Master of Love (6 page)

“Yes, I gathered that myself.” He pivoted to look around the room. “I hadn't quite realized when Uncle George proposed this arrangement how many books his collection had grown to include, nor that he intended to ship me every last blessed one of them.”

“Perhaps you'd care to sell part of the collection, or put it in storage? Or have me arrange a secondary collection from the books here for one of your other residences?” she proposed. “You have a country home, do you not?”

He paced in a winding circle through the trunks. “I don't care to sell any of the books, not after Uncle George has made me such a grand gesture. You can cull any doubles to send to my country seat, but I want the rest kept here. We've agreed we need the collection together to create that grand impressive display on my shelves, haven't we?” He came to a stop close in front of her, favoring her with wide eyes and his most innocent smile.

She gave him a hard look and moved away. “Do you have significant book shelving elsewhere in Rexton House? Perhaps in your private study?”

“In my study, certainly,” he answered, “although not enough, I think, to contain all the overflow from here. Although now you mention it”—he snapped his fingers as a grin spread across his face—“that could be an ideal solution.”

“What solution would that be?” she asked with a gratifying degree of alarm.

“I don't want the books spread all through the public rooms and bedchambers of Rexton House, so we need to set up a unified secondary collection somewhere else in the house. The most logical place is my study. It would make sense to put there those volumes of least interest to guests and those few books I consult most regularly in my occasional feeble attempts at reading and writing.”

She shook her head at his self-mockery. “Yes, that would seem to make sense.”

“You concur, then, with my plan, Miss Higginbotham?” He came up behind her and dropped his voice into its deeper register, purring out her name, just to spark that mix of panic and annoyance in her eyes. While it was childish of him to toy with her so, he couldn't resist.

She turned to frown up at him, back against her worktable. “With what, exactly, am I concurring?”

“Why, that I should have my study renovated, of course, starting immediately, to accommodate this secondary collection. We can remove the paneling across the back and side walls of the study and build shelving cabinetry for the books.” He rubbed his hands in delight at the prospect. “I shall quite bask in the splendor of being surrounded by such a handsome collection.”

She pursed her lips hard, as if biting back a retort. “I certainly wouldn't want to put you to any unnecessary expense or inconvenience. This book-collection project is already turning your household upside down.”

“It will all be worth it, I am sure, my dear Miss Higginbotham.” He leaned in to close his trap. “I'll just move my desk in here with you for the duration of the renovation. It should only be for a couple of months—that is, if Graves can arrange for the craftsmen to start right away. I think you've proposed an excellent solution.”

She opened her mouth to protest, those lovely bow lips teasing him for a moment with a perfect O, before she gathered her wits to protest. “Surely there is a less public chamber somewhere in the residence, one more conducive to the quiet and privacy you need when you concentrate so hard on your work?”

He grinned.
Oho! You'll have to sharpen your arrows more than that to scare me off, Miss H
. “Certainly, when I have meetings to conduct, I'll do so in one of the parlors or the morning room, but for my meager writing tasks—lists of my upcoming social obligations, for example—I do enjoy being around my books. I'm sure you understand.”

“Indeed, my lord.”

“And this way, when you have need to consult me about the collection, I'll be close at hand.”

“A definitive advantage, I'm sure,” she muttered darkly.

He smiled, the grin of the triumphant. “That's settled then. I'm off to tell Graves and Danvers of your suggestion, and to consult with them about the renovation. We'll see if we can't get started right away. Remember the carriage when you're ready to go,” he tossed over his shoulder.

“Wait, if you please,” she called out to him. “There is one final matter.”

He turned back toward her, but she merely paused, clenching her hands in front of her skirts. “Yes?” he prompted.

He watched her take a deep breath. “I would ask to be excused from any further luncheons with you or your guests,” she said in a rush. “I'm afraid Lady Barrington does not approve of me. It poses a problem, since she serves as your hostess.”

From comments Anna and Lady Vaughnley had made at their social calls this afternoon, he had some idea what was going on—especially after a wave of twittering gossip spread out behind teacups and fans in the ladies' wake. His new librarian was no doubt correct that Lady Barrington meant her no good. Callista's struggle to maintain her composure in face of the slights she'd endured under his roof deepened his sting of conscience. Even so, he found himself unwilling to give up her company.

