Читать книгу Regency Rogues and Rakes: Silk is for Seduction / Scandal Wears Satin / Vixen in Velvet / Seven Nights in a Rogue's Bed / A Rake's Midnight Kiss / What a Duke Dares - Loretta Chase - Страница 26

Experience, the mother of true wisdom, has long since convinced me, that real beauty is best discerned by real judges; and the addresses of a sensible lover imply the best compliment to a woman of understanding.

La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, Advertisements for June 1807

Early afternoon, Sunday 10 May

The Duke of Clevedon blinked at the excessively bright light. Saunders, the sadist, stood looking down at him. He’d opened the curtains, and the sun was as bright as lightning bolts. When Clevedon moved his head, thunder cracked, right against his skull.

“I’m so sorry to disturb you, your grace.”

“No, you’re not,” Clevedon croaked.

“Mr. Halliday was most insistent,” Saunders said. “He said you would wish to be wakened. Mrs. Noirot is here.”

Clevedon sat up abruptly. His brain thumped painfully against something hard and sharp. The interior of his skull had grown thorns. “Lucie,” he said. “Is she ill? Lost? Damn, I told her that child needed…” The sentence trailed off as his drink-poisoned brain caught up with his tongue.

“Mrs. Noirot said we were to assure your grace that the Princess Erroll of Albania is well and safely at home doing sums with her aunt. Mr. Halliday has taken the liberty of asking Mrs. Noirot to wait in the library. Being aware that you would need time to dress, he saw to it that refreshment was brought to her. I have brought your coffee, sir.”

Now Clevedon’s heart was pounding, too, along with his brain, but not at the same tempo.

He did not leap from his bed, but he got out more quickly than was altogether comfortable for a man in his condition. He hastily swallowed the coffee. He washed and dressed in record time, though it seemed an age to him, even though he decided not to bother with the nicety of shaving.

A glance in the mirror told him shaving wouldn’t do much to improve his appearance. He looked like an animated corpse. He tied his neckcloth in a haphazard knot, shrugged into his coat, and hurried out of the room, still buttoning it.

When he came in, smoothing his neckcloth like a nervous schoolboy called on to recite from the Iliad, he found Noirot bent over the library table.

She was perfect, as usual, in one of her more dashing creations, a heavy white silk embroidered all over with red and yellow flowers. The double-layered short cape, its edges gored and trimmed in black lace, was made of the same material. It extended out over her shoulders and over the big sleeves of her dress. Round her neck she’d tied a black lace something or other. Her hat sat well back on her head, so that its brim framed her face, and that inner brim was adorned with lace and ribbons. More ribbon and lace trimmed the back, where a tall plume of feathers sprouted.

He, clearly, did not make nearly as pretty a picture. At his entrance she looked up, and her hand went to her bosom. “Oh, no,” she said. Then she collected herself and said, in cooler tones, “I heard about the fight.”

“It’s not as bad as all that,” he said, though he knew it was. “I know how to dodge a blow to the face. You ought to see Longmore. At any rate, this is the way I always look after an excessively convivial night with a man who tried to kill me. Why are you here?”

He was careful to keep any hope from his face as well as his voice. It was harder to keep it from his heart. He didn’t want to let himself hope she’d changed her mind. He was fully awake and sober now and wishing he were drunk again.

He could truly understand at last, not only in his mind but in his gut as well, why his father had crawled into a bottle. Drink dulled the pain. Physical pain dulled it, too. While fighting with Longmore he’d felt nothing. Now he remembered every word he’d said to her, the way he’d opened his heart, concealing nothing. It hadn’t been enough. He wasn’t enough.

She gestured at the table. “I was looking at the magazines,” she said. “I’m unscrupulous. I looked at your notes, too. But I can’t read your writing. You said you had ideas. About my business.”

“Is that why you’ve come?” he said tightly. “For the ideas for your shop—the ideas to make you the greatest modiste in the world.”

“I am the greatest modiste in the world,” she said.

Dear God how he loved her! Her self-confidence, her unscrupulousness, her determination, her strength, her genius. Her passion.

He allowed himself a smile, and hoped it didn’t look too sickeningly infatuated. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “How could I forget? You are the greatest modiste in the world.”

“But I’m someone else as well,” she said.

She moved away from the table and walked to the window and looked out into the garden.

He waited. Had he any choice?

