The Luckiest Lady In London (8 page)

Louisa looked up at the ceiling of the bookshop for a moment, before she turned her attention back to the books. She always volunteered to pick up Lady Balfour’s book orders. It was rare that she could afford a volume for herself, but she never passed up a chance to walk between walls of groaning shelves, running her gloved fingertips over rows upon rows of clothbound spines. An enjoyment that was more like an ache: an aesthetic appreciation butting up against a perennially unsatisfied craving for ownership.

Why not say yes to Lord Wrenworth? That would keep you knee-deep in books for the rest of your life, if nothing else
.

Indeed, why
not
say yes to Lord Wrenworth?

When he had dropped out of sight for so many days after his initial proposition, she had grown increasingly certain, a sensation like a hole in her stomach, that she had woefully misread the situation. That what she had thought were but opening volleys actually constituted the entire transaction: offer tendered, offer refused, offer nullified.

That what she had thought to be real and sustained interest on his part was but a soap bubble under the sun, gone with the next blink of the eye.

Lady Balfour hadn’t needed to encourage her to pretend as if she belonged at Lady Tremaine’s ball. Had any servant tried to stop her from getting in, she would have gladly handed over her mother’s pearl brooch as a bribe—so badly did she need to see him.

It was to her credit that she had kept her clothes on—there was something about the man, about the way he looked at her, that made her want to disrobe on the spot. Not languidly, deliberately, but as if her corset and petticoats were on fire and must be yanked off without a second’s delay.

And when he had asked whether she had come to say yes, when he had renewed his offer and her hope, beneath her skirts her legs had trembled.

He would never know how close she had come to giving him the answer he wanted.

Yet for all her shaking relief that he was still interested—still committed to this lunacy of his—she had turned around and left.

Some part of her had recognized that the game was still very much on, and had not wanted to concede it. But how much longer could she play the game, when she had no idea how, or whether it was even possible, to win? Was she just playing to keep from losing, then? And what exactly did losing entail, in this particular instance?

Thunder like a field gun being fired right next to her ear
made her jump. Rain unleashed as if a dam had burst in the clouds. She realized that what she had thought of as table legs scraping the floor overhead had actually been the low rumble of thunder, which had been going on for a good while.

She would have to remain in the bookshop until the storm eased, not a terrible hardship. And since she was—or at least represented—a loyal customer of long standing, Mr. Richards, the owner, would not complain about her prolonged browsing.

“I’m looking for the young lady who came to pick up Lady Balfour’s order.”

Louisa blinked. Lord Tenwhestle—what was he doing here?

“My lord Tenwhestle.” She came out from the stacks. “I’m here.”

“Of course you are, my dear cousin.” He nodded at Mr. Richards, came toward her, and instead of walking her to the door, led her deeper into the shop.

When they were out of Mr. Richards’s hearing range, Lord Tenwhestle asked, with a mischievous smile on his face, “Have you ever read
Pride and Prejudice
, Miss Cantwell?”

His question baffled her. “Yes, years ago.”

Mrs. Cantwell had been disappointed that no modern-day Mr. Darcy or Mr. Bingley had ever whisked one of her beautiful elder daughters into a grand manor. Louisa found it strange that her mother had nursed such hopes at all. Even Miss Austen herself had not found a real-life Mr. Darcy. Why should he materialize almost a century later, after his creator had turned into bone and dust?

“Do you remember the part where Mrs. Bennet dispatches her eldest daughter to Netherfield Park on horseback, knowing it would rain and force Jane to stay overnight?”

Louisa bit the inside of her cheek; she saw where this was going.

“My mother-in-law has contrived something similar,”
continued Lord Tenwhestle, confirming Louisa’s suspicions. “She sent me to my club on foot, even though it was certain to pour, with the instruction that I must ensure that you arrived home warm and dry in case of rain.”

What would Lady Balfour think if she only knew that while she planned her innocent tricks, Louisa was playing far more reckless games? “And since it is impossible to locate a hackney in this weather . . .”