And caught rather by surprise at the rush of pleasure he felt knowing that his position of power over her meant he didn't have to give her up, either.

“I'm afraid I can't grant your request,” he said. “When the officers of the Philosophical Society took their leave, they expressed hope that they'd lunch with you again. Rexton House functions as their London headquarters, you see, and I'll be hosting a series of meetings as they plan the upcoming Edinburgh conference.”

She swallowed and turned away. “If you'll forgive me for being blunt, luncheon was somewhat trying. I have not only my own reputation to look to, but that of my younger sister as well, since I am her guardian. Your reputation as Lord Adonis, Master of Love, will not help my own, I'm afraid, if certain people choose to make an issue of my presence in your household.”

He read the quiet desperation of her situation in her tense shoulders. For the first time, he truly hated that skein of stories about the “Master of Love.” It had originally served his purposes, but lately he'd begun to wonder if it was all worth it. The truth would blow away the cobwebs in an instant, yet he had woven the tale so well, none would believe him now.

Frustration sharpened his tone. “I expect my sister will be doing more of the hostessing, now that she's back in town and the Season is picking up.” It was the most he'd yield. He was paying for this book dealer to work in his library; she could bloody well show up at his dining table.

She nodded stiffly, looking at some point over his left shoulder. “As you wish, my lord.”

The whip of annoyance stung hard. The spinster no doubt imagined herself martyr to his beastliness. His irritation grew, with himself now, and irrationally goaded by her air of porcelain fragility. What was it about this tightly wound woman that had him careening from annoyance to intrigue and back again? The intensity of his response made no sense and could go nowhere. She was in his employ, and thus off-limits. She was inexperienced, thus also off-limits. And she thought him a libertine seducer whom she obviously held in low regard.

Christ, he
was
sick of the mask he wore.

Chapter 4

C
allista hugged her legs to conserve heat in her bedchamber's cooling hip bath, laid her head on her knees, and refused to cry.

She had thought the day would never end.

As a gray sunset darkened the sooty London sky, the viscount's luxurious carriage had paraded into Bloomsbury Square with the crest of the Avery family lion stalking across the doors. She'd found it both a little too appropriate for the viscount's golden feline style and a lot too conspicuous if the ladies Vaughnley and Barrington were indeed bent on ruining her. Although Mr. Danvers had assured her that transportation to and from home was a standard contract benefit, she'd been desperate to get out.

All she wanted was to collapse on her family's dilapidated old sofa with a glass of their precious remaining stock of sherry. But first Marie and then Great-Aunt Mildred begged for detailed accounts of the St. James mansion, its occupants, and Callista's first day of work. Marie had been her bosom friend since Callista's widowed father, after several years of traveling with his daughters throughout Europe, had settled his family in the same Paris street as Marie and her seamstress mother. There was little Callista would refuse her devoted friend and her great-aunt, especially as she knew they both hoped not only a financial boon but also renewed social possibilities would come from Callista's new position. If anyone could advise her about the debacle of her smeared reputation, it was her worldly-wise Frenchwoman friend, but the shame felt too raw for Callista to bear speaking about it. So instead she provided a highly censored and improved account of her day—especially the luncheon, which sent them into raptures of delight. When her thirteen-year-old sister, Daphne, burst in, reddish-blond braids flying, Callista had to retell everything from the beginning.

“Remember, dear, you are the great-granddaughter of a duke!” It was her great-aunt's favorite refrain. Callista had hidden a smile as she held the lady's cane and helped seat her at the supper table. “On your mother's side, the Willette family goes back to William the Conqueror. Royal blood runs in our veins! How many of Lord Rexton's guests can make such a claim?” Lady Mildred sputtered.

“Exactly.” Marie nodded, passing the crisp biscuits. “You should hold your head high with those people,
chérie
.”

“That was all a long time ago,” Callista said gently as Margaret served the Regency soup made from Sunday's pheasant. Besides serving as housemaid, the quiet young woman stitched with a fine hand and helped Marie in her dress shop, assembling the gowns from the fashion plates the Frenchwoman had brought from Paris.

“Bah! You are as
charmante
and distinguished as any of them—although you really must let me do something with your wardrobe,” Marie added with an unhappy professional glance at Callista's drab gray gown.

