The Luckiest Lady In London (18 page)

And by his harshly uttered words in her ear, as he gripped her close: “I can never be in you deep enough. Never.”

W
hen she had on her drawers again, and her skirts were decorously in place, she allowed Felix to sit her between his legs, his arms wrapped around her.

He was not sure what he had accomplished this day, or whether he had even truly resolved this lovers’ quarrel between them. But it didn’t seem to matter, not when he could bury his nose in her hair and inhale.

“It smells just like yours, my lord,” she said, her tone arch, forestalling a compliment on his part, “since I’m fairly certain we have the same soap.”

“Then my hair must smell divine. And you might as well call me Felix in private—we wouldn’t want Lady Tremaine to be the only one enjoying that privilege.”

“Huh,” was her dismissive response.

But then she followed that with an offer of the coffee cream she was eating, her person half turned, her spoon held out toward him. “Do you want some? It’s rather nice.”

He ate from her spoon. The coffee cream was more than nice; it was delectable.

“Just to let you know,” she continued, “I am still angry with you. I simply cannot express it very well when I am in direct physical contact with you.”

“Then I must make sure we remain in constant direct physical contact. I like it when you cannot express your anger very well.”

“Huh,” she said again.

He leaned back against the tree behind him, so content he could melt. “Tell me about your childhood intrigue with the night sky.”

“Must I?” She offered him another spoonful of the coffee cream.

“You mentioned it last night, when you knew it was me standing behind you. So yes, now you must.”

She gave the next spoonful of the coffee cream to herself, looking up at the day sky. “One night, when I was three, my father woke up all his daughters and took us outside, promising a special treat.”

Given that she was born in 1864, she must have seen the Leonid shower of 1867, which was not as grand as the meteor storm the year before, but still impressive.

“They tell me that for a week afterward, I would wake my father up every day after midnight and make him take me to see more shooting stars.”

“Did he?”

“My mother said he did. She said that he would read until I came to fetch him and then stay out with me for as long as I wanted.”

He kept his envy from his voice. “A doting father.”

“He was. According to my mother, he was an expensive man to have around. But we all adored him. Too bad he didn’t live long enough to see me carrying on the family legacy of fortune hunting so successfully. He would have been tickled about the bust improvers.”

“I am honored to be tickled on his behalf.”

Her head tilted forward. He moved his to the side, to see a slight smile on her lips. Impulsively he kissed her on her cheek.

“Don’t be so pleased with yourself,” she admonished. “I distrust you and will continue to do so.”

“Your distrust is the spice that gives my life flavor,” he said grandly. “Long may your suspicions simmer.”

Little did he know how much he would come to regret that sentiment.

L
ouisa had never brushed her teeth or combed her hair at quarter to four in the morning. But her lover had said he would be coming to her room at four to see how she was getting on with her astronomical observation, so here she was, seeing to her toilette in the dead of the night for a man she couldn’t trust.

It was always a problem when he put his hands on her. His touch diminished both her capacity to remember the past and her ability to plan for the future, so that she was liable to think only as far back as the previous time they had made love, and forward only to the next time they would make love.

Her common sense was further decimated, given that she’d spent at least an hour sitting between his legs, with his arms around her.

Had he never stopped coming to her bed, had he never shown her the kind of cruelty of which he was capable, she would have been deliriously happy by now.

She was still too pleased for her own good, but it was a happiness with thorns.

At exactly four o’clock, he walked in, kissed her on her hair, and led her out through her sitting room to the balcony where she’d stationed the telescope.

“Let me show you something.”

He removed the tarp from the telescope and pushed it, on its wheeled base, out to the edge of the balcony—he was a pleasure to behold, in his shirt with two buttons open.

“Find Jupiter, will you?” he said.

She wrested her gaze away from him. Telescopes, marvelous as they were, magnified only a tiny patch of the sky. She had better know at which coordinates she ought to point the thing before she looked into the eyepiece.

Jupiter came into view, a slightly blurred cream-and-orange sphere. “It looks the same as usual.”

“Let me see.” He took her place at the eyepiece. “Hmm. This telescope should be able to achieve a greater resolution than this.”

He maneuvered various knobs, a rather adorable scowl of concentration on his face. And those strong, shapely forearms, bared by his rolled-up sleeves—she couldn’t stop looking at them.

Remember this
, she thought to herself.
Remember this weakness in yourself. Remember that you do not know why he behaved abominably a fortnight ago, or why he is sweetness and sunshine now. It could all go away again in the blink of an eye, without warning, without explanations
.

“Aha!” He felt around the base of the telescope, opened a drawer she hadn’t even known was there, and swapped in a different eyepiece. “Now come see.”

When she looked this time, Jupiter was much smaller, barely the size of a farthing. The image, however, had become razor sharp. Not only could she see two of Jupiter’s moons,
but she could see the perfectly round shadow one of them cast on the giant planet’s surface.