“Precisely.” Lord Tenwhestle winked conspiratorially. “When I groaned about my problem, a very fine gentleman stepped forward to put his carriage at my disposal.”

One with more than one folly on his estate?
Louisa almost asked.

They were speaking in low voices, but now she dropped hers to a whisper. “Do you not think, sir, that perhaps Lady Balfour is overly optimistic about my prospects? I’d hate for her to be disappointed, but if the gentleman is who I think it is, I have no reason to believe any offers of marriage will be forthcoming from that quarter.”

Lord Tenwhestle gave her a gentle pat on the elbow. “You needn’t worry, dear cousin. We are all grown-ups here. Besides, I have known the gentleman in question for years, and perfect though he may be, he is also quite wily at dodging scheming mamas and equally scheming misses. I will allow that once could be a coincidence—the time he came to dinner at my house because Mr. Pitt happened to be our missing fourteenth guest—but I do not think Lord Wrenworth accidentally offers his help twice to the same kin of the same debutante.”

No, not accidentally. But whatever Lord Wrenworth did, it was for his own purpose: to have her standing naked on that belvedere at the break of dawn, while he had his way with her.

She felt a sharp pinch in her chest. Would this scenario only ever exist in her imagination?

“If you say so, sir,” she said weakly.

A pair of footmen waited outside the bookshop, holding umbrellas. Lord Wrenworth stood by his sleek, splendid town coach under one such umbrella, looking as if he had stepped out from a fairy tale, the beautiful trickster prince—a fairy tale that must be bowdlerized before it could be safely read to children.

He greeted her with utmost propriety. His hold on her hand, as he helped her into the carriage, was light and decorous. And when he came into the carriage, his trousers did not even remotely brush the edge of her skirts.

All the same, it took only one swift, unsmiling look from him for heat to sweep over her. She clutched Lady Balfour’s packet of books in her lap.

Lord Tenwhestle climbed in. The door closed behind him. Smoothly, the coach rolled away from the curb.

“I was just telling Miss Cantwell how grateful I was that you came to my rescue,” said Lord Tenwhestle to the man who had proposed to Louisa, except not marriage. “And how thrilled I was not to have to seek a hackney in this downpour.”

Louisa’s lover—the appellation shocked her, but how else was she to refer to him?—inclined his head graciously. “My privilege to be of assistance.”

My lover
, she repeated the words to herself. They had not made love, but that was an insignificant detail, given that he had probed her mind, both erotically and otherwise. And she, though she had yet to be unclothed before him, had certainly laid bare a great many of her naked desires.

Traffic moved slowly. Lord Tenwhestle shouldered most of the small talk, some amusing incident of being lost in a similar downpour in the middle of Rome, while he was on his Grand Tour with his brother.

All of a sudden he exclaimed, “Goodness, I very nearly forgot! I am to meet my brother at his house in ten minutes—some
business with the solicitor about a useless plot of land we’ve been trying to get rid of for ages.”

“If I’m not mistaken, Mr. Northmount lives on the next street?” asked Lord Wrenworth.

“That is correct. If I wasn’t just telling a story about us, I wouldn’t have remembered.”

Lord Wrenworth relayed new directions to his coachman. Minutes later, Lord Tenwhestle was inside his brother’s house and Lord Wrenworth and Louisa were headed toward Lady Balfour’s.

Louisa felt strangely self-conscious, not because she was alone with her unconsummated lover, but because the ploy on the part of her kin had been so ludicrously transparent. She was both immensely grateful for Lord Tenwhestle’s and Lady Balfour’s sincere and kindhearted efforts—and immensely embarrassed.

Especially since she had more or less confirmed to Lord Wrenworth that she was nothing of the sweet, innocent girl that a self-respecting man would take for a bride; she was in fact a nymphomaniac who did not mind being taken in public, if only he would take her at all.

She removed the books from her lap, set them beside her, and traced her thumb along the twine that had been used to wrap the package.

“Tell me about the telescope,” he said.

She looked up. “I thought I’d made it clear that is not something I will discuss.”

“Not something you will discuss unless you are already in bed with me,” he corrected her. “But that was for the reason you wanted the telescope. What I request is a description of the telescope itself.”

