A Wild Pursuit (5 page)

“I'm afraid that my mother has…has quite discarded the idea of our further acquaintance.” It was absurd to find that she had a lump in her throat. She hadn't even had a cup of tea with her mother for some three years. Why should she miss her now?

“Is that why you have such a fierce wish to become respectable?” Sebastian inquired. “So that your mother will accept you again?”

“Of course not! It's only because of Miles, as I told you.”

“Hmmm.” But he wasn't really listening. He was kissing her ear.

“I don't think my mother likes me very much,” Esme said dolefully.

To Sebastian's mind, her mother's behavior had made that clear for years, but it didn't seem politic to say so. “I expect she has some affection for you,” he said in as comforting a manner as he could manage, given that he had Esme's delicious body on his lap. He felt like a starving man at a feast. “I am almost certain that my mother has some affection for me, although she would never acknowledge such a thing.”

“You were a perfect son to her. And you will be again. Once you return from the Continent, everyone will forget the scandal, and you can return to being the very proper Marquess Bonnington. Snobby old sobersides.”

“Never again.
Never
.”

“Why not?”

“I shall never again believe that it matters a bean whether I kiss the woman I love in a garden or my own bedchamber. All that propriety, respectability, it's nothing but a trap, Esme, don't you see?”

“No,” she said. Secretly she was a bit shaken by the vehemence in his voice. “I wish—oh, I do wish—that I hadn't been unfaithful to Miles in the first year of our marriage. Perhaps if I'd been more respectable, we could have found a way to be married again. To live together and raise a family.”

She was startled by the look in his eyes. “Why? Why, Esme? Why
Miles
?”

“Because he was my husband,” Esme said earnestly. This was at the heart of all their arguments. “I should have honored our vows,” she explained.

“You vowed to love him forever. Yet you didn't even know him when you married him. He was weak, charming but weak. Why on earth are you harboring the idea that the two of you could ever have been happy together?”

“Because it would have been the right thing to do.” She knew she sounded like a stubborn little girl, but he had to understand.

“Ah, the right thing,” he said, and there was a dark tiredness in his voice. “I can't fight with that. But if you, Esme, were able to fall in love with your husband because it was the right thing to do, you would have been a very unusual woman indeed.”

“I could have tried!” she said with a flare of anger. “Instead I flaunted my affairs before him and the rest of London.”

Esme was missing the point. The trouble was that Sebastian wasn't sure how to make himself clear without risking her stamping out of his hut in a rage. He tried to put it delicately. “Your husband, Miles, didn't seem to take much notice of those affairs.”

“Yes, he did.”

My God, she was a stubborn woman. “You began flirting with other men in an attempt to get Miles's attention,” Sebastian said. “Fool that he was, he simply concluded that the marriage was not successful. And to be honest, I don't think he cared very much. He was in love with Lady Childe, these many years before he died.” His voice was calm but merciless.

Esme was silent for a moment. “We could have tried,” she said finally.

“You did reconcile just before Miles died,” Sebastian pointed out. “To my knowledge, you had one night together.” He drew her even closer against his chest. “Did it pass in a blaze of passion, then?”

Esme turned her face into his rough shirt. “Don't laugh at Miles,” she warned. “He was my husband, and I was very fond of him.”

“I would never laugh at Miles. But I would never make the mistake of thinking that the two of you could have had a successful marriage, either.”

“Perhaps not. I suppose not. It's just that I'm so…so ashamed of myself!” It burst out of her. “I wish I hadn't done all those things. I just wish I
hadn't.
”

Sebastian was beginning to kiss her again, and his kisses were drifting toward her mouth. Suddenly Esme was tired of whimpering about her miserable marriage and her reputation. “You know when you used to watch me so crossly?” she said huskily. Sebastian's large hands were leaving tingling paths in their wake. He was a beautiful man, with his honey skin and tumbling hair. She couldn't tear her eyes away from him. Why was she even
thinking
about Miles?

“Of course,” he drawled. He was watching her now too, except his eyes were below her chin. He was watching his hand on her breast.

“You had the most arrogant, sulky look,” she said. “You used to lean against the wall and frown at me, and I knew you were thinking that I was an absolute tart.”

