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  “Beast!” the lady cried, and struck him smartly-across the cheek before she turned and bent her head so that it was so completely covered by streamers of her shining golden hair that he could not see how hard she tried to bring out some realistic tears.

  The marquess sighed. It was becoming tedious, he thought, even as he attempted to gently pull the lady back into his embrace. The affair had started well, but was ending badly. Obviously, she wanted her husband to know of the liaison for her own reasons, and his own insistence on keeping their meetings discreet was running counter to whatever plans she’d hatched. Although there could scarcely be two more different females in appearance and style, she too, he thought, even as he assured her of her safety in the hotel and his regret at being late, wanted him mainly for his reputation, even as the wicked young lady he’d been discussing at lunch no doubt had.

  But for all of his sagacity about the lady in his arms, and her whims and machinations, he was entirely wrong about her reasons for wanting him. As she swept her hair back from her eyes and turned her face to him again, realizing that she’d get no further with her importuning today, she gazed at him. And were she the sort of female wise enough to understand that gentlemen need flattery too, she would have told him what pleasure she took in that simple act.

  She looked into his searching eyes and even forgot to look for her own reflection there, they were so deep and blue and intense. Just staring at that hard young face, with its clean contours and curiously full lips awaiting her own mouth’s touch, made her want him more than any other man’s presents or flattery or fame ever had. And though it would have been very good if Lambert did more than suspect their meetings, just to show him how well she could do for herself, since he had that shocking Turner woman’s favors now, she would forego that simpler pleasure for the more complex ones she could discover in the marquess’s close embrace.

  But, even as he gathered her to himself, as he whispered a list of her physical virtues for her to glory in, he found that only a part of himself was involved in the proceedings. Another, more rational Joscelin had already risen, walked across the room, and seated himself in a chair, and idly swung his booted foot and waited for the randy fool to be done with his foolish pleasures. Or so it seemed, or so it increasingly seemed to happen to him.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t like females, he did, and had always done so. He was a devoted son to his fond mama, and he had looked after his two younger sisters’ welfare with so much affection and goodwill that they’d both grown to be jolly, confident young girls who were now the delight of their husbands’ lives. Perhaps it was because he genuinely liked females that he was lately so disconsolate in each of his fleeting affairs. For he was used to valuing those of their gender as he valued his men friends, as separate and distinct persons.

  And yet lately he’d only had dealings with those women who, if truth be told, he didn’t care for too very much once they were up and out of his bed. He was not so compelled to find bedchamber companionship as, for example, his friend the duke had been in his youth. Yet while not precisely a rake, it could be said that the Marquess of Severne was also never long deprived of a female’s intimate company. But since he was not driven, he exercised selectivity in his choice of partners. Now that he was a grown man he no longer visited those establishments where he could choose a female for the evening as he would a bottle of wine. Nor could he enjoy any relationship such as so many of his fellows did, where a young person was properly housed and clothed and paid quarterly, even as a footman or a housemaid was, in exchange for the performance of personal services that were supposed to pass for acts of love.

  But it was never love he sought, or so he told himself. At least he was wise enough to know it could not be found among those he had deceived, as they attempted to deceive him, on his missions upon the Continent. Neither did he expect to find himself such a gentle passion either with or among those ladies he did disport with, those bored and spoiled beauties whose husbands allowed them to stray so long as they reciprocated that privilege. Females of the servant class were too amazed at his attentions, or too conniving at receiving them, for him to become involved with, and respectable young women from any social station, were, of course, quite above his touch.

  He was saved from these gloomy reflections before they could hinder his present plans, by his lady’s suddenly twining her fingers in his thick hair and wrenching him even closer to her. When he stopped his ministrations to stare in puzzlement at her, and even that other Joscelin, the one that had abandoned him to solitary carnality, looked up in surprise, she breathed, “Ah Joss, do not be so cruel to me. I know I deserve it after my complaints, but please spare me.” Since she said this with a look of great anticipation upon her uplifted, lovely face, he sighed deeply. That other Joscelin gave a cough of a laugh and left him alone again.

