Not Proper Enough (A Reforming the Scoundrels Romance) (2 page)

She turned in his arms and clasped her hands behind his neck. Her eyes caressed him, and when he cupped her bottom and drew her closer, she let out a trembling sigh of desire.

He carried her to his bed, pushing aside the heavy red curtains around it, and placed her on the mattress. Eugenia wore nothing but a gold medallion on a ribbon the same shade of azure as her eyes. He joined her on the bed, touching, his fingers gliding over her, his mouth and lips tasting. Beneath his hands and fingers, her skin was soft, so soft. She lifted one knee, and his pelvis settled between her legs. He took her nipple in his mouth, swept his tongue over the peak, and she arched toward him on the end of a soft moan. He did the same to her other breast with a similar, satisfying result.

By the time he pulled himself over her, he was halfway to climax. She parted her thighs, and he slid inside her. Her body accepted him, soft and slick around him. Ready for him. Eager for him as she would never be in reality. Their eyes met, connected, knew each other. In his dream, she knew what he liked and wanted that from him. True, he could be tender and gentle. He often was. But there were times he wanted an edge, and right now he wanted that edge with her. Hadn’t he always?

She wore a wedding band, but it wasn’t the one Robert had given her. No, this ring was one he’d put on her finger himself. They were married, he realized. She was his wife now. Not Robert’s.

Eugenia, God, so willing and passionate, put her arms around his shoulders, holding him close, moving with him exactly as he needed. Hard. Fast. Pushing them both to surrender. Her breath came in short bursts, and he was both masterfully making love to her and aroused almost beyond his endurance.

“I love you.”
She gazed into his face, besotted, trusting, while he thrust into her. Her fingertips slid over his skin. “Fox. Oh, Fox, I love you more than life.”

“I love you, too,” he said, and his heart dissolved into her. “Forever.”

His observing self remarked, “You are deluding yourself.” To which his dreaming self replied, “Sod off.”

Eugenia wrapped her legs around him, and his body wound up tighter than ever. She whispered his name and then encouragement.
More. More, Fox. Please.
His climax shattered him to pieces.

Immediately, even before his orgasm had faded, she was asleep beside him, sated, and there was Robert at the foot of the bed where he and Ginny lay tangled in each other’s arms. Had he been there the entire time? Fox slid out of her embrace and gazed at his best friend. Robert stood unevenly, as he always did, one hand on one of the bedposts so he would not lose his balance. His hair was shorn close to his head. He’d never been a handsome man, but no one who met him cared. Intellect, that beady-eyed genius, burned in him fever-bright.

“Robert.” The apology he’d owed Robert from nearly the day Ginny had entered their lives paralyzed him. The words were too big, yet they must be said even though it was too late. He wanted to apologize, to confess what a damned fool he’d been to allow their friendship to founder, but the words remained jammed up in his throat. In any event, Robert lifted a hand to stop him from saying something else he could never take back. Eugenia’s medallion, or one very much like it, dangled from his fingers.

“You’re to take care of her, Fox.”

He sat up, naked, one arm wrapped around his upraised knee. His other hand held a lock of Ginny’s hair. “You know I will.”

Robert leaned forward with that crooked grin of his. “I miss you, you old fool.”

“I, too.”

“There’s nothing you could have said that would have
stopped me from marrying her. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

From the moment Eugenia met Robert, she’d not cared about anyone else. Robert, whom Fox had always assumed would never marry, had fallen just as fast and just as hard. The connection between Eugenia and Robert took root so quickly there hadn’t been a damn thing he could do to stop it. Not that he hadn’t tried.

“Good.” The medallion slowly turned in Robert’s upraised hand.

“That’s no excuse for the things I said to you.”

Robert glanced at Eugenia. “She is the love of my life, Fox.”

“I know.”

“Keep her safe.” Robert let go of the bedpost and took an uneven step back. The shape of his body wavered. “Make her happy. If it takes your last breath, see that she’s safe and happy. Swear it.”

