Читать книгу The Firebrand - Сьюзен Виггс, Susan Wiggs - Страница 10

Lucy Hathaway perched on the edge of her seat, pretending to hang on every word spoken by the evangelist. Anyone in the crowded salon who saw her attentive posture would admire her piety. Observers would find the sight of the dark-haired young woman, with her hands clasped in religious fervor, uplifting. Inspirational, even. Commendable, most assuredly.

“Your eyes are glazing over,” said a deep, amused voice beside her.

She didn’t recognize the voice, which was unusual, for Lucy Hathaway made it her business to know everyone. The man must have slid into the seat beside her after the start of the lecture. But she didn’t turn to look at him. She pretended not to notice that he’d spoken at all.

“…St. Paul is clear on this point,” Reverend Moody intoned from the podium. “A wife must submit to her husband’s leadership in the same way she submits to the Lord…” The message rang through the room full of people who had braved a dry windstorm to attend the event at the fashionable Hotel Royale.

Lucy blinked slowly, trying to unglaze her eyes. She kept them trained straight ahead with unwavering attention. She tried to govern her mind as well, batting away the preacher’s words like bees at a picnic, when she really wanted to leap to her feet and object to this claptrap about the superiority of man over woman.

And now, despite her best intentions, she found herself wondering about the insolent man sitting next to her.

The man whose whisper had come so close that she could feel the warmth of his words in her ear.

“You know,” he said, leaning even closer. “You might try—”

“Go away,” she said between clenched teeth, not even moving her lips as she spoke. He smelled of bay rum and leather.

“—leaning on me,” he continued insolently. “That way, when you fall asleep from boredom, you won’t attract attention by collapsing on the floor.”

“I will not fall asleep,” she hissed.

“Good,” the man whispered back. “You’re much more interesting wide-awake.”

Ye gods. She mustn’t listen to another word of this.

The Reverend Dr. Moody came to a lull in his address, pausing to fortify himself with a glass of lemonade from a pitcher.

She sensed the man next to her shifting in his seat and then leaning back to prop his ankle on his knee in an easy, relaxed pose. By peeking through lowered eyelashes, she caught a glimpse of his pantleg. Charcoal superfine, perfectly creased, fashionably loose-fitting.

Lucy herself was being slowly strangled by a corset designed, she was certain, for use in the Spanish Inquisition, and she resented him more than ever.

“We should leave,” he suggested, “while we have the chance.”

She glared stoically ahead. This was the first lull in forty minutes of the stultifying lecture, and the temptation to flee burned like a mortal sin inside her. “It’s interesting,” she said, trying hard to convince herself.

“Which part?”

“What?”

“Which part did you find so interesting?”

Lucy was chagrined to realize that she could not recall one single word of the past forty minutes. “All of it,” she said hastily.

“Right.” He leaned in closer. “So now I know what bores you. Suppose you tell me what excites you.”

She narrowed her eyes in suspicion, for no man had ever voluntarily made small talk with her. He was probably setting her up for some sort of humiliating moment. Some social faux pas so he and his cronies could have a chuckle at her expense. So what? she thought. It wouldn’t be the first time someone made her the butt of a joke. She’d survived moments like that before. Many moments.

“Ha,” she muttered. “As if I would tell you.”

“I’m leaving,” he said. “Come with me.”

Lucy ignored him. If she got up now, people would notice. They might think she was following him. They might even believe she had “designs” on him.

As if Lucy Hathaway would ever have such a thing as designs on a man.

“Quickly,” he urged, his whisper barely audible. “Before he gets his second wind.”

The audience, restless and trying not to show it, buzzed with low, polite conversation while the evangelist refreshed himself. At last Lucy could resist no longer. She had to see who this rude, mellow-voiced stranger was. With the bold curiosity that caused her such trouble in social situations, she turned to stare at him.

Heavens to Betsy. He was as handsome as a sun god.

Her eyes, no longer glazing over, studied him with unabashed fascination. Long-legged. Broad-shouldered. Deep brown hair, neatly combed. An impeccably tailored suit of clothes. A face of flawless, square-jawed strength and symmetry such as one saw on civic monuments and statues of war heroes. Yet this particular face was stamped with just a hint of wicked humor. Who the devil was he?

She didn’t know him at all, had never seen him before.

If she had, she would have remembered. Because the unfamiliar warmth that curled through her when she looked at him was not a sensation one would easily forget. Lucy Hathaway was suddenly contemplating “designs.”

He smiled, not unkindly. She caught herself staring at his mouth, its shape marvelously set off by the most intriguing cleft in his chin. “Randolph Birch Higgins,” he said with a very slight inclination of his head.

