Forbidden (34 page)

"You're not realistic, Etienne," Daisy softly said. "If I hadn't met you that night at Adelaide's, your life would have proceeded uninterrupted… your marriage would have continued."

"I'm not looking for a martyr," the Duc said as softly as she. "You needn't be noble on my account. I'm too cynical to embrace either of those concepts as relevant in this world. But if I believe in anything, I believe in the shaman gods who looked down on me with kindness that night." He grinned then, touching the toe of her white kid slipper. "Don't become serious,
chou-chou
, about the divorce or Charles or anything else Isabelle might orchestrate. I'll take care of you. I'll take care of everything."

How often, she wondered, would he have to take care of things for her? How many times in the coming years would he have to threaten someone for what they might say about her as the femme fatale who destroyed his twenty-year marriage? At what price could he continue to live in the society of his birth? Would he eventually tire of the burden? Etienne was a man familiar with a life of ease, of adoration and favor. How long would it be before he wearied of championing both his marriage and his foreign wife?

"I don't really want to be taken care of," Daisy said, her words only a whisper of sound.

It stopped him for a moment—the very novel concept—before he remembered she was an American woman. "I keep forgetting you're not—"

"Isabelle?"

"No. Any woman I've ever known. Forgive me." A smile brightened his face. "Since you're so independent, would you like to take care of
me
?"

Daisy laughed at his expression and the notion she could shoulder responsibility for the very irresponsible Duc. "I don't have the energy to oversee an incorrigible, audacious man who's been raised to consider himself a golden child of the universe."

"Would you have the energy to oversee… perhaps a small portion of my life?" he inquired with a wolfish smile.

"I don't suppose I need inquire which portion?" she replied, her own smile luxurious. He made her feel always as though the sun were shining precisely for her. For them.

"Probably not," he murmured, his fingertips moving up the pale silk of her stockings. "Aren't you warm with these stockings on?"

"I wasn't until now…"

"I can cool you off."

Her eyebrows rose. "Really. That would be different."

He grinned. "I mean I'll take these stockings off."

"How nice of you."

"I've been told I'm very nice."

"By?" Her voice was coquettish.

"My mother, of course."

"Of course. I should have known. My parents too have often complimented me on my—manners."

"Just so long as no other man has ever touched you," he murmured, only half in jest. He had no control over his jealousy when it came to Daisy, begrudging with a lethal kind of resentment any man who'd courted her.

"You can assure me, of course, of a similar monkish existence," she sardonically replied.

"You're a demanding woman." There was a smile in his voice and in his eyes.

"Yes," she said and meant it. She never would have allowed him the license Isabelle did within marriage. She would have rather not been married. And while she tried to understand Isabelle's need to maintain a marriage so bereft of love or affection, in her heart she found it incomprehensible.

"I'm glad," the Duc said, understanding their mutual needs. Pleased perhaps with an innocence alien to his character of late, that after all these years he was truly loved.

For how long, though, would he be glad, she wondered. She was too aware of his past: when he was back from his habitual polo, and back from his casual influencing of Charles, he would effortlessly seduce her with his charm and beauty. Following the patterns of a lifetime… this day no different from the thousands preceding it.

So different from her own life.

"I'm more jealous than Isabelle," she simply said, declaring an element of her feelings, if not the substance. "I could never share you."

"Good." The single word was a promise. "And speaking of sharing, could I persuade you to join me inside? So we don't run the risk of our making love becoming a shared experience with the servants." His smile was apologetic. "There's no privacy in town." When you love a woman, he thought. Under other circumstances in his past, he'd not been so circumspect.

The Duc carried Daisy inside, through the ground floor hallways and up the grand staircase past a dozen smiling servants, whose whispers followed them like small tittering birdsong.

"They know," Daisy whispered, a blush heating her cheeks as they passed an upstairs maid carrying a vase of fresh flowers. Her giggle trilled behind them in the still shadowed hallway.

"People don't make love in America?"

"Well… of course—I mean…"

"Not in front of the servants?"

"Well—" Daisy thought of her brother Trey who subscribed to the same laissez-faire attitude as Etienne. "Well, I never have." A qualified response.

"Someone else, then, is as insensitive as I," he teasingly said.

"My brother—before his marriage," she hastily added. "Oh, dear, I don't mean to be puritanical or censorious…" Her voice trailed off weakly under the Duc's ironic gaze.

"Since you harbor an unblemished record in terms of fornicating in front of the servants, I'll be sure to lock the door." His grin was outrageous.

"Have you really?" She suddenly realized how exemplary her life had been.

"Of course not," he said, perjuring himself with a smile.

"Fraud." But her voice was affectionate.

He kissed her then because he'd thought suddenly of Charles and Isabelle at the sound of the single pejorative word and wished to dismiss such images from his mind.

The kiss was effective in canceling such images. It also spurred the Duc's progress toward his bedroom.

He undressed Daisy on the daybed near the lace-curtained windows, slipping her white kid slippers and pale stockings and lemon-yellow dimity summer frock off with wordless languor. Charles was forgotten. The sun patterned them in lacy arabesques as the summer breeze stirred the curtains.

She helped him then tug his shirt over his head and watched him with the admiring eye of a lover as he leaned over to pull off his riding boots. His broad shoulders charmed her and the muscular grace of his torso; his strong biceps swelled with the effort needed to slide the tall leather boots free. And when he sprawled back across her in sportive play, she stroked the taut firm smoothness of his stomach.

"You're perfect," she murmured, tracing the flowing curve of his powerful pectorals.

"For what?" His brilliant green eyes gazed up at her in frolic.

"For everything." She loved being with him, knowing he was close and content and enamored. Her own content was complete.