  Games, he thought wearily, whenever an affair became flat, they always thought to recapture his and their own interest with never-ending games. He decided to ignore her.

  “Joss,” she whispered, as though she might be overheard, even though he had difficulty hearing her, close as he was, “go ahead, I won’t mind. Be savage with me if you must. I’ve known you weeks now and you no longer need restrain yourself.”

  “My dear,” he said slowly, “you know I am not cruel, nor do I enjoy cruelty, nor will I indulge you in it.”

  “So you say.” She laughed until her whole body trembled beneath his and then looked up at him wisely. “But you cannot deny the evidence in your face. Nor have you seen that pitiless look in your eyes as others have. And I have heard the rumors. Oh yes. We all know it is not your inability which took you from your marriage. I can vouch for that,” she said smugly. “Nor is it any part of your person or personality. Save that. It must be that. That’s what everyone says. So go ahead. Don’t hold your desire back. I’m not some inexperienced chit, as your wife was. I won’t mind. I rather like it, actually. Only don’t get too carried away, I have a dinner party to attend tomorrow night.”

  He stopped completely. And it seemed that a small surviving scrap of his pride, which had escaped the slaughter of his self-esteem five years ago, now quietly stopped breathing as well. The fantasy he had of that other, watchful, safe, and uninvolved Joss died, too, for he was entirely appalled.

  He had known her for weeks, as she’d said, which was longer in fact than he had known the wife she mentioned. That this woman who waited eagerly beneath him, trembling not with laughter now, but in excited anticipation of what dark and nameless deeds she believed him capable of, could so misjudge him, could so value him for what he would consider repugnant, astonished and infuriated him.

  He did not leave her at once, for he was only human. And though he did not half meet her expectations, as he could never so completely unleash his anger in such fashion, he did not precisely disappoint her, though his callous divorce of his mind from his body more than disappointed himself. And when he left her, he left her for good.

  But as he walked home in that London twilight, he thought for the first time that perhaps, just perhaps, it was time for him to marry again. If not for love, then for an end to expecting love. And to anyone who would be willing to have him, and his heirs, and not a great deal more of him than that.

  FIVE

  The rain had come. It was a fine mist really, pearl gray and opaque, hardly qualifying as a true rainstorm, but it made the morning dim and bleak. Yet no one complained except for the smallest children who knew no better. In a curious way it was comforting to have such thoroughly damp and dismal weathers on the heels of those few glorious episodes of picture-perfect spring. However much that interlude had been enjoyed, a true Englishman knew when he had been given false coin. This day felt more natural, and a fellow could relax now and know the truth, that at last the brief flirtation was over, and it was well and truly springtime.

  Leonora sat at her dressing table while Katie did valiant battle with her hair, which she claimed liked to coil and ti
e itself into knots at night just to spite her while her lady slept.

  “Good heavens, Katie,” Leonora said, wincing and biting her lip as Katie found and attacked a particularly convoluted snarl, “you make me sound like Medusa. It’s only hair. And it’s only that it’s damp out today.”

  Katie gave out a grim laugh and bore down harder on her chosen foe, her mistress’s heavy, tangled tresses, as if they were indeed hissing snakes she battled with. Leonora declined to mention that part of the problem just might have been that she had tossed and turned the entire night, falling to sleep now and again only to wake immediately, struggling up from the grasp of ghastly dreams. She ought to feel lucky, she thought, as she bit back a little cry as Katie sought and discovered a particularly complex knot, that at least she hadn’t strangled herself with her own hair during her restless, sleepless night.

  She was in such discomfort now, from the combined effects of the past night and Katie’s present crusade against disorder, that she was about to ask the girl to leave off and simply go and get a razor and clear the whole lot off the top of her aching head, when her pain-heightened senses detected the sound of the merest scratching at her door.