He swallowed hard before he could manage words. “I swear it, Robert.”

Robert’s body wavered, thinned, then vanished as if he’d never been there. Which, seeing as this was a dream, he had surely never been.

Fox came awake, momentarily unsure of where he was. Wherever he was, he had no company. A chill permeated the air. A damn arctic wind.

He was at home. Not at Bouverie, but at his private residence. The one his father had never been in and never would be in. He pulled the linens and covers over his chest. London in October could be bitterly cold. His bedroom was silent, but his heart raced, and Robert’s voice echoed in his head as if he’d really been here, speaking to him.

Make her happy.

He’d made Robert a promise.

Oddly enough, even though he had sworn to do so in a dream, he intended to keep that promise.

The next day. London.

J
UST WHEN
E
UGENIA THOUGHT THINGS COULDN’T GET
any worse, they did.

He was here. That
awful
man, the Marquess of Fenris. Awareness of his arrival jumped through the room like a pestilence picking off the weak and unwary. The orchestra played a few more notes then petered out, bringing a lively country reel to a halt. No one, Eugenia included, could believe the Marquess of Fenris was here at a ball given by Mrs. Wilson. Plain Mrs. Wilson, who was merely gentry, who had no connections one might research in the peerage. The man did not attend any parties but those given by the very upper reaches of the British aristocracy, yet here he was.

Whatever the reason for his appearance, his timing was impeccable. The room fell silent as guests realized he was here, and that meant everyone in the room heard the tail end of Mr. Dinwitty Lane’s comment, uttered in horrified tones as Lane stood not five feet from Eugenia.

“
Another
country chit? My God they’re coming out of the woodwork this season.”

The remark, though not intended as a direct insult to
Eugenia, nevertheless hit a glancing blow on its way to its intended target, which was the young woman standing beside her. If Mr. Lane had been within arm’s reach, Eugenia would have slapped him, she was that angry. It was fitting, horribly, awfully fitting, that Lane’s barb was universally heard because of that man.

One of the members of Dinwitty’s band of supporters laughed, and that, too, carried through the nearly silent room. That man, Fenris, remained near the door, expression cool because there was nothing but ice in his veins. Eugenia was unnaturally aware of him even as she turned her attention to the odious Mr. Dinwitty Lane.

A great deal depended on her reaction to Lane, and she fought her temper. No good would come of anything she said in anger. She could not afford to give Lane or the Marquess of Fenris ammunition against her.

Fenris’s social standing went without saying. Only son of a duke, after all. The Lane family had a page in Debrett’s, and this particular Lane was not without influence. He fancied himself the Beau Brummell of the sporting world, and Eugenia had hoped to avoid meeting him until Hester had made a few friends. He had questionable taste in clothes but was held in awe by many for his ability to ride, race a phaeton, and shoot the dots from a playing card. As far as Eugenia was concerned, he’d wasted his time at public school and at Oxford. An intellectual giant, he was not. He was, however, one of the Essex Lanes. More, he was wealthy and generous with a loan. Friends and debtors of Dinwitty Lane were legion.

Miss Hester Rendell, whom Eugenia had agreed to guide through her first London season, gazed at Mr. Lane with placid calm. She was not a beauty by any stretch. In terms of her looks, she did not impress upon first glance and possibly not even upon the second. She was quiet and slow to warm to people she did not know, a reserve too easily mistaken for a lack of spirit. Anyone who troubled to know her soon learned she was kind, generous, sensitive, and shockingly intelligent.

Lane was a good-looking man, not as tall as Lord Fenris, but heavier through the shoulders, with legs like tree trunks. His waistcoat was mauve with embroidered pink dots, his trousers the absolute crack of fashion, his coat dark green. Half a dozen fobs dangled from his watch chain, which, in Eugenia’s opinion, was five fobs too many. His cravat was a confection of linen so thoroughly starched he could not move his chin without danger of slitting his throat.