“I was tired yesterday,” she said, still looking out. “Very tired. It was a shockingly busy day, and we were run off our feet, and I was in a state, trying not to fall apart.” She turned away from the window and met his gaze. “I was trying so hard that I was unkind and unfair to you.”

“On the contrary, you declined my offer quite gently,” he said. “You told me I was kind and generous.” He couldn’t altogether keep the bitterness from his voice. It was the same as telling a man, We can still be friends. He couldn’t be her friend. That wasn’t enough. He understood now, not merely in his mind but with every cell of his being, why Clara had told him it wasn’t enough.

“You were kind and generous enough to deserve the truth,” she said. “About me.”

Then he remembered the stray thought he’d had after he’d seen Lucie for the first time. “Damn it to hell, Noirot, you’re already married. I thought of that, but I forgot. That is, Lucie had to have a father. But he wasn’t in view. You were on your own.”

“He’s dead.”

Relief made him dizzy. He moved to stand at the chimneypiece. He pretended to lean casually against it. His hands were shaking. Again. He was in a very bad way.

“Your grace, you look very ill,” she said. “Please sit down.”

“No, I’m well.”

“No, sit, please, I beg you. I’m a wretched mass of nerves as it is. Waiting for you to swoon isn’t making this easier.”

“I never swoon!” he said indignantly. But he took his wreck of a body to the sofa and sat.

She walked back to the library table and took up a cup from the tray resting there. She brought it to him. “It’s gone cold,” she said, “but you need it.”

He took it from her and drank. It was cold, but it helped.

She sat in the nearest chair. A few, very few feet of carpet lay between them. All the world lay between them.

She folded her hands in her lap. “My husband’s name was Charles Noirot. He was a distant cousin. He died in France in the cholera epidemic a few years ago. Most of my relatives died then. Lucie fell gravely ill.”

Her husband dead. Her relatives dead. Her child on the brink of death.

He tried to imagine what that had been like and his imagination failed. He and Longmore had been on the Continent when the cholera struck. They’d survived, and that, as far as he could make out, had been a miracle. Most victims died within hours.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no idea.”

“Why should you?” she said. “The point of all this is my family, and who I am.”

“Then your name really is Noirot,” he said. “I’d wondered if it was simply a Frenchified name you three had adopted for the shop.”

Her smile was taut. “That was the name my paternal grandfather adopted when he fled France during the Revolution. He got his wife and children out, and some aunts and cousins. Others of his family were not so lucky. His older brother, the Comte de Rivenoir, was caught trying to escape Paris. After he and his family went to the guillotine, my grandfather inherited the title. He saw the folly of trying to make use of it. His family, the Robillon family, had a bad name in France. You know the character, the Vicomte de Valmont, in the book by Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses?”

He nodded. It was one of a number of books Lord War-ford had declared unfit for decent people to read. Naturally, when they were boys, Longmore had got hold of a copy and he and Clevedon had read it.

“The Robillon men were that sort of French aristocrat,” she said. “Libertines and gamblers who used people like pawns or toys. They weren’t popular at that time, and they’re still not remembered affectionately in France. Since he wanted to be able to move about freely, Grandfather took a name as common as dirt. Noirot. Or, in English, Black. He and his offspring used one or the other name, depending on the seduction or swindle or ruse in hand at the moment.”

He was leaning forward now, listening intently. Pieces were falling into place: the way she spoke, her smooth French and her aristocratic accent…but she’d told him she was English. Well, then, she’d lied about that, too.

“I knew you weren’t quite what you appeared to be,” he said. “My servants took you for quality, and servants are rarely taken in.”

“Oh, we can take in anybody,” she said. “We’re born that way. The family never forgot they were aristocrats. They never gave up their extravagant ways. They were expert seducers, and they used the skill to find wealthy spouses. Being more romantic and less practical than their Continental counterparts, the men had great luck with highborn Englishwomen.”

“That must hold true for English men as well,” he said.

Her dark gaze met his. “It does. But I never set out to get a spouse. I’ve lied and cheated—you don’t know the half of it—but it was all for the purpose I explained early in our acquaintance.”

“I know you cheat at cards,” he said.

“I didn’t cheat during our last game of Vingt et Un,” she said. “I merely played as though my life depended on it. People in my family often find themselves in that position: playing a game on which their life depends. But cheating at cards is nothing. I forged names on our passports to get out of France quickly. My family often finds it necessary to leave a country suddenly. My sisters and I were taught the skill, and we practiced diligently, because we never knew when we’d need it. We were well educated in the normal ways as well. We had lessons in deportment as well as mathematics and geography. Whatever else we Noirots were—and it wasn’t pretty—we were aristocrats, and that was our most valuable commodity. To speak and carry ourselves as ladies and gentlemen do—you can imagine the fears it allays, the doors it opens.”