The corner of his mouth curled up. “Something like that, I suppose.”

She was getting breathless because of what he was doing, but she wanted to make herself clear. “I used to do some of it for you,” she said, pushing his chin up so he met her eyes.

“Do what?”

“Flirting.” She smiled and put all the seductive joy she felt into that smile. “You would be frowning at me from the side of the ballroom, with that gloriously sulky mouth of yours, and I'd play for you.”

“Play for
me
?”

She nodded, giggling. “Be even more wanton. Do you remember when I kissed Bernie Burdett on the ballroom floor at Lady Troubridge's house party?”

“Of course,” he growled, and he nipped her bottom lip with his teeth. He used to feel half mad, watching Esme Rawlings flirting with her latest conquest, allowing that intolerable Burdett to partner her in dance after dance. While he—he'd rarely danced with her. She'd been married, and he'd been engaged to her best friend. The very memory made him take her mouth with a growl of desire.

“Even as I kissed Bernie, I was wondering what you would do if I simply waltzed up to
you
and kissed you,” she said after a little while, and with a catch in her voice. “I decided you'd probably be up in arms about it, prig that you are, so I kissed Bernie instead.”

He raised his head for a moment. “You deliberately—”

“Exactly,” she said smugly. Then she ran her lips along the strong, sun-browned column of his neck. “You were so disdainful of me and yet—something—I thought I saw something in your eyes.”

He growled again, that deep male sound that made her thighs tremble. “So you were longing to kiss me, were you?”

It was frightening to hear it aloud. Esme chose to keep silent, turning her cheek against his shoulder so he couldn't see her eyes.

“So kiss me now, then,” he said. And his voice had that dark, insistent throb that she couldn't disobey. It made her feel ravishing rather than pregnant. She didn't know why she'd ever thought he was priggish: He kissed her like a wild man. With one last gasp of rational thought, she said, “But Sebastian, I meant it when I said you have to leave. Tomorrow. It's too dangerous now that a house party is arriving.”

“And what shall I do for a living, eh?”

“You'll have to go back to what you did before.”

“Before…” His voice was dark now, velvet dark, muffled against her skin. “I spent all my time
before
arguing with a certain lady.”

“You were extremely vexing,” Esme said. “You were always scolding me because I was brazen, and—”

He bent and kissed her shoulder. “Brazen,” he agreed. “Improper.” He dropped another kiss on the little juncture between her neck and her collarbone. “Strumpet. I'll have to lend you that pamphlet on the Ways of the Wicked.”

“And all because I was having a wee flirtation with Bernie Burdett,” she said, grinning up at him. “Ravishing man that he was. How I miss—”

“That Bertie,” he said against her mouth.

“Bernie!”

“Whatever,” he growled. “The pain he caused me!”

She reached up and put her hand to his cheek. “Bernie and I never had an affair. It was a mere flirtation.”

“I know that.” He smiled down at her then, a lazy, dangerous smile. “Bertie would have made a tedious lover.” He dragged his lips over the sweetness of her cheek and the long delicate stretch of her neck. “And you, my darling Esme, are not a woman to tolerate tedium in your bedchamber.”

“And how would you know, sir?” she said, sounding a little breathless. “You have something of a lack of experience in these matters, wouldn't you say?” It was one of the most joyous memories of her life when the beautiful Marquess Bonnington threw off his cravat in Lady Troubridge's drawing room, announced he was a virgin, and proceeded to lose that virginity.

“It would be no different if I were Adam himself, and you Eve,” he said. His eyes were burning again. “No one can make love to you the way I do.” His hands slipped from her shoulders to her breasts, shaped their exuberance in his hands. She arched up with a gasp. His knee nudged her legs apart, and with one swift motion, he pulled her to the end of the bed, where he would put no weight on her belly.

Then he was
there
, bending over her, and she was laughing, and to him, it felt as if there were only the two of them in the world. He and his intoxicating, ravishing mistress, his very own Esme, his infamous lover…

As if his garden were the first garden itself.