A solar eclipse on Jupiter. She sucked in a breath. “How did you know it was going to happen?”

“I didn’t. I saw it myself only half an hour ago. So I thought I’d show it to you, too.”

“Where is your telescope?” She knew he had to have one.

“Somewhere on the estate,” he teased.

She would not beg him to show it to her. Well, not yet. Putting her eye to the eyepiece again, she asked, “So how did
you
become interested in the stars?”

“I used to have trouble sleeping as a child. So I would slip out, walk about, look at the sky, and, after a while, notice the wheeling of the stars.”

“Was your health frail?” She couldn’t quite imagine him as a sickly child.

“No, I was quite sturdy.”

She glanced back at him. Perhaps it was his stillness, the darkness of the hour, or the soft light spilling out from the sitting room and limning his features, but she remembered the late marchioness’s portrait in the gallery, her dramatically beautiful face against a velvety black background.

“You resemble your mother a great deal.”

“I do.”

“I wouldn’t have been able to tell that you were related to your father.”

Instantly she regretted her statement. Before her London Season, Lady Balfour had given her an important piece of advice:
Never comment on likeness or the lack thereof
. With marriage what it was among the upper crust, there was no telling who might have fathered a lady’s third or fourth or fifth child.

But he was the firstborn, the heir.

“I am my predecessor’s son,” he said calmly.

“Of course you are. I only meant to say that the resemblance is slight.”

There was a beat of silence. He tilted his chin at the telescope. “It’s Io, by the way.”

It took her a moment to understand that he was talking about the moon that cast a shadow on Jupiter. She examined the image in the telescope again. “Because it’s the closest to Jupiter?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any formal training in astronomy?”

“No, but I did read mathematics and physics at university.”

He had been at Cambridge; that she knew. But she drew a blank when she tried to come up with the name of the public school he must have attended. “And before university, you were at . . .”

“Here. I was tutored at home.”

He had so many friends, she’d assumed that they must have been accumulated from his days as a pupil. She couldn’t imagine someone who enjoyed the company of others as much as he being stuck home, with no other children nearby for playmates.

“Why? I thought you said you did not suffer from any illnesses.”

“My mother preferred to keep me at Huntington.”

She almost asked,
Was she very attached to you?
But the measured, neutral tone with which he’d spoken of his parents did not convey any particular closeness.

“I see,” she said instead, fiddling with the knobs. “By the way, are there any other eyepieces? And would you mind explaining to me the best ways of using them?”

T
his was the peril of being close to another person: One became seen for what one was.

Felix preferred to view his biography as beginning with
the day he inherited his title, when his sleek new persona was first forged.

In this, he was greatly helped by the facade of devotion his mother presented in public—of course the son of a woman who so genuinely adored him would embody all the virtues of manhood. He was also greatly helped by the fact that most people preferred to take one another at face value—a well-turned-out chap of pedigree, manners, and hospitality must be just that, the epitome of gentlemanliness.

He’d always known he was nothing of the sort. As did Louisa. But it was one thing to let her see the flaws that he in fact considered strengths—cunning, unscrupulousness, a willingness to break rules—quite another to expose his actual weaknesses, the old pains and yearnings that had never completely dissipated into the ether.

To allow her access to the one soft spot on the dragon’s underbelly that no fire or adamantine scales could protect.

T
he eastern sky was turning paler when they stowed the telescope and came back inside.

“Did you already know that I get up in the middle of the night to use the telescope?” she asked, as they passed into her bedroom.

“I’ve seen you.”

On those occasions Lady Tremaine had caught him coming back into the house at odd hours, he had been on the grounds, standing in the shadows, gazing up at his wife’s balcony, and her solitary figure at the telescope.

She hopped onto the bed and sat at its edge, leaning forward slightly, her elbows on her knees, her interlinked fingers beneath her chin.

It was the way a young girl would sit. Her face, of course, appeared open and sweet. Her dressing gown was cream
colored, trimmed with bands of small, embroidered daisies. Taken altogether, the wholesome innocence she exuded would have been too much, if it weren’t for the devious gleam in her eyes.

His breath caught. “You look expectant.”

“I’ve never seen you naked,” she said, the way another wife might accuse a husband of offenses such as insobriety or spendthriftness.

He raised a brow. “And you think you will now?”

Her tone was imperious. “I had better.”

That she was fiercely drawn to him was what made his sense of vulnerability bearable
.

He had thought so an aeon ago, when his only vulnerability was having made his interest known with his offer to buy her body. He was infinitely more unprotected these days, led about by his needs, master of neither his thoughts nor his actions—a condition made tolerable only because she was just as enslaved by the pleasures of their marriage bed.