“I can see that it would be much easier to seduce an aristocratic English girl if you don’t sound like a clerk from the City or a linen draper,” he said. “But you married a cousin. You have a shop. You didn’t follow the same path.”

She got up abruptly from her chair and moved away in a rustle of petticoats. He rose, too, unsteadily, and he couldn’t tell whether that was the aftereffects of fighting and drinking or the hope warring with the certainty he’d lost her.

She walked to the library table and took up his notes. “Your handwriting is deplorable,” she said. She put them down and, turning back to him, said, “I haven’t told you about my mother.”

“An English aristocrat, yes? Or something else?”

She gave a short laugh. “Both.”

She returned to her chair, and he sat, too. His heart thudded. Something was coming, and it wasn’t good. He was sure of that. He was leaning forward, waiting. He was wanting it to be over with and hoping against hope it would be good news. But it couldn’t be good, else she wouldn’t be so ill at ease, she who was never ill at ease, mistress of every situation.

And what was wrong with him? She’d admitted to forgery! She’d told him she came from a line of blue-blooded French criminals!

“My mother was Catherine DeLucey,” she said.

He recognized the surname, but it took a moment for him to place it. Then he saw it: blue, vivid blue.

“Lucie’s eyes,” he said. “Those remarkable blue eyes. Miss Sophia, too. And Miss Leonie. I knew there was something familiar about them. They’re unforgettable. The DeLuceys—the Earl of Mandeville’s family.”

Her color came and went. She folded her hands tightly in her lap.

He remembered then. Some old scandal to do with one of Lord Hargate’s sons. Not the one who’d manhandled him yesterday, though. Which one? He couldn’t remember. His brain was slow and thick and aching.

She said, “Not those DeLuceys. Not the good ones with the handsome property near Bristol. My mother was one of the other ones.”

He’d been leaning toward her so eagerly, and she’d seen the hope in his eyes, and the uncertainty.

Then she saw the truth dawn. His head went back, and his posture stiffened, and he looked away, unable to meet her gaze.

Sophy and Leonie had told her he didn’t need to know. They’d said she’d only heap coals on her own head, and since when had she taken on the role of martyr?

But they didn’t know what it was to love a man, and so they didn’t know what it was to hurt at causing him pain. He’d opened his heart to her. He’d offered her the moon and the stars, knowing nothing about her. and she hadn’t had the courage to offer what she could in fair return: the truth.

She’d reminded him again and again of her trade, because she could cope with his coming to his senses and rejecting her because of what she did for a living. But to tell him who she was, then see his face change as he shut her out…That would hurt more than she could bear.

She saw it now, and it hurt more than she’d imagined. But the worst was over. She’d live.

She went on quickly, eager to have her sordid tale done. “My mother was a blueblood, but she wasn’t like the other Noirot wives. She hadn’t any money. They married each other for fortunes that turned out not to exist. They didn’t learn the truth until the marriage night, and then they thought it a great joke. She and Father led a nomadic life, from one swindle to the next. They would run up debts in one place, then leave in the dead of night for another. We children were inconvenient baggage. They left us with this relative or that one. Then, when I was nine years old, we ended up with a woman who’d married one of my father’s cousins. She was a fashionable dressmaker in Paris. She trained us to the trade, and she saw to our education. We were attractive girls, and Cousin Emma made sure we learned refinement. That was good for business. And of course, a pretty girl with good manners might attract a husband of wealth and quality.”

She looked up to gauge his reaction, but he seemed to be studying the carpet. His thick black lashes, so stark against the pallor of his skin, veiled his eyes.

But she didn’t need to read the expression in his eyes to know what was there: a wall.

A sense of loss swept over her, and it was like a sickness. She felt so weary. She swallowed and went on, “But I fell in love with Cousin Emma’s nephew Charlie, and he had no money. I had to continue working. Then the cholera came to Paris.” She made a sweeping gesture. “They all died. We had to close our shop—not that I would have stayed. I was terrified I’d take sick. Then who’d look after my daughter and sisters? I felt we’d be safer in London, though we were nearly penniless. But I went to the gaming hells and played cards. You saw how I won in Paris. That was how I fed and housed my family when we first came to London, three years ago. That was how I started my shop. I won the money at cards.”

