expensive jewelry—more succinctly known as mistresses—were not particularly amusing, although they could be temporarily satisfying. People, in general, who did not say what they thought for fear of offending an earl were the least amusing of all. Sitting across from him in the excruciatingly slow-moving barouche was a woman who was none of these things.
Meredith and Pru, having been seen, had condescended to exchange pleasantries with Henry Winthrops. “If I can’t see your face,” he said, his voice pitched low, “I’ll have to look at something else.” His comment was rewarded by a jerk of the parasol, and he could tell by the mulish set of her mouth that she was torn between keeping her face concealed or moving the parasol so he would stop staring at her breasts. Or hitting him with it; Robin thought that was a distinct possibility.
Before any of these could occur, Meredith said, “King George is mad again, Robin. They’ve taken him to Kew Palace and unpacked the turquoise damask.”
At Pen’s look of perplexity, he explained, “It’s a waistcoat, tailored expressly for ease while dressing and undressing in a disordered mental state.”
“Disordered!” interjected Winthrop senior volubly. “The government is headless!”
Meredith frowned. “Don’t make bones over trifles, Henry. The prince regent will have everything well in hand. Although it is sad for George. I suppose he’ll be trying to shake hands with trees again. The government will not topple, but it is distressing nonetheless to have one’s own monarch non compos mentis.” She sniffed and looked sad. For King George, but also because sniffing reminded her of her dead husband, who had often taken snuff from a gilt enamel box tucked in his waistcoat pocket.
Pru patted her on the knee. “He’ll recover. He has before.”
Pen was watching a flock of starlings in the beech trees near the carriage path. Something had startled them; they rose in concert and wheeled away as one body through the air. Robin stared at Pen, possessed of the odd