Private Arrangements (16 page)

A garden party was in full swing. Set against a profusion of red tulips and yellow jonquils was a kaleidoscopic parade of women, the edges of their creamy skirts blurring like a distant memory. In the middle of this swirl of colors, an oasis of calm. A man sat at a small table by himself, his cheek in his palm, his gaze enthralled by someone just outside the frame of the painting.

Lord Frederick was a far more talented and vivid painter than Camden had guessed. The painting radiated warmth, immediacy, and charming wistfulness.

A Man in Love,
said the small inset on the bottom of the frame.

A man in love.

At his sister Claudia's house in Copenhagen, there was a framed photograph of Camden, taken the day after New Year's Day 1883. He'd been waiting for his mother and Claudia to finish their primping in advance of a family portrait, and the photographer had captured him in a pose nearly identical to that of Lord Frederick's man in love—daydreaming in an armchair, his head propped up in his hand, smiling, gazing somewhere beyond the range of the camera.

He had been looking out the window in the direction of Briarmeadow and thinking of
her.

The photograph remained Claudia's favorite, despite all his efforts to persuade her to get rid of it.
I like looking at it,
she'd insist.
I miss you like that.

Some days he, too, missed it. The optimism, the headiness, the feeling of walking on air. He knew perfectly well now that it'd been based on a lie, that he'd paid for those few weeks of unbridled happiness by never being able to feel anything like that again, and still he missed it.

He might divorce her, but he'd never be free of her.

Gigi's sitting room was dark, but light flowed out of her bedroom, casting a long, narrow triangle the color of old gold coins along the angle of the bedroom door, which had been left slightly ajar. Strange, she was certain she had switched off the light before going out.

When she reached her bedroom, she discovered the light to be from Camden's apartment. The connecting door between their bedrooms was wide open. But his bedroom, though lit, looked empty, his bed undisturbed from when it had last been made.

Her heart rate accelerated. She had deliberately stayed out very late to avoid a repeat of last night. Surely he wouldn't bother waiting up when he still had three hundred sixty-three nights left to impregnate her.

But where was he? Fallen asleep in his chair? Or possibly still out on the town somewhere, seeing to his own amusement? But what did she care what he did in his own time? She should simply close the door—very quietly—and get herself to bed.

Instead, she walked into his bedroom.

The sight of the fully restored room still made her throat tighten. It took her back to the time when she used to flop down on his bed and weep at life's unfairness.

The day she emptied the bedchamber was the day she took charge of her life. Three months later she met Lord Wrenworth and began a torrid affair that further boosted her confidence. But this was where it all began, the decoupling of her life from Camden's, the choice to move on, no matter how lonely and uncertain the future.

His personal effects were nowhere to be seen, except for a watch on a silver chain that lay on the demilune table opposite the bed, an intricate timepiece from Patek, Philippe & Cie. She turned the watch over. On the back was an inscription wishing him a happy thirtieth birthday from Claudia.

She put down the watch. The console table stood not far from the half-open door to the sitting room. A bright light washed in, but the sitting room itself was as silent as the bottom of the ocean.

She pushed the door open and saw rolls of blueprints, dozens of them, on chairs and tables. On the writing table, held open by a paperweight, a slide rule, and a tin of bonbons, was a sheet of white draft paper.

She saw Camden only after she had opened the door fully. He was seated in a low-slung Louis XV chair, clad in the black dressing gown that brought out the dark flecks in his green eyes, turning them the color of summer foliage at dusk. A book lay open in his lap.

“You are up early,” he said, taking his sense of irony out for some exercise and fresh air, no doubt.

“Must be that Protestant work ethic I keep hearing so much about,” she said.

“Did you do well at cards tonight?” His gaze dipped to the décolletage of her gown. “I'd guess you did.”

She had worn one of her less modest pieces. It was, to be sure, a cheap trick to divert attention at the gaming tables, but she disliked idling her assets when she could make use of them. “Who told
you
about it?”