She stood. “There it is. You know everything. Your friend Longmore thinks we’re the devil, and he’s not far wrong. You couldn’t ally yourself with a worse family. We seduce and swindle, lie and cheat. We have no scruples, no morals, no ethics. We don’t even understand what those things are. I did you the greatest favor in the world when I said no. No one in my family would understand why I did it.”

She started for the door, still talking, unable to help herself. It was the last time, perhaps, they’d ever speak.

“They’d see you only as a pigeon ripe for plucking,” she said. “But you needn’t believe I was being noble and self-sacrificing in declining your proposal. It was pure selfishness. I’m too proud to endure being snubbed by your fine friends.”

“You could endure it.” His low voice came from behind her.

She hadn’t heard him rise from the sofa. She’d been deaf and blind to all but despair, and too busy trying not to fall apart. She wouldn’t turn around. Nothing he said could make any difference now. He was trying to be kind, probably. She couldn’t bear kindness. She continued toward the door.

“You can stomach the obnoxious women and their demands and their treating you like a slave,” he said. “You have no trouble handling them. You have Lady Clara eating out of your hand.”

Hope was trying to claw its way up out of the dark place where she’d buried it. She stomped it down. “That’s business,” she said without turning her head. “That’s part of the guile and manipulation. My shop is my castle. But the beau monde is another world altogether.”

“It’s Lucie you’re protecting, not yourself,” he said. “You insist you have no redeeming qualities, but you love your daughter. You’re not like your mother. Your child is not an inconvenience.”

She paused, her hand on the door handle. Her chest was tight, a sob welling there, threatening to get out.

“Perhaps you don’t own the usual set of scruples and morals and ethics and such,” he said, “but you don’t cheat your customers.”

“I manipulate them,” she said. “I want their money.”

“And in return, you give them your utmost. You make them better than they think they can be. You gave Clara the courage to stand up to her mother and to me.”

“Oh, Clevedon, you’re such a fool. You’re blinded by love.” She turned to him then. “Do you think, because you can find a redeeming quality or two in my black heart, that all of the ton will see the same? They won’t. They’ll see that you married a Dreadful DeLucey—”

“The Earl of Hargate’s son married one, and her daughter married an earl.”

“I’ve heard that old story,” Marcelline said. “You’re talking about Bathsheba DeLucey. She brought Lord Rathbourne a great fortune. What do I bring? A shop. And Rathbourne’s father, Lord Hargate, is a powerful man. You may stand higher in rank, but you’ve nothing like his power. Yesterday he walked into a crowd of bloodthirsty men as though you were a lot of schoolboys. The world respects and fears him. You’re not like that, and you’ve no one like that to throw his weight around on your behalf. You’ve lived on the Continent and in the fringe world of London where idle aristocrats play. You’ve no political power. You haven’t cultivated social power. You can’t make your world accept me. You can’t make them welcome and love Lucie.”

“If you can’t be welcome in my world,” he said, “I’d rather not live there.”

The horrid sob was building in her chest.

“I love you,” he said. “I think I’ve loved you from the moment I first saw you at the opera—or, if not then, from the time you took my diamond stickpin. I’ll admit that matters are sticky—”

“Sticky!”

“But it was a mad scheme to come to Paris and attract my attention, in hopes of getting your hooks into my duchess,” he said. “It was a mad, brave scheme to come to London in the first place, with a small child and two younger sisters and a few coins. It was mad to think you could set up a dressmaking shop by winning money at cards. But you did that before you knew me, before you’d ever thought about the Duchess of Clevedon. And so I’m very, very sure that you’ll devise a mad scheme to solve our present problems, especially with my brilliant mind assisting you.”

She was looking up at him, into those dangerous green eyes, and all she saw there was love. His beautiful mouth curved into the smile that could so easily warm a woman’s heart, and lower down.

He truly did love her. After all she’d told him. He truly believed she could do anything.

“And if I don’t?” she said. “If this sticky little matter proves too much even for my guile and imagination—”

“We’ll live with it,” he said. “Life isn’t perfect. But I had much rather live it imperfectly with you.”

“Th-that is a very f-fine s-sentiment.” The sob was filling her chest.

“I didn’t practice it at all,” he said.

“Oh, Clevedon,” she said.

He opened his arms. she walked into them. There was no choice, no choice at all. His arms closed about her and she wept, stupidly, but it was days and nights’ worth of bottled-up fear and worry and sorrow and anger and hope.