As if his Esme, with her plump mouth and her seductive wit, were the very first woman in the world. She moaned, and he shook with desire. Took up a rhythm that he knew drove her to distraction, made her whimper and grow incoherent. Standing there, making sweet, slow love, he was the only man in the world…or the first…it didn't matter.

Marquess Bonnington was well and truly ravished.

S
tephen had made up his mind to approach—not
seduce
—Lady Godwin. One couldn't use a disreputable word of that sort in respect to such a delightfully ladylike woman. He organized his campaign in the same orderly fashion with which he approached all important arguments undertaken in Parliament.

First, Helene Godwin had eloped at age seventeen, which surely indicated a certain unconventionality, even if she showed no signs of it now. Second, the lady's husband proved to be a reprobate, tossing his wife out the front door and establishing a changing show of young women in her bedchamber. Nonetheless, third, the lady had maintained an irreproachable reputation. She would not be an easy woman to win. But, finally, he fancied that he did have a chance of winning. A long shot, perhaps, but that blush…. She blushed whenever she saw him.

Stephen grinned to himself. He was used to assessing the odds of any given victory in the House. He gave himself a forty percent chance of victory over Helene. Sufficient odds to make it a challenge. Already he felt much more himself than he had in the last few months. Enclosure Acts just weren't enough to keep a man's interest. He had been suffering from a healthy dose of lust.

A deliciously bashful countess, intelligent, musical and neglected by her husband, would solve all his problems.

He strode into Lady Rawlings's Rose Salon and paused for a moment. The house party had apparently been augmented by neighbors of Lady Rawlings; country gentlefolk drifted around the room in little groups. The countess was sitting next to the fireplace, talking to their host. Her skin was so pale that it looked translucent. Frosty, almost. Like snow or ice. Stephen loved ices, sweet and cool to the tongue.

He was far too adept a campaigner to approach Lady Godwin immediately. Instead he walked over to greet an old friend, Lord Winnamore, whom he knew well from various skirmishes between the Houses of Lords and Commons.

Winnamore was as amiable as ever. “Another escapee from matters of business, I see,” he said, greeting him.

“I should be in London,” Stephen admitted. Come to think of it, what was Winnamore doing in the deeps of Wiltshire?

“Life has a way of creating distractions,” Winnamore said. He was watching Lady Arabella.

“Thank goodness!” Stephen was startled by the vehemence of his own exclamation. It certainly wasn't as if he ever would consider deserting the House before his term was up. Or even at that point. There was no threat to his reelection, after all.

“This isn't the sort of party where I'd have thought to meet you,” Winnamore said, giving him a shrewd glance over his spectacles.

“I am finding it quite enjoyable,” Stephen said, checking to make certain that Lady Godwin was still in the corner. In another moment, he would stroll in that direction.

“Enjoyable, yes. Respectable, no. Have you met Lady Beatrix yet?” Winnamore said cheerfully, looking at the door to the salon. Stephen looked as well. Lady Beatrix was making what she clearly considered a spectacular entrance. Apparently the curls of yesterday had been compliments of a curling iron; today her shining copper hair was straight as a pin. Yesterday, her skin had been sunkissed; tonight it was pale as snow. Yesterday her lips had been ripe as a cherry; tonight they were a pale, languid pink. Even her pert expression of the previous night had been replaced by a faintly melancholy gaze—except if one looked very, very closely, mischief brewed.

“That young woman is a work of art,” Stephen said, not without admiration.

“A lovely child, in fact,” Winnamore said. “She is a great comfort to Lady Arabella.”

Stephen could think of no reason why Lady Arabella, known far and wide for her three marriages and various other dalliances, would have need of comfort, but he kept prudently silent. Besides, Lady Arabella herself swept up to them that very moment.

“Mr. Fairfax-Lacy,” she cried, taking a grip on his elbow, “I must
insist
that you greet my niece. Dear Esme is not as nimble as she is normally, and so I have appointed myself the duty of bringing sufficient conversationalists to her side.”

It was suddenly quite clear to Stephen why he had been invited to this particular house party. Lady Arabella had selected him as a prospective husband to her niece. Well, there was nothing new in that. Matchmaking mamas had been chasing him for years.

