was beautiful. At least he was that, his dark hair falling to his shoulders and eyes the colour of wet leaves after a forest storm at Falder. She did not glance below the line of his neck, though every fibre of her being seemed to want her to. His smile said that he knew her thought, the creases around his eyes falling into humour.
‘Lady Lucinda Wellingham?’
He knew her name. She nodded, trying to find her voice. What might happen next? She felt like a chicken in a fox’s lair.
‘Do your three brothers know that you are here?’
Her shake of the head was tempered by a lack of breath that indicated panic and she could barely take in air. Every single thing had gone wrong since dawn, so when her hands tried to open the stays of her bodice a little she was glad when they gave, allowing breath to come more easily. The deep false cleavage so desired by society women disappeared as the fasteners loosened, her breasts spilling back into their natural and fairly meagre form. The lurid red dress she wore fell away from the rise of her bosom in a particularly suggestive manner and she knew he observed it.
‘Choosing my room to hide in might not have been the wisest of options.’ He glanced tellingly towards the large bed.
Lucinda ignored the remark altogether. ‘Richard Allenby, the Earl of Halsey, and his friends gave me little other choice, your Grace. I had the need of a safe place.’
At that he laughed, the sound of mirth echoing about the chamber.
‘Drink loosens the choking ties of societal pressure. Good manners and foppish decency is something most men cannot tolerate for more than a few weeks upon end and this place allows them to blow off steam, if you will.’
‘At the expense of women who are saying no?’
‘Most ladies here encourage such behaviour and dress accordingly.’
His eyes ran across the low-cut décolletage of her attire before returning to her face.
‘This is not London, my lady, and nor does it pretend to be. If Halsey has indeed insulted you, he would have done so because he thought you were … available. Free will is a concept I set great store by here at Alderworth.’
The challenge in his eyes was unrepentant. Indeed, were she to describe his features she would say a measured indolence sat across them, like a lizard playing with a fly whose wings had already been disposed of. Her fingers went back to the door handle, but, looking for the key, she saw it had been removed. A quick sleight of hand. She had not seen him do it.
‘As free will is so important to you, I would now like to exercise my own and ask you to open the door.’
He simply leaned over to a pile of clothes roughly deposited on a chair and hauled out a fob watch.
‘Unfortunately it is that strange time of the evening: too early for guests to be properly drunk and therefore harmless and too late to expect the conduct of gentlemen to be above reproach. Any movement through the house at this point is more dangerous than remaining here with me.’
‘Remaining in here?’ Could he possibly mean what she thought he did?
His eyes lightened. ‘I have room.’
‘You have known me for two minutes and half of those have been conducted in silence.’ She tried to insert as much authority as she could into her announcement.
‘All the better to observe your … many charms.’ His green eyes were hooded with a sensual and languorous invitation.
‘You sound like the wolf from the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, your Grace, though I doubt any character from a nursery rhyme exhibits the flair for nudity that you seem to display.’
Moving back from him, she was pleased when he pulled on a long white shirt, the sleeves billowing into wide folds from the shoulder. A garment a pirate might have worn or a highwayman. It suited him entirely.
‘Is that better, my lady?’
When she nodded he smiled and lifted two glasses from a cabinet behind him. ‘Perhaps good wine might loosen your inhibitions.’
‘It certainly will not.’ Her voice sounded strict even to her own ears and her eyes went to the book deposited on the counterpane. ‘Machiavelli’s Il Principe is a surprising choice for a man who seems to have no care for the name of the generations of Ellesmeres who have come before him.’
‘You think all miscreants should be illiterate?’
Amazingly she began to laugh, so ridiculous was this conversation. ‘Well, they are not usually tucked up in bed at ten o’clock wearing nothing but a pair of strong spectacles and reading a book of political philosophy in Italian, your Grace.’
‘Believe me, degeneracy has a certain exhausting quality to it. The expectations for even greater acts of debauchery can be rather wearisome when age creeps up on one.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-five. But I have been at it for a while.’
He was only a year older than she was and her few public scrapes had always been torturous. Still he was a man, she reasoned, though the double standards of behaviour excusing his sex did not even come close to exonerating his numerous and shocking depravities.
‘Did your mother not teach you the basics of human kindness to others, your Grace?’
‘Oh, indeed she did. One husband and six lovers later I understood it exactly. I was her only child, you see, and a very fast learner.’
She had heard the sordid story of the Ellesmere family many times, but not from the angle of a disenchanted son. Patricia Ellesmere had died far from her kin. There were those who said a broken heart had caused her death, but six lovers sounded particularly messy.
‘What happened to your father?’ She knew she should not have asked, but interest overcame any sense of reticence.
‘He did what any self-respecting Duke might have done on discovering that his wife had cuckolded him six times over.’
‘He killed himself?’
He laughed. ‘No. He gambled away his fortune and then lost his woes in strong brandy. My parents died within a day of the other, at different ends of the country, and in the company of their newest lovers. Liver failure and a self-inflicted shot through the head. At least it made the funeral sum less expensive. Two for the price of one cuts the costs considerably.’ His lips curled around the words and his green eyes were sharp. ‘I was eleven at the time.’
Such candour was astonishing. No one had ever spoken to her like this before, a lack of apology in every new and dreadful thing he uttered.
Her own problems paled into insignificance at the magnitude of his and she could only be thankful for her close and supportive family ties.
‘You had other relatives … to help you?’
‘Mary Shields, my grandmother, took me in.’
‘Lady Shields?’ My God, who in society did not know of her proclivity for gossip and meanness? She had been dead for three years now, but Lucinda still remembered her beady black eyes and her vitriolic proclamations. And this was the woman whom an orphan child had been dispatched to?
‘I see by your expression that you knew her?’ He upended his tumbler and poured himself another. A generous another.
He wore rings on every finger on his left hand, she noticed, garish rings save for the band on his middle finger which was embellished with an engraving. She could not quite make out the letters.
A woman, no doubt. He was rumoured to have had many a lover, old and young, large and thin, married and unmarried. He does not make distinction when appetite pounces. She remembered hearing a rumour saying exactly that as it swirled around in society—a diverting scandal with the main player showing no sense of remorse.
The