"I can't cook—or play bridge with any competence. My manners are appalling, I've been told—actually some have said I have none. And I dance only under duress. Outside of that, I'm available… although we don't have time for everything—speaking in the biblical sense—" he grinned, "because we're promised at Boiselle's play at the Chatelet tonight."

"Salacious man."

"Carnal knowledge is actually high up on my list of 'everything.'"

"How fortunate."

"I adore an intelligent woman." Reaching up, he touched the tip of her nose with a brushing fingertip.

"You may kiss me," she said in her best instructive manner but ruined her haughty pose by giggling at the end.

And he did… along with several other noteworthy additions from his sizable list of "everythings."

At midafternoon the following day, Daisy returned from Adelaide's. Familiar now with Etienne's polo schedule, she knew precisely when he'd walk in… how he'd look, how he'd be smiling from satisfaction over his game and from his pleasure in seeing her. And she wanted to be there first, waiting for him, welcoming him as though she'd always been there when he came home, as though she always would. She was humming in anticipation when she entered the foyer, her friendly smile for Burns prompted by her blissful daydreams.

Burns didn't smile back or give his usual friendly greeting; he seemed instead strangely agitated, his brow knotted in a frown.

"Is the Duc back early?" Daisy asked, thinking perhaps Etienne was waiting for her.

"No, Mademoiselle, but I've sent for him."

Clearly something was wrong. A flustered Burns was extraordinary; he was never disconcerted. A figure of cool British reserve and poise, Burns served as the paradigm for haughty stewardship. "Someone's hurt," she quickly said, "Is it Hector?"

"No… no… Mademoiselle," he assured her, "no one's hurt… but it might be best if you… returned to the Princess de Chantel's until Monsieur le Duc—"

"I've been waiting for you," a cool familiar voice interjected. Someone else apparently was conscious of Etienne's polo schedule.

When Daisy swung around to the sound of the same disparaging voice she'd heard at the
Opéra
, Isabelle was standing in the doorway of the rosewood salon looking as though she owned the Bernini-designed residence. Dressed in Watteau pink chartreuse, silk apple blossoms at her sashed waist, she was a vision of femininity. Even her blonde hair seemed blonder in the half shadows of the gilded interior. And the de Vec diamonds sparkled in her ears. Above the dictates of fashion requiring lesser jewels for daytime, she wore her diamonds with regal assurance.

"I'm sorry, Mademoiselle," Burns softly said.

He'd been powerless to deny his master's wife entrance, Daisy understood, and she touched his arm in silent recognition of his apology. "I'm fine, Burns." She smiled, then turning to Isabelle said in a calm, level voice she frequently used when arguing the finer points of reservation borders to infringing cattlemen in court, "We can talk in the rosewood room. Would you like some refreshments?"

"This isn't a social visit." Isabelle deliberately neglected addressing her by name.

"I'll have tea, Burns," Daisy said. "And some of those madeleines, the chocolate ones." It was impossible to publicly intimidate Daisy; Absarokee training taught one self-possession. Walking across the green travertine entrance hall, she passed Isabelle to enter the salon.

By the time Isabelle followed her in, she'd seated herself. "You may prefer to stand," Daisy said to the woman she both en-vied and despised, "since this isn't a social visit." She wished she might have been the one to share the last twenty years with Etienne instead of this cool disdainful aristocrat. "Please state your business."

Isabelle bristled noticeably. "Someone should teach you manners. You're speaking to a Duchesse."

"Then I outrank you, for my father is a King among his people," Daisy quietly replied. "If you've come to see me, kindly state your business," Daisy repeated. "Etienne has been sent for," she added, feeling that information might prompt Isabelle to speak quickly.

"You won't last, you know." Isabelle's eyes were cold like those of the yellow eyes contemplating the theft of Indian lands. Daisy recognized the hatred.

"Perhaps," Daisy replied, more aware than Isabelle of the duration of her relationship with the Duc. In all likelihood, she would be on board a steamship this time next week.

"You females never do."

"Is there a point to this?" Daisy wasn't interested in being insulted by the Duchesse de Vec. If she had come merely to cast derision, further discussion was unnecessary.

"This is the point." Drawing an envelope from the deep pocket of her skirt, she tossed it on the table beside Daisy's chair, her smile smugly malicious.

Opening the envelope, Daisy took out the two sheets of scented paper and looked at them both. On each page were twin columns of names—women's names—written in lavender ink. She began mentally to count them, but found the list too long to quickly calculate. Gazing up at Isabelle, she said, "Obviously these mean something."

"They're a partial list of the women Etienne's amused himself with. I thought you might be interested. Naturally… those in the brothels are unknown to me."

Daisy was unable to repress the sinking feeling of revelation. She had known, of course, of the Duc's reputation, but—she'd never fully realized the extent. "Why did you… allow this?" she murmured, unable to speak in a normal tone with the suffocating weight filling her chest.

"Etienne isn't a man noted for obedience. Surely, you're aware of this. I begged him," she lied, "especially when the children were young, to have more respect for his duty as husband and father. He was rarely home."

Daisy was rational enough to recognize Isabelle's attempt at melodrama; aware of Etienne's devotion to his children and grandchild—in terms of duty, he couldn't be faulted. The women, of course, were entirely different. She found herself dreadfully tired suddenly, of Isabelle and the confrontational nature of Etienne's marriage, of the disastrous vicious divorce in which she'd be involved whether she wished to or not. She was tired too, of pale-faced, supercilious women who found in a succession of wardrobe changes each day their raison d'etre. "Thank you for the list," Daisy said, rising from her chair, leaving the papers on the table, no longer able to even pretend politesse. "I'm sure its compilation took some effort. If you'll excuse me now." Without waiting for a reply, Daisy began walking from the room.