Against all odds, hope. Because she was a dreamer and a schemer, and one didn’t dream and scheme without hope.

“Does this mean I’ve won?” he said. Tears were all very well, but he needed to be absolutely sure.

“Yes,” she said, her voice muffled against his waistcoat. “Although some might argue that you’ve lost.”

“Will you marry me?”

A long pause.

His grip of her tightened. “Marcelline.”

“Yes. I’m simply not noble enough to say no.”

“Don’t be noble, I beg you,” he said. “I think nobleness of spirit…and morals…and ethics…and scruples…those sorts of things are all very well in their place. To a point, you know. But beyond a certain point, I think they make me bilious.”

She looked up at him. Tears shimmered in her eyes but there was laughter as well, and it curved the corners of her beautiful mouth.

“It doesn’t agree with me,” he said. “I tried to be good. I tried not to be my father. I tried to live up to Lord Warford’s standards. Then one day I realized it was pointless, and I’d had enough. That’s when I set out with Longmore on a Grand Tour. But when he decided he’d had enough of the Continent, and wanted to come home, I didn’t think I could stand coming back. Then you came into my life and everything changed. Because you were right. For me. Are. Right. For me.” He slid his hand down her back. He heard her breath hitch.

That was all it wanted. That little sound. He had waited for so long. He’d suffered the tortures of the damned.

He tipped up her chin and untied her bonnet. He tossed it aside.

She winced. “That was my best bonnet. It took me forever to decide which one to wear.”

“You? But you always know what to wear.”

“I never had to confess to anybody before,” she said. “That’s my confession bonnet. I even trimmed it special—and you toss it aside like a soiled handkerchief.”

“You confessed,” he said. “It was beautifully done. Like everything you do.” He quickly untied the black lace thing around her neck.

She caught his hand before he could throw that down. “Clevedon, what do you think you’re doing?”

They’d waited long enough. They’d made each other miserable for long enough. It was time for happiness.

“You know very well what I’m doing,” he said.

“You didn’t even lock the door,” she said.

“Right.”

He let go of her hand, picked up the nearest chair, and pushed it under the doorknob.

Then he led her to the sofa. He draped the lace thing over the back, and brought his hands to the fastenings of the layered cape.

“You can’t undress me,” she said.

He looked down at the layered cape and the great puffed sleeves and the belt, and he remembered what was underneath, layer upon layer. He remembered watching her undress herself. He remembered the way she’d set her leg on the bed, against his hip, and rolled down her stocking.

For a moment he couldn’t breathe. His heart was pumping too fast and his breathing was too quick and that was nothing to the excitement stirring down low.

“Right,” he said. “Another time.” He drew her down onto the sofa and gathered her in his arms. He kissed her until her body went all soft and yielding and her arms wrapped about his neck, and she kissed him back in the same fierce way.

He lifted his mouth an inch from hers. “I’ve been wretched,” he said.

“I’ve been wretched, too,” she said. “I’m no good at being good.”

“I don’t want you to be good,” he said. “I want you to be you. Marcelline. The woman I love.”

She caught hold of his head and brought his mouth to hers.

It was a long, searching kiss, and a lifetime seemed to pass in that kiss, and a lifetime opened up before them. He’d very nearly ruined his life and hers, but they’d found their way at last.

He eased his mouth from hers and said against her cheek, “One of these days—soon—we’ll have time for leisurely lovemaking. I’ll spend a delicious forever taking off your beautiful clothes. “But for now…” He found the bodice fastening under the cape and he unhooked enough of the bodice to get to her corset and chemise, exposing a few inches of her velvety skin. He kissed the hollow of her throat, and the smooth curve of her neck, and she sighed, and arced back, like a cat stretching simply for the pleasure of it.

She still had one hand tangled in his hair while she moved the other over him, taking possession of him the way he took possession of her, so easily and naturally, with a touch. He heard the brush of her fingers over the wool of his coat sleeve and the rustle of his starched neckcloth as her hand moved downward. When she came to the waist of his trousers, he caught his breath.

She slid her hand down, and his cock swelled and rose at the touch, and “Mine,” she said softly. “All this manly beauty. All mine.”

He caught hold of her dress, the embroidered flowers feeling almost alive under his hand. He dragged it up by fistfuls, a great mass of dress and petticoats that billowed over his arm. He stroked over her drawers, upward over her thighs and between her legs to the opening of her drawers. He cupped her and she shivered. “Mine,” he said. “All this feminine perfection. Mine.”

