Private Arrangements (6 page)

Gigi burned, one moment with the fires of hell, one moment with the ecstasy of that other afterworld, but mostly with an earthly amalgam of mortification and raw ferment.

She'd been a hairbreadth away from climbing back into bed with Lord Tremaine. The entire scenario had already unfolded in her mind: the ardor, the consummation, the dismay, and the consequences. In the end, he would marry her, because it was the honorable thing to do, despite his disgust for her and his relative blamelessness in the matter.

Everything in her yearned for him. He would be the equal she had never known, the deliverance from her vast loneliness, the balm to any and all misery. If only she could have him. . . .

But she had stopped herself. Because it was too craven a thing to do, too much beneath her dignity. And she wanted his good opinion, she craved it, she who had never cared what anyone else thought of her.

An eternity passed before it was time to dress and head down for breakfast. She thought she would be alone, but he was already there in the breakfast parlor when she entered. Her face burned again.

He set aside the ironed copy of
Illustrated London News
he'd been reading and rose. “Miss Rowland,” he said, all courtesy and impeccable breeding. “Good morning.”

She didn't respond immediately. She couldn't. All she could think of was the way he'd shoved her under him, his arousal pressed fully against her, separated from her thigh by only the flannel of her nightgown.

But he had slept through all of it. He had no recollection.

“Lord Tremaine. Did you sleep well?”

His gaze met hers, level, innocent. “Oh, yes, splendidly. I slept like a log.”

While she suffered for the want of him. While she alternately berated herself and marveled at what she had done. While she went over each moment of their perilous encounter, recalling his topography, his texture, his scent, and his frightening yet delicious weight as he held her captive.

He smiled at her. And it hit her like a mallet to the temple, the realization that she was in love with him. Stupidly, dreadfully in love with him.

Overnight, she'd become a fool.

Chapter Five

9 May 1893

P
hilippa!” Freddie cried.

Philippa. Less than twenty-four hours had passed since she'd last heard her name on Freddie's lips. She'd loved the sound of the spirant syllables, loved the slight catch in Freddie's voice that always accompanied their utterance, as if he still couldn't believe that she permitted him to address her so intimately.

But all she could think now was that he didn't call her Gigi. He didn't even
know
that she was Gigi. No other living man thought of her as Gigi.

Only Camden.

“Are you all right, my love?”

She smiled at the man she adored. With his fair complexion, rosy cheeks, and earnest eyes, Freddie was Gainsborough's Blue Boy all grown up. He had a wonderful head of sandy curls, blue eyes the color of Delft chinoiserie, and a gentle, unassuming nature as kind as the sun in May. Her very own Mr. Bingley—everything a young man ought to be.

“I'm fine, darling, I'm fine.”

He came forward to take her hands in his but stopped before he quite reached her, the concern in his eyes breaking her heart. “Can we be sure that Lord Tremaine has really left? What if it's a trap, and he returns to spy on you? He can . . . if he chooses to, he can make things unbearable for you.”

How did she even begin to explain that Camden already had an armory of unbearable-making devices at his disposal? That he held her entire future in his not-so-tender mercy?

“Tremaine has been quite civil,” she said. “He is not the sort to throw tantrums.”

“I can't believe he left town already,” said Freddie. “He arrived only yesterday afternoon.”

“There is nothing keeping him here, is there?” Gigi said.

They were in the back parlor where they usually took tea together, a room done in shades of lavender: the upholstery amethyst brocade, the draperies lilac velvet, and the tea service white with borders of wisteria. In her youth she had disdained all but the primary colors, but now she appreciated a broader segment of the spectrum.

And so it was with Freddie. At eighteen—or perhaps even twenty-three—she'd have scoffed at an alliance with such a shy, unworldly man. She'd have seen him as an embarrassment, a burden. But she had changed. The only thing she saw when she looked at Freddie was the shining goodness of his heart.

“Where did he go?” Freddie asked anxiously. “When will he be back?”

“He didn't bring a valet, so there is no one to tell us anything. I wouldn't even know he had gone off somewhere if Goodman hadn't overheard him telling the cabbie to take him to the train station.”

She was incensed that he made free use of her house and her staff without informing her of his movements—the least courtesy, surely. She was also profoundly relieved by the small respite of his absence.

The way she had ogled him this morning—at his torso, which seemed to have been sculpted by the hands of Bernini himself, smooth, lean, lithe, with long, beautifully sinewed arms like those of a seasoned sailor—could she have done anything more mortifying short of dropping her handkerchief and falling to the floor in a dead faint?

She and Freddie sat down side by side on the chaise longue. “Tell me what he wanted,” said Freddie. “He must have wanted
something.”

She had been able to think of nothing but what Camden wanted. Even now, with him miles away, she was still distracted and tense. Disaster, that was what he wanted. For what else could bedding her achieve but somehow, somewhen, calamity on an epic scale?