  “That can be no other but Annabelle,” she groaned, annoyed at the sound, but glad of a reason for Katie to lay down her punishing brush. “Go and let her in, please, for I haven’t the patience to shout her in. She’ll only hesitate and wait until I call her again, and I don’t have the head for all that roundabout this morning. Go, go, Katie, do please, or she’ll scratch a groove in the door. I wonder what’s to do? It isn’t like her to come to visit this early. She’s always afraid I’m still sleeping if it’s before noon, although I’ve told her a thousand times that I’m always up and dressed by nine in Town.”

  “Maybe her bed’s on fire,” Katie muttered sourly as she went to the door. Leonora detected a bit of hope in that sullen pronouncement, and did not think it was only because her maid had been interrupted when she was just getting into her full stride as a champion hair brusher. Katie made very little effort to hide the fact that she liked Annabelle about as much as she did a toothache. But then, Leonora thought, her plain-faced, plump little Katie was very secure in her position, and probably had been secure in the cradle, and so had little patience with a hesitant, shy girl like Annabelle.

  Katie opened the door to admit Annabelle and then turned around without a word and marched back to her hairbrush, as though she was eager to seize it up again before the handle could grow cold. In fact, she thought as Annabelle came softly into the room, she would be damned if she would give her breath in greeting to that sly little layabout. Katie was as class conscious as a queen. And, she thought as she attacked her mistress’s hair with renewed gusto, causing that lady to gasp as she gave good morning to her relative, there wasn’t any reason on earth why Miss Greyling couldn’t go out and work for her bread as any healthy young woman ought, for she wasn’t a true lady like young miss, and that Katie would lay odds against her own life upon.

  “Well, and what brings you to visit me so early this morning?” Leonora asked with false cheeriness, since Annabelle had already done with greeting her and refusing her offer of a cup of chocolate and only stood and stared at her with a dolorous expression.

  “I only came to see how you were feeling, cousin,” Annabelle said softly, “since you were so very upset last evening. You went to bed early, you know. Are you quite recovered?”

  Leonora felt a twinge of guilt, for she remembered that one of Annabelle’s chiefest pleasures since she had come to visit had been when the two of them would sit and read aloud through the long winter evenings.

  “I’m much recovered, Belle,” Leonora began, and then she broke off and said more vehemently, “Oh rot, no I’m not. But at least my wretched night brought me counsel. I was sick with shame at myself last night, Belle, and there’s the truth of it. Imagine, to serve Severne such a turn! He doesn’t deserve it, nor do I deserve the opinion he must have of me that I’ve given him with my own rash tongue. I know better, Belle, there’s the worst of it. I have all the words in my head, ready and in perfect order and formation, and then I see him, and open my mouth, and they all tumble out like clowns.”

  “Do you care for him so very much then?” Annabelle asked, her blue eyes wide.

  “Why no!” Leonora exclaimed at once, as though her relative had asked her if she plotted against the King. “But, you see, he did me a favor once, and I’d like to show I’m still grateful. Then too, you know, Belle, he is not acceptable everywhere and I should like him to know that I don’t agree with that sort of attitude at all. And yet each time I see him I give him cause to believe the opposite is true.”

  Although her mistress’s hair now resembled a dark and flowing silken scarf, Katie gave a handful a little sharp tug as she began to arrange it, if only to pay her back for such a blatant lie. For gratitude didn’t bring such a look to a female’s eyes, nor did a grateful lady jump as though she’d sat on a tack when she was asked about her feelings for a gentleman she only wished to give her thanks to.

  “But he is acceptable here and he must know that,” Annabelle said reasonably, “because he was here just the other night as your father’s guest.”