He bowed to Lady Rawlings but sought Lady Godwin's eyes as he did so. She was just as lovely as he remembered, pure and delicate as a—he couldn't think. Poetry was hardly his forte. She was blushing again and looking rather adorably shy.

Too
shy. A moment later she jumped to her feet like a startled gazelle and fled across the room. He'd have to go even slower than he had planned. He didn't look over his shoulder at the countess, but sat down next to Lady Rawlings.

For her part, Esme was watching Stephen Fairfax-Lacy with a good deal of interest. Unless she was mistaken (and she was
never
mistaken when it came to men), the man was attracted to Helene. Marvelous. Poor Helene had suffered so much from the cruelties of her careless husband. A kindly, handsome, respectable man such as Mr. Fairfax-Lacy would do wonders to restore her sense of confidence and allow her to hold her head high before that reprobrate of a husband.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” she asked, remembering rather belatedly that she was nominally, at least, a hostess. Arabella had taken over all the duties of running the house, the better for Esme to concentrate on her supposed confinement. “Is your chamber acceptable?”

“Truly, it has been all that is comfortable,” he said. And then changed the subject. “I much enjoyed Countess Godwin's waltz. Her husband is not invited to this gathering, I presume?”

Yes!
Esme felt all the exuberance of an old friend. Helene appeared to have made a remarkable impression on Fairfax-Lacy. “Absolutely not,” she hastened to say. “Helene and Rees have had little to do with each other for years. He has other interests. She and her husband have an entirely amiable friendship,” she added. One wouldn't want the M.P. to be frightened off by the notion of an irate husband.

Stephen was watching Helene talk to Bea on the other side of the room. Esme didn't quite like the contrast that conversation presented: Bea was such a vividly colored young woman that she made Helene look pale and washed out. “If you'll excuse me,” she said brightly, “I must confer with my butler.” She allowed Fairfax-Lacy to haul her to her feet and then trundled off toward the door, stopping next to Helene and Bea.

“He was just asking for you!” she whispered to Helene.

Helene looked adorably confused. “Who was?”

“Fairfax-Lacy, of course! Go talk to him!”

Helene looked across the room, and there was Stephen Fairfax-Lacy smiling at her. But she felt a strange reluctance; it was all she could do to hover next to the door and not flee to her bedchamber. Her life, to this point, had not been easy. In fact, although she only admitted it to herself in the middle of the night, sometimes she felt as if she must have been cursed at birth. It had only taken one foolish decision—the foolish, foolish decision to elope with an intoxicating man by the name of Rees—to ruin her entire life. But in the last year she had realized that if she didn't do something about it now, the rest of her life would follow the pattern of the past seven years. The years hadn't been unpleasant: She lived with her mother and she was welcome everywhere. But she had no life, no life that mattered. No
child.

She glanced again at Fairfax-Lacy. He looked like a gentleman, not like that savage she had married. Perhaps, just perhaps, she would even like having intimacies with him. It wouldn't be terrifyingly messy and embarrassing as it had been with Rees. It would be…proper. Acceptable. He was quite lovely: all rangy, lean, English gentleman. And without a doubt it would curdle Rees's liver to see her with such a man. If anything
could
curdle her husband's liver, given the qualities of brandy he drank. So why wasn't she walking straight into Mr. Fairfax-Lacy's arms?

Suddenly a pert voice spoke just at her left elbow. “Shall I walk you across the room again?”

Helene blinked. Bea's eyes were sparkling with mischief. She repeated, “Shall I walk you across the room, Helene? Because I believe you are expected.”

“Ah—”

“This way,” Bea said efficiently, taking her elbow and strolling toward the far end of the room, where Stephen waited. “He
is
quite lovely, isn't he?”

Helene was so nonplussed that she couldn't quite bring out an answer. “Who?” she finally said lamely.

“Mr. Fairfax-Lacy, naturally!”

“I thought you found him Old Testament.”

“That too. But it seems obvious to me that the two of you are perfectly suited,” Bea said in a coaxing voice, as if she were taking a mare over a high jump. “There he is, a perfect specimen of the English gentleman, and here you are, exactly the same in a female form. Both impeccably virtuous too, which must add luster to your friendship. And I think he's quite, quite interested in you,” Bea said confidentially. “He looked straight in your direction when he entered the room. Whenever I speak to him, he simply glances around the room. Normally”—her smile grew—“I am used to complete attention.”