“He is not convinced that we should be divorced for something as trivial as me wishing to marry someone else,” she said. It was beyond her to tell Freddie that her husband meant to invoke his long-abdicated rights and shag her until she showed something for it. Nor could she reveal that she would submit to this connubial copulation, while planning to make use of every device ever invented to block conception.

What was it about Camden that turned her into such a chiseler and now a double-crosser? “But he's willing to be reasonable. If we are still determined to marry in a year's time, he'll let the divorce proceed.”

“A year!” Freddie exclaimed. Then he breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, if that's his only condition, then it's not half so bad. We can wait a year. It will be an awfully long year, but we can wait.”

“Freddie.” She gripped his hand, gratitude inundating her heart. “You are so good to me.”

“No, no! You are the one who's good to me! Everyone else thinks I'm clumsy and dense. You are the only person who thinks I'm all right.”

On any other day she'd have preened with pride, to think that at last she possessed the depth and maturity necessary to appreciate a diamond of the first water like Freddie, when all about her, men and women were still blinded by superficialities. But today her depth and maturity truly made their presence known. She was more than humbled; she felt unworthy. But she could not say it. Freddie looked to her for strength and guidance. She must not tumble off her pedestal now.

“I am most certainly not. I know for a fact that Miss Carlisle thinks highly of you.”

Miss Carlisle was in love with Freddie. She was dignified and self-contained about it, but she could not conceal it from Gigi. Normally, Gigi would not have pointed out such a thing to Freddie. But these were not normal times, and her guilt overshadowed her possessiveness.

“Angelica? Really? She used to laugh at me all the time when we were younger, whenever I fell off my pony or some such. And she used to tell me that I was a veritable idiot.”

“People change as they grow older,” Gigi said. “At some point we learn to value kindness and constancy above all else, and in that, we cannot find better than you, Freddie.”

Freddie smiled in pleasure. “If you say so, then it must be so. Angelica hasn't been feeling quite well lately. I've been meaning to have a bottle of tonic sent to her. I think I'll deliver it in person now, and ask her if I've become less of a dunce over the years.”

The mantel clock chimed the half hour. Freddie had been in her parlor for fifteen minutes. She used to allow his calls to stretch for half an hour and more, but that was no longer possible with Camden's return.

“I think I'd better go,” Freddie said, standing up. “Though I hate to leave.”

She rose. “I hate it too. I wish—oh, never mind what I wish.”

Freddie clasped her hands in his broad, warm palms. “Are you sure you are quite all right, my love? Are you really sure?”

No, she was not all right. She felt ill and lonely. And appalled at herself. She was about to undertake a dangerous gamble, lying and cheating at both ends. And here she thought she had forever sworn off fraud and swindle.

She mustered a radiant smile for him. “Don't worry about me, darling. Remember what you yourself have said? Nothing can shake me. Nothing.”

Langford Fitzwilliam, the Duke of Perrin, began his five-mile afternoon walk a half hour earlier than usual. He liked a little unpredictability from time to time, as currently his life consisted of all the variety of a mediocre vicar's Sunday sermons. But he didn't mind it, not too much. A scholar needed peace and quiet to delve deep into the Homeric past and the heroic battles before the walls of Ilium.

One of his favorite places along the walk was a cottage located exactly two and a quarter miles from his front door. The cottage itself was ordinary enough: two stories, white walls, red trims. Its gardens, however, were worthy of a sonnet, if not a hoity-toity ode outright.

The front garden was a fantasia of roses. And not just the tight-budded roses he usually came across but full-open, immodest blooms from an earlier, less straitlaced era—big, riotous flowers weighing down bushes and drooping off trellises, ranging from the most pristine blush to a wine-dark, blowsy red.

He was curious about the back garden, where gardeners often concentrated the main of their energy and effort. But a high hedge surrounded the back garden, and all he could see was the ridge of what looked to be the roof of a sizable greenhouse. He did not wish to make the acquaintance of the cottage's residents, so he waited for that inevitable day when someone forgot to put away the ladder after trimming the hedge.

He had no scruples about peeking into a private garden. What was anyone going to do? Call the constable on him? The one thing he had learned from nearly thirty years of being a duke was that, short of actual murder, he could get away with just about anything.

Today, however, there was a ladder, though it didn't lean on the hedge. Instead, it had been put up against an elm tree across the lane from the garden. A woman stood on the ladder, her back to him, dressed in an afternoon gown much too fashionable and ridiculous for such things as climbing fifteen-foot ladders.

The woman was lecturing a cat, a kitten that she was attempting to perch on a branch twelve feet off the ground, a sight that halted Langford dead in his tracks.

“Shame on you, Hector! You are a cousin of the mighty lions of the savannah. You disgrace them! Now stay put, and you will be rescued in time.”

The kitten disagreed with her assessment. The moment she removed her hands, it leapt back into her bosom.

“No, Hector!” the woman cried as she caught the cat. “You will not do this again. You will not foil my plan. You will not be yet one more capricious male to stand between my daughter and a coronet of strawberry leaves!”