His mouth found hers again and he kissed her and drank in the taste of her and the feel of her mouth and her tongue, and he took it all in like a man starved. And while he kissed her, he slid his fingers into the soft cleft between her legs. She was wet there, and her legs trembled as he stroked her, and then he was trembling, too. So much happiness.

“What a lucky man I am,” he said.

She let out a throaty laugh. “You’re about to get luckier.”

She unfastened his trousers fully and grasped him. “I want you,” she said softly. “I want you inside me. I want you to be mine and I’ll be yours.”

“Yes, yes, yes, whatever you say.” He pushed into her, and he seemed to fly up into the heavens. He saw stars, and “Oh,” she said. “Your grace.”

“Gervase,” he said.

“Gervase,” she said, and she made it a whisper, and the sound made him shiver. “Mon amour.”

Then in French: murmured words of nonsense and love and pleasure while they made slow love, then faster love, until there was nowhere farther to go, and they seemed to leap to a blinding happiness, like flying to the sun. Release came in a cascade of sweetness. Then he was sinking onto her, burying his face in her neck, and murmuring her name.

For a time they simply lay together.

Quietly. At peace.

So hard to believe, after so much turmoil. But here he was, in her arms, and there was her heart beating steadily in her chest and filled with happiness.

She held him, relishing his weight and the feel of his silky hair against her skin and the scent of him, while her breathing quieted, and the world came back.

“That was much more fun than self-sacrifice,” he muttered.

She laughed. “Yes, cheri, it was.”

He raised himself up to look at her. “Cheri,” he repeated. “Why does it sound so delicious when you say it?”

“Because I’m delicious,” she said.

“The delicious Duchess of Clevedon,” he said. “I like the sound of that. I like the feel of her better,” he said. “And the scent of her. And the sound of her voice. And the way she moves. I love her madly. I would like to stay here, and count all the ways I love her, and show her all the ways I love her. But the world calls. Life calls.” He kissed her, so tenderly, on her forehead. “We have to put our clothes on.”

It took only a minute or two, since they hadn’t taken very much off. For her, a slight rearrangement of her undergarments, a few hooks to fasten, a stocking to pull up, a garter to tie. For him, a quick business of pulling up his drawers and trousers, tucking his shirt in, and buttoning a handful of buttons.

He found her black lace fichu, and she tied it.

He collected her hat from the corner it had bounced to. He brushed it off, and attempted to straighten the plumes.

She watched him for a moment, then laughed. “Oh, Clevedon, you’re the dearest man,” she said. “Give me that thing. You’ve no idea what to do with it, but I do love you for trying.”

He stilled briefly. Then he looked down at the hat and back at her. “Isn’t that it?” he said. “Trying? If we try with all our hearts, do you not think we can make a go of this—of us? And then, even if it doesn’t come out quite as we wish, at least we’ll know we tried wholeheartedly. That’s the way you do everything, is it not? With all your heart. And look how far you’ve come and all you’ve achieved. Only think what we can do together.”

“Well, there’s that,” she said, gesturing with her hat at the sofa. “We did that very well. Together.”

He laughed. “Yes. And don’t you think that a man who could do that—after a fight and a night of maudlin drinking—don’t you think he could take on the ton? I may not be much of a duke, but I haven’t given any time to the job. Only think what I might do, once I set my mind to it—with madame la duchesse at my side.” He grinned and added, “And under me or on top of me or behind me as the case may be.”

She lifted her eyebrows. “Behind you, your grace?”

“I see that you still have some things to learn,” he said. He straightened his waistcoat.

“I was married very young, for a very short time,” she said. “I’m practically a virgin.”

He laughed again, and the sound was so sweet to her ears. He was happy, and so was she. And so she dared to hope, and dream, as she always did. And she dared to believe, that it would all come out as it ought, somehow, eventually.

He took her into his arms, crushing the hat.

She didn’t care.

“I have a plan,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Let’s get married,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Let’s conquer the world,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. No one in her family had ever been accused of dreaming small.

“Let’s bring the beau monde to its knees.”

“Yes.”

“Let’s make them beg for your creations.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“Is tomorrow too soon?” he said.

“No,” she said. “We’ve a great deal to do, you and I, conquering the world. We must start at once. We’ve not a minute to lose.”

“I love hearing you say that,” he said.

He kissed her. It lasted a long time.

And they would last, she was sure, a lifetime. On that she’d wager anything.