“Why?”

“Because it interests me.”

All at once she understood why she had not said yes two
nights before. Why she continued to play this dangerous game.

She was afraid of losing him.

Once she became his mistress, once he was free to satisfy himself on her, it would be the beginning of the end. But as long as she resisted, as long as his lust simmered unfulfilled, there was a chance he would remain part of her life.

Perhaps he would write her risqué letters on a typewriter, unsigned so that they could not be traced back to him. Perhaps he would find a reason to buy a property near where she lived—and call on her once every two years or so, when he came by to inspect the property in person. Perhaps he would—

“What is the size of the aperture?” he asked.

She hesitated. Her carnal infatuation she could not hide, but could she bear to expose more of herself, to be even more naked before him?

“Six inches?” he continued his questioning.

“Nine and a half,” she heard herself responding.

“Focal length?”

“Twelve feet, four inches.”

He tented his hands. “No wonder you were unable to afford it. Earlier I thought you wanted one of those five-guinea telescopes. But you, Miss Cantwell, are ambitious.”

“For some things,” she admitted.

“When you fancy a telescope, you want one that can show you each party of a double star. When you fancy a man, you want The Ideal Gentleman.” With one finger atop his walking stick, he tipped it from side to side. “What else do you fancy?”

She should not tell him anything else. She should never have mentioned the telescope in the first place, never given him a glimpse into her private self.

“All I ever wanted was to be an independent spinster.”

She winced inside. What possessed her to keep laying
herself bare before him? Granted, it was terribly lonely to be in love, and granted, his continued interest was—

Her thought process halted abruptly, as if it were a ship encountering a hidden sandbar. She stopped fiddling with the twine bow. What had just happened?

She had been so careful. Infatuation, besottment, madness—she’d used every word in the thesaurus to describe her state of mind.

Every word except
love
.

Because love wasn’t a state of mind liable to change from hour to hour, day to day. Love was like smallpox: Even the survivors did not escape unscathed.

She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time, the beauty, the poise, the wickedness. She was in love with a man no woman in her right mind would approach, let alone want.

He tapped his tented fingertips against one another. “I can give you that, an independent spinsterhood. And a bigger telescope than the one you hungered after.”

“You are as persuasive as the serpent in the Garden of Eden.”

“And you are far cleverer and warier than poor Eve ever was.”

He lifted his straight rod of a walking stick and, holding it near the base, set its handle on her lap, a frightfully intimate, invasive gesture that made flame leap through her.

The terrible thing was, the more he revealed himself to be dangerous and warped, the more she fell under his spell. And the more she fell under his spell, the freer he felt to reveal even more of his true nature.

His eyes met hers again. “Let me give you everything you’ve ever dreamed of.”

But he couldn’t. Or at least, he wouldn’t.

For she could no longer be satisfied with an expensive
telescope, an exemplary spinsterhood, or his sure-to-be-magnificent body—or even all three together.

She was a woman in love and she wanted nothing less than his unscrupulous and very possibly unprincipled heart, proffered to her in slavish devotion.

She set her fingers on the handle of the walking stick, still warm with the heat of his hand. At first she thought it was but a knob made of heavy, smooth-grained ebony, but as she traced its curve with her hand, she looked down and realized that the handle was actually in the shape of the head of a black jaguar.

“Very fine specimen you have here,” she said, a little shocked at both her words and her action.

She was
caressing
the part of him that he had chosen to extend to her person, her fingertips exploring every nook and cranny of the handle. His gaze, intense and heavy lidded, traveled from her face to her uninhibited hand and back again.

“You like it?”

He was as deliberate and self-mastered a man as she had ever met. Whenever she thought of him with access to her body, she’d always imagined a manipulative lover with infinite patience and control, making her pant and writhe, and then perhaps tormenting her a little—or a great deal—by withholding what she desperately needed.

But there was an undercurrent to
this
particular question that made her think of him pushing her up against a wall, or perhaps the column of a Greek folly, and taking her hard, all his patience and control gone.