Pleasure for Pleasure

Page 41

“I’m not sure I like it here,” Sylvie whispered.
“It’s quite safe.”
“I know I am safe with you,” she said, smiling at him. “It’s one of the things I like about you, Mayne.”
“Won’t you call me Garret?” he asked. “At least when we’re alone?”
But she shook her head. “Absolutely not. It would only lend itself to the impression that we share a degree of inadvisable intimacy. Why should we present that illusion, when it is not the case?”
A solid argument.
“Perhaps we might be slightly more intimate,” Mayne said, his mind sliding quickly away from the memory of kissing Josie. He hadn’t realized it at the time, but that was a deeply disloyal kiss. Sylvie would dislike it, if she knew.
She frowned at him and her tone was slightly—just slightly—frosty. “How do you mean, sir?”
“This,” he said softly, and bent to kiss her. She was really quite small. He took her delicate face in his hands. It felt like the face of a child. She spoke through his kiss, as if his lips weren’t on hers.
“I am not enjoying this.”
“Oh,” he said, straightening up.
There was a tiny frown between her brows. “I am not in favor of intimacies before marriage,” she told him. “I thought we were in agreement on this front.”
“But a kiss,” he said hopelessly.
She raised her chin. “I am not the kind of woman who takes pleasure in courting disgrace in a garden, Mayne.”
“You wouldn’t be—” But there was a look in her eye that made it adamantly clear that she meant what she said.
The truth was that she couldn’t be as inviolable, as untouchable, as goddesslike as she was, if she were a light-heeled wench who would collapse into his arms with a giggle, the way so many other women had done in the past.
And he didn’t want that. He hadn’t had an affaire in almost two years now. He felt as if slowly, slowly, he was regaining a sense of himself, a cleansing from the dozens of tawdry little evenings when he walked home with perfume on his coat and tears on his sleeve. He had come to a stage in his life after which he wanted to share his life with one woman, and one who would be his alone, as he would be hers alone.
They turned in silent agreement back to the house. “I’m thinking of putting my stables in order for the next racing season,” he said.
“Didn’t you tell me that you meant to do that a month ago?” Sylvie inquired, not unkindly. “Do you need to hire someone?”
He’d forgotten that he’d told her…of course, he’d been thinking constantly about it for months. “It’s not an easy decision. I’d have to be there.”
“One should never allow a secondary to hire important staff,” Sylvie said rather vaguely, waving to a friend who was also going into supper. “Shall we sit with Miss Tarn, Mayne? She speaks French so divinely. She tells me that she’s had a private tutor for three years. I can’t think why more English people don’t bother to learn French properly.”
But Mayne was on the edge of an important decision. He was the type of man who would never bring himself to say such a thing, but he felt it might—would—change his life. Certainly, it would change Sylvie’s future life.
“No,” he said rather brusquely. “We need to talk, Sylvie. I never seem to find you alone.”
“That would be quite inappropriate,” Sylvie said, waving at Miss Tarn and mouthing no. He glanced to the side and saw she was wiggling her eyebrows to indicate some sort of silent disapproval of himself. Or was it mockery?
“We will be man and wife someday,” he observed.
“It sounds so horridly Puritanical when you say ‘man and wife.’ I’ll never be a wife, not in that pedestrian kind of way. I’m a lady first. And you’re a gentleman, not a man.”
He sighed. “A small table, please,” he told the footman bowing before him. “No, we will not be joining anyone.”
A moment later they were seated in such a way that Sylvie could see the entire room, and her reticule, shawl, and fan were arranged to her satisfaction. Then she turned her eyes to him. “Mayne,” she said, “what on earth is the matter?”
He felt a little of the uncertain clutch on his heart lessen. “I’ve made a mess of my life, Sylvie.” He said it flatly, without any drama.
“In what sense?” she asked, an enchanting little wrinkle appearing between her brows. “Have you lost your estate?” She put a hand over his. “I have a great deal of dowry, Mayne. It is yours.”
It almost made him feel teary. It must be because he’d been alone so long, and finally he had someone to talk over these issues. And she was so generous.
“Don’t worry!” she said. “My father, also, he has much funds, as you say in England. He will not allow a daughter of his to go without these funds.”
“It’s not money. I almost wish it were.”
“What then?”
“My life has slipped away in a series of tawdry little affaires and meaningless friendships. I haven’t done anything. I never took up my seat in Lords. I’m hugely wealthy, to be honest, Sylvie, but I had little to do with that either. My friend Felton advises my man. I scarcely know what I own, anymore.”
“Is that Lucius Felton?” Sylvie asked. And, at his nod: “A very wise thing to do, on your part. Mr. Felton is a genius in such things, is he not?”
“My estate runs itself,” Mayne said, out of the quiet desperation he’d felt for more than a year. “I haven’t taken up my seat in Lords because, frankly, I’d be a flat loss on the floor. I’ve no interest in enclosure acts or sending pickpockets to the Antipodes.”
“But what is wrong with this life?” Sylvie asked, looking at him with frank, curious eyes.
“What life?”
“This life,” she said. “It’s hard to put in English. But the life of a galant.”
“The life of a gentleman with nothing to do but enjoy himself,” Mayne translated. “I’ll tell you what such gentlemen do, Sylvie. They flirt with other men’s wives, and sometimes they bed them. They involve themselves in foolish bets over carriage rides and boxing matches.”
Sylvie nodded. “Yes, those things. And they manage their estate, and are kind to those beneath them.” (Sylvie’s father, after all, had supported the revolution, at least at the beginning.) “They have children and make certain those children are raised to be intelligent members of society, who know their place and what they should do in life.”
“That must be my problem,” Mayne said. “I don’t know my place. Nor yet what I should do in life.”
Sylvie’s little brow knit. “You should do…what you’re doing now. You are a good man, Mayne, with friends and substance. What more do you want?”
“I want to make something,” Mayne said helplessly. “Construct something.”
She stared at him, and then her mouth fell open. “You mean like that very odd marquis, the one who constructed a windmill on his estate to catch the wind?”
“No. Although if I had an inventing bend of mind, I would be happy to retire to the country and make windmills.”