Hester turned to Eugenia, completely poised as Eugenia had discovered was her nature. Very little upset or perturbed her. “I believe I should very much like some lemonade. Shall we?”

“Observe,” Mr. Lane said. He lifted a hand so as to alert his companions. “It speaks.”

One of his friends barked. Deliberately. The room was still silent, and this little scene, this deliberate and cruel destruction of Hester’s social hopes, was center stage.

Eugenia’s head snapped toward Lane. She wanted to eviscerate the man. She wished him a hundred, no, a thousand painful deaths. If Lord Fenris followed Lane to his doom, all the better.

“Observe,” Hester said with perfect serenity as she put her arm through Eugenia’s. “It’s forgotten its species.”

And that was the beauty of Hester Rendell. Eugenia did not expect Hester to make a splash in the Ton, but Eugenia had, until now, been confident that by the end of the season, short as it was, some discerning gentleman would have fallen in love with her. That Eugenia managed to keep her temper in the face of Dinwitty’s insult was nothing short of a miracle. “Yes. Something to drink would be delightful.”

Arm in arm, they walked away from Lane, who had only begun to suspect one of his friends had been insulted and that, perhaps, he himself had just been summarily dismissed as unimportant. Perhaps, just perhaps, this encounter might not mean the utter ruin of Hester’s social hopes.

“I believe,” Hester said when she and Eugenia stood with glasses of what might more properly be called lemon water, “I do not like that man.”

“Nor I.”

“He’s not kind.”

Eugenia nodded her agreement.

“People ought to be kind.”

The orchestra had begun playing again, and those who’d been dancing when Lord Fenris arrived and brought everything to a halt took up their pattern again. No one had yet asked Hester to dance.

Eugenia returned her attention to her nemesis, though at the moment she disliked Mr. Lane a good deal more than the marquess. Mrs. Wilson hurried to greet him, but she did so by walking the perimeter of the room as she must do now that the dancing had begun again.

Lord Fenris noticed Mrs. Wilson’s approach and waited by the door, looking extremely forbidding and completely at ease at the same time. Eugenia was quite sure Fenris had not been invited to the Wilsons’ ball. He kept to a very small and exclusive circle of friends. Mrs. Wilson would have been aware of the hubris of sending the Marquess of Fenris an invitation to any event she might sponsor. Yet here he was. Of all the bad luck to have.

The commotion occasioned by the marquess’s arrival continued, albeit in less public fashion. Ladies who did not stare outright did so surreptitiously. Some of the younger ladies were not as circumspect as they might have been. They giggled or fanned themselves with too much energy. The whispers started.

There he is.

Oh, lud, isn’t he handsome?

Now, I don’t like a dark man, but I like it in him.

Honestly, he was only a man, and not a very pleasant one at that.

Lord Aigen, one of Fenris’s few friends, slung an arm around his shoulder and spoke into his ear. Whatever Aigen said in such private tones, Lord Fenris’s expression did not change. He remained by the door, surveying the room with a condescending eye. The ballroom, which was really two salons that had been opened into one room, wasn’t large. Good. He’d
need the space of twenty seconds to see he had no business here. He’d done quite enough damage already.

Even from across the dance floor, she could see Fenris was exquisitely dressed. He always was. He was well made enough that anything he wore looked good on him. Nevertheless, unlike Lane, he dressed with a conservatism that prevented one from calling him a Corinthian or a dandy. His nose was a trifle large, but that was, alas, a part of his physical appeal. She wasn’t so petty as to deny him his due in terms of his appearance.

Mrs. Wilson arrived at his side and curtseyed to him. To his credit, he greeted her with cool respect.

Hester followed Eugenia’s gaze. “Ah. Lord Fenris.”

There was such a familiarity in Hester’s words that Eugenia said, “You know him?”

“He visited us once when I was a girl.” Hester continued in a low voice. “With your husband. They came to see Charles.” Charles was Hester’s brother, and a childhood friend of Robert’s. “Long before you and Robert met, of course.”