  Katie gave the blond young woman a rare nod of approval, for someone ought to make her mistress see sense. If she could overcome her nervousness about the fellow, she could speak to him and judge him whole and cold, as a female ought to do, before she made some other disastrous leap. Not, Katie mused, as she paused in her work, that a leap toward the marquess would necessarily have been so ruinous for her mistress, if it were not for the matter of that shocking divorce.

  There was the pity, Katie sighed to herself. If it weren’t for that, she considered that he might have been one of the few gentlemen in all the civilized world who might have made a fair match for her adored mistress. But then too, if it weren’t for that, he likely would have been married three times and over by now, he would have been that eligible. Still, that was an opinion she would never breathe aloud, since she believed her mistress to be such an impulsive female. Better, Katie thought, that she should never think any other decent female could see a glimmer of goodness in him.

  “That’s true, but you see, Belle,” Leonora sighed sadly, “Father has sophisticated tastes, and Mama doesn’t necessarily share them. I don’t believe Severne would ever have been one of her guests.”

  As her relative cocked her head to one side in her incomprehension, and Katie nodded above her head like a wise woman reading gypsy cards, Leonora told Annabelle the pertinent details that she knew about the marquess’s brief marriage and subsequent disgrace.

  “It was a writ, I believe, called an A Vinculo Matrimoni, or some such,” Leonora went on, wrinkling her brow as though in deep recollection, as if she hadn’t committed the words to heart the moment she learned of them, “being an entire dissolution of the bonds of matrimony, which is more difficult to obtain than a plain separation. But then again, a mere separation would mean that neither party could ever marry again in any case.”

  Annabelle did not lose her quizzical expression, but then, Leonora thought whimsically, perhaps she never could, her light brows were so perennially arched above those wide light eyes. But she must have been surprised, for she only said with wonderment,

  “Indeed, I have never heard of such a thing, cousin. There were some terrible husbands that I knew of at home, but their poor wives could never be quit of them. Why,” she said, blushing faintly, “I am sure that Mama might oftentimes have wished to be free to wed another, but even though Father left us and never returned, she couldn’t ever seek her happiness with any other gentleman while he yet lived. And yet she herself often said that so it must be. And so it must. I cannot believe that this marquess can be so admirable if he was party to such a proceeding.”

  Katie gave a vigorous nod of agreement as the fair young woman went on to add, before her cousin could cut in,

  “And I doubt i
t matters if it was his wife that sought such, or even if she was at fault in it For if she sought to obtain a divorce from him, it may be that she was driven to it by unspeakable actions on his part, and if he sought it, what sort of a man must he be, not to be able to bear it as most men might?”

  Since this was the longest speech that Annabelle had given in days, Leonora was so taken aback that she could not speak up in defense of the marquess at once. But, she noted from glancing in the looking glass, Katie was actually smiling at her cousin in the fondest way imaginable. That, if nothing else, stung her from her silence. For she knew Katie’s opinion in the matter, and that opinion was that Severne was a handsome dog with a heart as black as coal and morals that must make his heart seem lily-white by comparison.

  “Well there you are!” cried Leonora heatedly. “Belle, you have said just what so many supposedly proper people say. But you can’t have looked at it clearly. For I say that it is far worse to continue on in a marriage that is a mockery of man’s and God’s laws, simply for propriety’s sake, than it is to dissolve such a union for sanity’s sake. There are too many persons, right here in London, who lead lives that are blatantly hypocritical lies, who would be better off declaring the truth and—” But here Leonora stopped, for both her cousin and her maid were observing her in horrified fashion. She had raised her voice, as well as herself, she realized, becoming so impassioned that she sprang to her feet without knowing it and no doubt startled them. Worse, she thought as she sank back to her chair, she had almost said, “too many persons right here in this house” instead of “right here in London.”

  “Well,” she said weakly now, “I’m sorry if I became exercised. But you see, it’s foolish to think Severne a monster, for nothing in his aspect or his reputation gives credence to that, at least. And I maintain that his was an act of courage, not cowardice.”