“You. You told me that once you were married, you planned to never dance again and to spend all your time at balls separating English fops from their cravat money.”

“I don't remember ever saying anything like that.”

“It was a long time ago,” he said. “Let me show you something.”

He rose and walked over to her, opening the book in his hands to an oversize page. The page was folded into quarters. He unfolded it. “Take a look.”

She immediately recognized the large illustration as a rendering of Achilles' shield. Mrs. Rowland adored Book 18 of the
Iliad,
and many a night, as a child, Gigi had gone to sleep listening to the description of the great shield Hephaestus had wrought for Achilles, the five-layered marvel that depicted a city at peace and a city at war, and just about every other human activity under the sun, all surrounded by the mighty river Oceanus.

She had seen other imaginings of the shield, most of which, too faithful to Homer's depictions, were crammed with details of dancing youths and garlanded maidens, resulting in a filigree so fine that it could not possibly outlast the vigor of even one battle. But this particular interpretation was lean, shorn of minutiae, yet muscular and menacing in its austerity. The sun, the moon, and the stars shone down on the wedding procession and the bloody slaughter in equal serenity.

“It is the
oeuvre
of the man whom your mother would like you to marry,” Camden said as he restored the page to its folded state. “If you can't hang on to me.”

Gigi was surprised enough that she took the book from Camden and inspected its spine.
Eleven Years Before Ilium: A Study of the Geography, Logistics, and Daily Life of the Trojan War
by L. H. Perrin. The family surname of the dukes of Perrin was Fitzwilliam, but by custom a peer signed his title.

“Fancy that.” She gave the book back.

Camden set it aside. “Since you are here, have a look at some of my designs.”

He'd done nothing to indicate the slightest sexual interest in her. Yet the hairs on her neck abruptly stood on end. “Why should I be curious?”

“So you'll know whom to blame when Britain loses the next America's Cup Challenge.”

She was dismayed despite her preoccupation. “You are helping the American side?”

Some forty years before, an American yacht had raced fourteen yachts from the Royal Yacht Squadron around the Isle of Wight and won by a whopping twenty minutes. According to legend, the queen, watching the race, asked who was second, and the answer she received was “There is no second, Your Majesty.” Ever since then, English syndicates had been trying to best the Americans and win back the cup. To no avail.

“I'm helping the New York Yacht Club, of which I'm a member,” he said.

He walked ahead of her to the writing desk and glanced back, waiting. The light of the standing lamp beside him caressed his hair, illuminating its sun-bleached locks. His expression was kind and patient—too kind, too patient.

She felt the tug of gravity on her feet. Only her refusal to reveal any weaknesses in herself forced her to move, one heavy heel at a time, to stand before the desk.

As she bent her neck to inspect the design, he moved behind her. “It's more of a preliminary drawing at this stage,” he said.

He spoke next to her ear. A filament of pleasure zigzagged through her, acute and debilitating. She felt his hand brush aside the tendrils of hair that had escaped from her low chignon. Then his fingers settled on her nape.

“I see,” she said, her voice tight.

“I can do the detailed scale drawing myself,” he murmured, undoing the top button of her gown. “But mostly these days I have a draftsman do it for me.”

She stared down at the designs. At the center was a yacht, appearing as it would at sea, sails fully deployed. To the side he had drawn a cross section of the hull and a view of the vessel in dry dock.

He reached around her and pointed at a deep, narrow protrusion from the keel halfway down the length of the yacht, while his other hand unmoored her buttons easily, languidly, and all too swiftly.

“I hope the fin keel will give the yacht greater lateral stability,” he said, as if he were addressing a group of engineering students, even as he opened her gown all the way to her hips. “You want the yacht to ride as high as possible, to increase hull speed. But a vessel barely in the water would capsize that much more readily.”

“Been capsizing boats lately?” she said, hoping her voice dripped enough tartness.