“You know, dear”—Lady Mildred accepted a slice of Red Leicester from Daphne; they were making economies with fresh butter these days, but cheese they could still afford—“I was acquainted with Lord Rexton's mother, Celeste, when we were all quite young, although she is a good fifteen years my junior.”

“Yes, Great-Aunt, I do recall you mentioning the connection.”
Several times already
. Callista smiled fondly at the lady, who'd grown a little fuzzy minded of late. “Did you know her older brother Sir George as well?”

“Somewhat.” The lady looked away. “I . . . we were acquainted.”

Callista frowned, passing on the bowl of boiled parsnips that rounded out their supper. “Do you know of any reason why Sir George would insist I be the one to organize the library? Lord Rexton said his uncle presented my commission as a condition of his early bequest.”

“Why, I'm sure I don't know, dear!”

The suddenly high pitch of her great-aunt's tone made Callista wonder what the lady
wasn't
saying, but then Marie leaned in, fascinated as always by the ways of the English aristocracy. “What was this Lady Celeste like?”

A long reminiscence followed about the vivacious blonde, dubbed the Celestial Beauty. “Your Lord Adonis must have inherited both his mother's looks and temperament,” Lady Mildred told Callista, oblivious to her great-niece's pained wince.

Daphne suddenly interrupted. “Oh, and Mr. Garforth called on you, Callista! Remember him? He's the business agent for the Duke of Bedford.”

“Ah,
oui
!” added Marie. “Monsieur Garforth wanted to know all about the new roof and my dress shop here.”

“He was quite interested in you too, Callista,” said her sister. “I told him about your marvelous new position doing very important work for Viscount Rexton. I offered him tea and he said I was a ‘right lovely little lady, very grown-up indeed.' ” Daphne grinned. “He left a packet for you, some new lease documents, I think he said. I gave the papers to Billy to put on your dressing table with the rest of the post. Mr. Garforth said he was going to see the duke at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, but he'd be back in a fortnight and would see you then.”

None of that sounded particularly good. She hadn't missed a quarterly payment yet, but nor had she ever felt comfortable with the duke's land agent. Mr. Garforth made her nervous, although she couldn't pin down why.

It wasn't until much later that Callista finally had time to look through the papers their landlord's agent had left. First, there had been more questions to answer at table about every detail of her day. After the meal, Callista managed to pull Marie aside to ask what her friend knew about Lady Barrington. “I got the distinct impression,” Callista said, “the lady was laying certain claims with regard to Lord Rexton.”

“
Oui.
” Marie tapped a well-manicured figure against pursed lips. “I have heard she is a well-to-do widow, very fashionable, and often in his company. She is apparently a distant cousin by marriage; at least that's the story they use to explain why she acts as hostess when neither his mother nor sister is in town.” Marie gave one of her elegant Gallic shrugs. “I think she's assumed to be his lover, along with the other ladies the society pages link him to.”

Callista then met with Margaret's mother, Mrs. Baines, in the cook-cum-housekeeper's small sitting room below stairs to go over the week's menus and household accounts.

“The coal heavers delivered today, miss,” Mrs. Baines said with a sigh. “I'm afraid you're not going to like the bill, but there's nothing we can do until the weather warms up for good.”

She and Mrs. Baines had developed a system of paying the tradesmen's bills in the order they were past due. They shared a pot of tea as they figured out how to shuffle funds so as to be no more than sixty days late on the fishmonger and thirty days on the butcher. Even with her new commission at Rexton House, the bills kept falling overdue. She hid the full extent of their problems but didn't know how long she could hold on to the family home where she and Daphne had been born. Sometimes she slipped out alone to walk by St. Pancras Workhouse, off Elephant Row to the north, drawn like a moth to the flame of her worst secret fear: that they'd all be tossed into the street.

She shook herself mentally. “ ‘Twill all come right, some day or night,” she muttered under her breath.

“What's that, miss?” asked Mrs. Baines.

“Nothing.” Her father's old refrain had always sounded cheery when he'd said it; she'd been repeating it since his death as a grim incantation.

Finally, Callista completed her nightly ritual of reading with Daphne in the girl's room. Much begging on her sister's part had won the concession that she was old enough to take turns reading aloud with Callista from the new and wonderfully scandalous
Jane Eyre.