Langford's interest in the situation escalated dramatically, given that he was the only man in a fifty-mile radius known to possess a coronet of strawberry leaves—the ducal headgear worn at the coronation of a sovereign. He wasn't quite sure where his particular coronet was kept, though, there having been not a single British coronation during his lifetime.

“Listen to me, Hector.” The woman lifted the kitten until the creature's eyes were level with her own. “Listen and listen well. If you do not cooperate, I will cut every ounce of fish, liver, tongue, you name it, out of your meals. What's more, I will bring a dog into the house and feed it foie gras right in front of you. A dog, you understand, a dirty cur like Gigi's Croesus.”

The kitten meowed pathetically. The woman remained pitiless. “Now up you go, and stay this time.”

And damned if the kitten didn't obey, meowing plaintively but staying put all the same. The woman let out a long sigh and slowly descended the ladder. Langford began moving again, tapping his walking stick purposefully on the packed soil of the lane.

The woman turned at the sound. She was beautiful, with jet-dark hair, alabaster skin, and red lips, like Snow White after a few decades of happily-ever-after—and older than he'd supposed. From her voice and her figure he'd thought her somewhere in her thirties, but she was at least forty, likely more.

At the sight of him, her eyes widened to the size of gold guineas, but she recovered quickly. “I do beg your pardon, sir.” She sounded breathless, nothing like the tyrant she'd been with Hector. “I don't mean to trouble you, but I can't get to my kitty. He is stuck up high.”

He frowned. He had a fearsome frown, the kind that sent people scurrying to the opposite side of a room. “You have no groom or footman to retrieve the beast for you?”

She was clearly offended by his reference to the fur ball but swallowed it. “I have given them the afternoon off, I'm afraid.”

A woman who thought ahead, a rare phenomenon. Although, if he was pressed hard, he'd admit that men who thought ahead were equally rare. His frown deepened, but it seemed to have temporarily lost its menace, for she was not at all deterred by it.

“Won't you be so kind as to retrieve it for me?” she asked, all fluttering handkerchief and feminine helplessness.

A delightful conundrum. Should he rudely refuse and watch her crumple or play along for a bit of diversion?

“Certainly,” he said. Why not? His life had become monotonous of late. And he'd been fond of charades and tableaux in his younger days.

Eagerly, she stood aside and watched his approach with such idolatrous rapture that he felt like the Golden Calf itself. If he hadn't known that she was an ambitious mama who had him marked out for her daughter, he'd have thought she was out to ensnare him herself.

He ascended the ladder, a rickety contraption that did not sound willing to hold his weight. The kitten had stopped its meows and regarded him uncertainly. He grabbed it by the scruff of its neck and brought it down. As soon as it could, the kitten jumped free of him and landed back in its mistress's bosom—an ample bosom that strained the front of her bodice very nicely.

“Hector,” she cooed shamelessly. “You had me worried, you naughty kitten.” Hector, still frightened over a vegetarian future, did not contradict her. “How can I thank you enough, sir?”

“It is gratification enough to be of assistance. Good afternoon, madam.”

“But you must let me know your place of domicile at least, good sir!” she cried. “My cook makes an excellent strawberry cake. I shall have one sent to you.”

“I thank you, madam. But I am not overly fond of strawberries.”

“A cherry pie, then.”

“I have nothing to do with cherries.” Now he'd see how far she'd go to worm her way into his acquaintance.

She was taken aback, but again, her recovery was quick. “I also have a case of Château Lafite claret, from the forty-six vintage.”

This was an offer more difficult to resist. He had acquired a taste for fine wines in his younger years. And '46 was an extraordinary vintage for Château Lafite. He had gone through his last bottle three years ago.

Two things immediately became clear about her. She was much wealthier than he'd guessed from her modest cottage. And this scheme to rope him in for her daughter was no lark. She was prepared to go if not to hell then at least to Jakarta and back.

“Or do you not care for that either, sir?” She played it coy, having already perceived his temptation.

He gave in. “I live at Ludlow Court.”

Her right hand detached itself from the kitten, arced in the air, and returned—
smack!—
to her bosom, fingers spread in a gesture that traditionally heralded delighted incoherence. “Surely—oh, dear! You do not— but—goodness gracious me!”

As she was made from sterner, cat-exploiting stuff, she sank not into a faint but into a gorgeous curtsy. “Your Grace. I shall have the case delivered to Ludlow Court before dinner.”

As she straightened herself, he suddenly had the feeling that he had seen her before, back when the world was young—or at least when he was. He dismissed the thought and nodded curtly. “Good afternoon.”

“Mrs. Rowland,” she supplied, though he still hadn't asked for her identity, even implicitly. “Good afternoon, Your Grace.”

Mrs. Rowland. The name triggered a new stirring in his mind but nothing strong enough to yield a remembrance. She had the good sense to let him go without further ado—or any mention of her daughter—leaving him mystified and rather too curious for his liking.