Bea had on a dinner dress that had neither a front nor a back. One could only guess how it stayed above her waist, given that her plump little breasts threatened to escape her scrap of a bodice. Men must simply slaver over her, Helene thought enviously. She herself was wearing a gown of Egyptian net over a dark blue silk. She had felt very
a la mode
in her chamber, but now she felt dismally overdressed, like a dog wearing a sweater.

But Bea seemed to follow her train of thought perfectly. “I'm certain that he doesn't like my gown,” she said. “Last night at dinner he kept looking at me as if I had something stuck between my teeth. Come along!” She jiggled Helene's arm. “You don't want to wait too long, do you? What if Arabella manages to convince the man that he should wed Lady Rawlings? You could hardly have a liaison with your friend's husband!”

Helene thought about that as they moved across the room.

“You see,” Bea said, not quite as softly as Helene would have liked, “he's looking at you right now!”

But when Helene looked up, it seemed to her that Stephen was watching her companion, although with an expression of deep annoyance. She swallowed and curtsied before Stephen Fairfax-Lacy. “Sir,” she said. Bea had glided away without even greeting Mr. Fairfax-Lacy.

He smiled down at her, and Helene realized again what a good-looking man he was. There wasn't a whisker on his face, not like her husband, who always had a shadowed jaw by evening.

“How are you?” he asked.

“I'm quite well.”

There was a moment's silence while Helene thought desperately of a conversational tactic. “Did you read this morning's paper?” she finally asked. “Napoleon has escaped from Elba and is in France again! Surely the French army will not support him.”

“I believe you are quite correct, Lady Godwin,” Stephen said, looking away. He had decided to play this game very, very slowly, so as not to startle her.

Helene felt a crawling embarrassment. How on earth could she have ever thought to seduce a man? She couldn't even carry on a simple conversation.

“What do you think of the fact that Catholics cannot sit in Parliament?” she asked.

He blinked, not prepared for philosophical reasoning. “I have long felt that the prohibition should be rethought,” he said finally.

“I believe it has to do with the wordings of the oaths they would have to take. Wouldn't it violate their religious vows to take Parliamentary oaths?”

“Most of the men I know don't give a fig for those oaths,” Stephen said.

Helene heard a faint bitterness in his voice and wondered about it. Why
was
Mr. Fairfax-Lacy in Wiltshire rather than sitting in the House of Commons?

“Why should we expect Catholics or Jews to be more circumspect than Anglicans?” he continued.

“Surely to establish oneself as a Catholic in this country, given its Anglican past, implies a deeper fidelity to religion than one might expect from an ordinary gentleman,” Helene said. She was quite enjoying herself now. He wasn't regarding her in a lustful fashion, just with the sort of normal engagement one might expect during a conversation.

But she waited in vain for a reply. He appeared to be looking over her shoulder.

“Mr. Fairfax-Lacy,” she said, with a bit of sharpness to her voice.

He snapped to attention. “Yes, Lady Godwin? Do forgive me.”

“Is there something interesting that I should see as well?” Helene said, deciding on the basis of his really quite charming smile that she wasn't insulted after all.

“It is merely that impudent little chit, Lady Beatrix,” Stephen said. “I truly can't imagine what Lady Withers is thinking, allowing the girl to dress in that unseemly fashion.”

Helene turned as well. Bea was sauntering across the room toward them.

Stephen felt as if the girl were some sort of irritating gnat. Here he was, having a remarkably informed and intelligent conversation with the woman who might well become his future mistress, and there
she
was again. About to interrupt their fascinating discussion of religious oaths. Lady Beatrix seemed to have dropped the melancholy pose with which she had originally entered the room. She looked strikingly exotic and utterly unnatural. And potent. Too potent.

“Do you know, I don't think that is the true color of her hair?” Stephen said. He could hear the rancor in his own voice. Why on earth did the girl get under his skin in such a fashion? “Look at that bronze. Have you ever seen such a color in nature?”