She was yawning heavily when she at last made it to her bedchamber. She pulled an eiderdown around herself against the evening chill and sank into her chair to read the post Billy had left. Mr. Garforth's packet she saved for last as she sighed over two creditors' bills and a bank draft that would just barely cover them from one of her last remaining clients. The elderly gentleman had been a dear friend of her father; she suspected he ordered foreign books from her now simply out of pity, two a month, regular as clockwork. She cashed his drafts with just as regular a prick to her pride.

Mr. Garforth's language of updated rental increases, retail disclosure, and heretofore noted subclauses etched a deep frown in her brow. Although she was familiar with contracts and read the document carefully twice, she couldn't decipher the dense legalese, with some of the subclauses notated merely “to be discussed.” Something was amiss. The unclarity of the document fretted her as much as the sense of a significant renegotiation to their land lease—she could afford neither trouble nor an increase in rent.

A knock at the door ushered in Billy. “Are ye ready for yer bath, Miss H.?” Although strong for his age, he huffed from hefting the steaming buckets up three flights of stairs. “I've got yer water pipin' hot, just as ye like it, and two more ready to bring up.”

She put down the papers. Tomorrow, she'd ask the viscount's coachman to stop in Arlington Street off Piccadilly at the business offices of Mr. Garforth, as it was only a few blocks away from Rexton House. The land agent's clerk could arrange an appointment for the day after Mr. Garforth returned from the duke's seat in Bedfordshire. It was all she could do for now.

“Billy, you really don't need to do this every night.” She pulled the shallow copper hip bath from the corner. “You must be tired after our day at Rexton House.” The lad found the idea of a nightly bath a truly dangerous fancy, but once he'd discovered how fond she was of the practice, there'd been no stopping him. If Miss H. wanted a bath, by crikey, he'd see she got one.

“It's no trouble, miss.” He poured, careful not to spill. “Ye should let me light the fire before I fetch the last buckets,” he said, casting a displeased eye toward the dark grate. “It's bad enough to take a bath without doin' it in the cold as well.”

“The weather's turned wonderfully warm, Billy.” She smiled at him brightly. “I think spring is definitely here. I shall be fine with just the rest of the hot water.”

He shook his dark head, clearly thinking her crazy. “If ye say so, miss. I'll be right back.”

By the time she'd settled into the water—knees tucked to her chin, steam rising, and heat biting at her skin, bless that Billy's heart—she felt the weariness of the day down to her very bones.

Her evening sherry and bath were the sole indulgences left over from her old life. Most people washed up in the morning upon rising, but Callista had developed the habit in Paris of a nightly soak in a hot tub. Marie had laughed and called her
la princesse,
but it had become her one time to herself, her one time
not
to think and plan. Especially in the last year, when it seemed everything was slowly falling apart, it had become her private time to relax—for just a few minutes—and not worry about bills and debt and dwindling sales and the way shop owners looked at her when she tried to offer foreign- and rare-book sales and, worse, the way they and other men looked at her when they tried to buy what she wasn't selling.

Tonight, however, not even Billy's hot water could chase away the nipping chorus of worried voices in her head. How in the world was she to pull off this library commission? The organizational task was daunting enough without the added torture of the luncheon she'd suffered through with the ladies Vaughnley and Barrington. She dreaded the prospect of the stories they might be circulating even now in the London ballrooms. And what of Lord Rexton? An image flashed through her mind, of him bent over the hand of some celebrated society beauty, grinning wickedly and saying, “You should see my little sparrow of a librarian, pecking away at the stacks of books!”

She grimaced:
Besmirched or belittled, take your pick.

“Hold yourself gently,” her mother used to say. “You're so serious, Callista, so hard on yourself.” But someone had to be serious in her family of impractical, romantic intellectuals, and the lot had seemed to fall on her. Her parents could while away the days reading and the evenings talking animatedly about books. She was the one who made the menu plans even then, and after her mother's death, most of the other plans as well. Despite Marie's loyal words, she knew she was no beauty, no vivacious conversationalist, no charming flirt. She was simply competent and organized and well-read.

She shook herself mentally. So be it—she was who she was. Pretending or wishing otherwise was mere folly. And what these aristocrats thought of her was none of her concern.

She sank lower into her cooling hip bath and screwed her eyes shut.

She wasn't getting out until the last of the heat was gone.