He kicked off his shoes. “Don’t I do well enough by you with my clothes on?”

“Very well. I particularly liked the sensation of all that Harris tweed against my thighs. In fact, I demand that when we make love outside, you keep your clothes on—that’s how it was in my dreams, and I am nothing if not a stickler for erotic details.”

He began unbuttoning his shirt. “But I should disrobe when we make love in safe, boring places?”

“Sometimes a lady is in a mood for skin.”

“Are you ever not in a mood for skin?”

“Yes, sometimes I just want your head on a pike,” she answered without blinking an eye.

Her words sent a shiver of fear through him—she did not even know the worst about him. Yet.

He peeled off his shirt and approached the bed. “Then I wouldn’t be able to do this.”

He kissed her below her ear.

She let out a shaky breath. But the next moment, she was pointing at his trousers. “I’ll bet if you’d gone to school, you’d have been able to better remain on task.”

“Well, next time I see my Old Etonian friends, I’ll ask whether they strip more efficiently than I do.”

“I am convinced they do. I will advise my sisters not to accept anyone without a public school ed—”

He let his trousers drop. She fell gratifyingly silent. Then she licked her lips and looked into his eyes. “Good. Now put it to use.”

He did, making love to her with the devotion and fervor of a new convert, building ramparts of pleasure to keep out fears and consequences, and hoping that he was creating something more substantial and permanent than castles in the sky.

I
t was two nights later, as her husband tried to elucidate the Newtonian mechanics behind Urbain Le Verrier’s prediction of the position of Neptune, then still undiscovered, that Louisa’s ignorance revealed itself to be as high and thick as the Wall of Jericho.

“I’m sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I didn’t understand a thing you just said.”

He threw up his hands in mock exasperation. “That was probably the best explanation anyone has given on the subject in the past forty years. Do you mean to tell me that you failed to appreciate my brilliance?”

“Utterly.”

“Well, that will not do, will it?”

“You could teach me Newtonian mechanics,” she said tentatively, not at all certain how he would react to such a request.

He shook his head. “That would be like teaching you to do a handstand on a galloping horse, when you don’t even know how to ride.”

Her hopes shriveled.

But before she could say anything to shield herself from embarrassment, he went on. “I would have to start you with the fundamentals and assume that you know nothing beyond elementary arithmetic.”

“But I can solve—” She stopped, self-conscious. “Saying I can solve paired equations now would be like telling a safari hunter that I once stepped on an ant, wouldn’t it? Or that I once caught a mouse in a trap?”

“You once caught a mouse? I run from those satanic creatures.”

She had the urge to giggle at the image he brought to mind, but suppressed her mirth. She did not want to be disarmed by his humor—it would be even more difficult to be wary when she was dissolving in laughter.

Instead, she cleared her throat. “Will you actually teach me?”

For a moment he seemed disappointed that his joke wasn’t better received. She felt a strange pang in her chest. She had to remind herself that with him, there was no such thing as simply wishing to please her. Always he aimed to exert more control, to reap more power.

He tapped a pencil against the barrel of her telescope. “See, this is why so many gentlemen never marry. You get yourself a pretty wife, you spend half of your waking hours pleasuring her; then you spend the other half eradicating her ignorance. Soon your estate smolders in neglect and your personal hygiene suffers. Your tenants complain, your staff depart, and your wife won’t let you near her anymore because you are poor and malodorous.”

Something about his tone—a barely perceptible
melancholy—made her want to reach out for his hand. But it was probably her mind playing tricks on her. She needed to defend against him, not comfort him.

“I had eleven pounds and eight shillings of emergency money set aside,” she said briskly. “I will earmark it for soap, so you never need to reek, no matter how poor you become.”

He looked at her a moment, his expression inscrutable. “Well, in that case, I must test you to see exactly how under-educated you are. Then we will need to spruce up the schoolroom—a dismal place. After that, I will try to teach you, provided you can refrain from seducing the professor.”

A tactical retreat, she thought. She’d done the same herself, steering a conversation into the somewhat less complicated realm of the bedchamber. She fluttered her eyelashes. “Will you rap me on the hand with a yardstick if I do try to seduce the professor?”

“Of course,” he said. “I might even have to bend you over the table and spank you.”

“Oh, my.” She touched her throat. “I suppose I had better let you know that I’ve never been in the presence of a learned professor without somehow becoming naked in the process.”

That had led to a very good time in bed, including a few playful thwacks on her bottom. But now it was the middle of the next afternoon, his lordship was sequestered with his secretary, and she was alone in the schoolroom, looking about.

She wouldn’t go so far as to call it dismal, but compared to the rococo airiness of his apartment, it was undoubtedly dull and uninspiring, all dark panels and somber drapes. Much of one wall was taken up with a big blackboard. Near the windows stood a lectern; in the middle of the room, a desk and a chair.