“Not for a while I haven't. But I did once. The first yacht I ever owned. I worked on the design for years, built her with my own hands, and she tipped over two leagues into her maiden voyage.” He eased the gown off her shoulders, disengaging her arms from the bodice, his touch as light as the first breeze of summer. “Serves me right for calling her the
Marchioness.”

Her heart suddenly pounded. He named his first yacht after
her?
“What possessed you to do something like that? Did you forget that you couldn't stand me?”

“I was told I should either name my boat after my wife or my mistress,” he said, as her dress crumpled into a heap of coppery satin and tulle. “I towed her in, rebuilt her from scratch, rechristened her the
Mistress,
and she's been sailing fine ever since, one of the fastest racing yachts on the Atlantic.

“You see,” he whispered, loosening her corset laces and lifting the corset over her head. “You are trouble even from three thousand miles away.”

“Truly, is there no depth to which I won't sink?” she asked sarcastically, even as she gripped on to the desk.

Her petticoats slipped off to join the discarded gown. He easily deprived her of her chemise, his accidental touches scalding her skin. “I think I still have a photograph somewhere of me waving from the
Marchioness,
idiotically overjoyed, just before she sailed.”

“I'd have preferred seeing you in the frigid Atlantic. I should have liked to sail right by and not fish you out.”

He retorted by divesting her of her drawers and trapping her naked body—naked but for white satin evening gloves and white silk stockings—between his body and the edge of the desk.

His fingertips skimmed over her bare bottom and headed slowly yet inexorably for the junction of her thighs. She closed her eyes and bit her lip but refused to clamp her legs together despite her nervousness.

“Are you always this wet?” he whispered. “Or is it just for me?”

She wanted to say something biting, something that would puncture his masculine pride so completely that he'd never be able to gloat again. But it was all she could do to suppress the whimper in her throat as he slowly pushed inside her. His dressing gown caressed her back, cool and silken against the burning sensations of his entry. He withdrew, then rammed inside her with a vigor that forced a gasp from her larynx and lifted her to her toes.

He sank his teeth into her shoulder. Nothing painful, just a strong bite to punctuate the hot, smooth glide of his body into hers. She could not silence a small moan.

Despite her desperate attempt to recite the alphabet backward—she reached only as far as V before she could no longer think—her body drowned in sensations. She was full, so full, and deliciously pummeled. The pleasure gathered and swelled. She gripped the edge of the desk tighter, her mind unable to comprehend anything except the need to extract ever greater, sharper, thicker pleasure from their mating.

That pleasure erupted in a quivering, imploding climax. She was vaguely aware of his final thrust, of the spasm of his body, of his labored breath in her ear and the heavy thudding of his heart against her back, plainly discernible through the thin layer of silk that separated them.

His cheek nuzzled against her neck. His hands were on either side of hers. They stood, practically in an embrace, with him leaning into her, surrounding her.

“Oh, God, Gigi,” he murmured, the syllables barely audible. “Gigi.”

She froze, the spell of the moment shattered. He had uttered that exact phrase on their wedding night, over her, under her, beside her, in what she had believed to be exultant bliss.

She disengaged herself, turned around, and slammed her palms into his chest. Her abrupt ferocity did not budge him, but his eyes widened in surprise. He moved aside. Not caring that she looked like a woman who made her living gracing pornographic postcards, she bent down, gathered an armful of her garments, and pivoted on her heels.

“Wait.” He followed after her. She thought he meant to hand her an item of clothing she had forgotten. But instead he draped his dressing gown about her. “Don't catch a chill.”

She had felt angry, mortified, humiliated. She still did. But his solicitude unearthed pain of the kind she thought she had resolutely put behind her when she cleared out his bedchamber: the pain of what might have been.

“I won't thank you,” she said. She had only surliness left for defense.

“I've done nothing worthy of a thank-you,” he said. “Good night, Lady Tremaine. Until tomorrow night.”