A Duke of Her Own

Page 68

What she did then made the Duke of Villiers actually cry out.
And those eyes, the eyes he hid from the world behind a screen of ice and a mask of gold thread…they were almost black with desire and yet he never closed them.
He kept looking at her, and she kept looking down at him.
“I know what is dangerous about you,” he said suddenly, a few shuddering moments later.
“What?” she gasped.
“You see me too clearly.” He flipped her over in one smooth motion, pinned her down, bit her lip. “You’re damned dangerous, Eleanor, Lady Eleanor.”
It made her feel shy…to be dangerous for other reasons than her own desire.
“My Eleanor,” he whispered.
And she didn’t correct him because her heart was singing the same tune, and there was no need to speak about it.
Chapter Twenty-six
Knole House, country residence of the Duke of Gilner
June 21, 1784
By the next morning Lisette had lost interest in the treasure hunt. The piles of paper had disappeared. At luncheon she airily announced that the housekeeper would be handling all the rest of the details, from the children’s whereabouts, to the refreshments, to the—
“All of it,” she said, with a wave of her hand. “I shall spend the day in the nursery with Phyllinda and Lucinda.”
“Those are not their names,” Villiers said with a distinct chill in his voice. “Mrs. Minchem assigned those names.”
“I must call them something,” Lisette said, reasonably enough. “The girls do not seem to know other names.”
“Villiers, you can perform a truly paternal action,” Anne put in. “You can name your children.”
In answer, the duke got up and left the room.
“I positively detest such bad manners,” Lisette said.
Eleanor detested the pain she’d seen in Leopold’s eyes.
“I have half a mind not to marry him after all,” Lisette continued fretfully. “Marguerite returns this afternoon and I doubt she will be pleased.”
“What will your father say?” Eleanor asked.
Lisette hunched a shoulder. “He won’t be pleased either.”
“Don’t they wish for you to marry?”
“No.” Lisette pushed her potatoes to the side. “They don’t.”
“Because…because of what happened years ago?” Eleanor thought back to the scandal that had ended her mother’s visits to the estate, and coincided with the ton’s perception of Lisette’s madness.
“I can’t have children,” Lisette said, darting off on a tangent, as she was wont to do.
“I’m sorry,” Eleanor said.
“Leopold has a family already, so he won’t care. If only that boy Tobias wasn’t part of it. I don’t like him. He thinks he’s clever but in fact he’s only rude. I can quite see bringing the girls up as ladies, but that boy will never be a gentleman.”
“The fact that Tobias doesn’t care for others’ opinions makes him only more akin to a gentleman,” Eleanor suggested.
“I shall marry Leopold, but I’ll tell him that the boys have to be apprenticed. That’s reasonable. There are three girls, or perhaps four. More than enough children for one household, given the number of maids they need and such.”
“I don’t think that Villiers will be happy with that bargain,” Eleanor said.
Lisette suddenly laughed, but the sound was jarring, like bells falling to the ground. “Must you keep to such affectations?”
“Such as?”
“Calling him Villiers! Remember, I’ve seen the way he looks at you!”
She was in a dangerous state that Eleanor remembered from years ago. It would take only one unwary remark to send her off into a towering rage followed by a passionate fit of crying.
“I shall do my best to please you,” Eleanor said. And she whisked out of the room.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Knole House, country residence of the Duke of Gilner
June 22, 1784
The morning of the treasure hunt dawned bright and clear. Eleanor had gone to sleep puzzling over love, and woken up, thinking about the shape of Leopold’s hands, and from the two constructed an understanding that made her sit up straight in bed.
Gideon was an exquisite male animal, a finely drawn, beautifully painted specimen with whom any healthy young woman would be hard put not to fall in love. Villiers—or Leopold, as she had taken to thinking of him in the inner recesses of her mind—had beautifully shaped thighs and a large nose and even larger parts that she ought to know nothing of…And he was infuriating, fiercely intelligent, and, in his own way, as ethical as Gideon.
Gideon followed rules with precision—at least until he discarded them in his pursuit of her. To him, life was properly lived if one followed the behest of an ethical watchman who combined the precepts of the Anglican church with the dictates of society.
But Leopold was doing something far more difficult: forging rules from the mistakes he had made. He was building an ethical life from the consequences of his not-always-ethical choices, and consciously pursuing a course designed to ameliorate the wrongs he had committed.
It was causing him no end of trouble, of course, given those six children. And it had to be said that his mistakes seemed to be more grossly evident in the world than those of other men: six children, after all. Though the sum total was, in fact, five, if one deducted Lady Caroline’s contribution, Eleanor reminded herself.
Her own ethical standing was just as confused. She had flagrantly broken the most important precepts of church and society that pertained to women when she slept with Gideon the first time, though in her own defense, she scarcely remembered those rules in the tumult of first love.
She thought for a moment about the implications of the phrase first love. No matter: the point was that her youthful shame was compounded by her extraordinary folly in making love to the Duke of Villiers. One could not be more shameless than to do so in the out-of-doors.
The problem—the real problem—was that the rules governing women’s behavior explicitly structured things so that women protected themselves from men. Because women were supposed to be designed along the lines of Ada: submitting to their husbands from a sense of duty, angelic in their desire to please.
She was out of bed and drawing back the drapes covering the door to the balcony, just so she could see the two chairs Leopold had placed there, before she realized that there should be no shame.
She had hurt no one. Gideon was none the worse for her seduction—indeed, she had the distinct feeling that he would consider himself the better for it. She had not injured Leopold by seducing him—or yielding to his seduction, however one wished to put it. And Leopold had not injured her, either.
She knew instinctively that Gideon was already in his coach on the way to the house, having said a hasty farewell to Ada’s great-aunt. And Leopold was in the chamber next to hers, and she had a shrewd suspicion that he had felt as hungry and aching as she had the previous evening, when she’d crawled into her bed and found it woefully empty.
And she was sure of another thing too: that a life in which there was no reevaluation of beliefs and behavior was a life not worth living.
Both men, both dukes, were doing just that. Gideon was laying his reputation and his fortune at her feet, to make up for the error of having turned his back on her years earlier. And Leopold was marrying Lisette because he believed that she would be the better mother for the children he had carelessly brought into the world, without love or even great affection. With women whose names he seemed hardly to remember.