Guiltily she glanced around, but to her relief noticed that they sat alone in the rear of the salon. She cleared her throat. “I beg your pardon?”

“Please don’t. I was simply introducing myself. My name is Randolph Higgins.”

“Oh.” She felt as gauche as a schoolgirl unprepared for lessons.

“I believe the usual response is ‘How do you do?’ followed by a reciprocal introduction,” he suggested.

What a condescending, pompous ass, she thought. She resented the marvelous color of his eyes. Such an arrogant man did not deserve to have perfect leaf-green eyes. Even more, she resented him for making her wish she was not so skinny and black-haired, pinch-mouthed and awkward. She was not an attractive woman and she knew it. Ordinarily that would not bother her. Yet tonight, she wished with humiliating fervor that she could be pretty.

“Miss Lucy Hathaway,” she said stiffly.

“Pleasure to meet you, Miss Hathaway.” He turned slightly toward her, waiting.

She had the oddest sensation of being alone with this man. On some level she perceived people milling around the large outer salon behind them. Through the arched passageway, she vaguely noticed ladies laughing and flirting, men stepping through the French doors to light up their cigars in the blustery night. In the lecture room, people spoke in low tones as they awaited the next portion of the address. Yet a strange electricity stung the air around Lucy and the man called Randolph Higgins, seeming to wall them off into a place of their own.

“Now you’re supposed to say ‘It’s a pleasure to make your ac—’”

“I don’t need lessons in idle conversation,” she said. Lord knew, her mother had taught her that well enough. Ensconced in a North Division mansion, Viola Hathaway had elevated frivolity to an art form.

“Then we should move on to meaningful conversation,” he said.

“What makes you think you and I could have a meaningful conversation?” she asked. Her parents had spent a fortune to drill her in manners, but all the deportment lessons in the world had failed to keep Lucy from speaking her mind.

She wished Mr. Higgins would go away. Far away. A man who produced this sort of discomfiting reaction in her had no possible use except…

Lucy was nothing if not honest with herself. Perhaps she should quit trying to feel peevish and admit that she was most inappropriately intrigued. A sudden, sinful inspiration took hold. Perhaps he could be useful. As a New Woman who adhered fervently—if only in theory, alas—to the radical notion of free love, Lucy felt obliged to practice what she preached. Thus far, however, men found her unattractive and annoyingly intellectual. Mr. Higgins, at least, seemed to find her interesting. This was a first for Lucy, and she didn’t want to let the opportunity slip away.

“You’re looking at me like a cat in the creamery,” he whispered. “Why is that?”

She snapped her head around and faced front, appalled by her own intoxicating fantasy. “You’re imagining things, sir. You do not know me at all.”

The lecture started up again, a boring recitation about the ancient founders—male, of course—of the Christian faith. She tilted her chin up and fixed an expression of tolerant interest on her face. She’d promised Miss Boylan not to argue with the preacher; her radical views often got her in trouble, tainting the reputation of Miss Boylan’s school. Instead she kept thinking about the stranger beside her. What wonderful hands he had—large and strong, beautifully made for hard work or the most delicate of tasks.

Lucy tried to push her attraction away to the hidden place in her heart where she kept all her shameful secrets.

Men were trouble. No one knew this better than Lucy Hathaway. She was that most awkward of creatures, the social misfit. Maligned, mocked, misunderstood. At dancing lessons when she was younger, the boys used to draw straws in order to determine who would have the ill luck to partner the tall, dark, intense girl whose only asset was her father’s fortune. At the debutante balls and soirees she attended in later years, young men would place wagers on how many feet she would trample while waltzing, how many people she would embarrass with her blunt questions and how many times her poor mother would disappear behind her fan to hide the blush of shame her daughter induced.

In a last-ditch effort to find their daughter a proper place in the world, Colonel and Mrs. Hathaway had sent her away to be “finished.” Like a wedding cake in need of icing, she was dispatched to the limestone bastion called the Emma Wade Boylan School for Young Ladies, and expected to come out adorned in feminine virtues.

Women whose well-heeled papas could afford the exorbitant tuition attended the lakeside institution. There they hoped to attain the bright polish of refinement that would attract a husband. Even those who were pocked by imperfection might eventually acquire the necessary veneer. Lucy found it bizarre that a young woman’s adolescence could end with instructions on how best to arrange one’s bustle for sitting, or all the possible shades of meaning created by a crease in a calling card, yet she’d sat through lengthy lectures on precisely those topics. To her parents’ dismay, she was like the wedding cake that had crumbled while being carried from oven to table. No amount of sugar coating could cover up her flaws.

Whenever possible, Lucy buried her social shortcomings between the delicious, diverting pages of a book. She adored books. Ever since she was small, books had been her greatest treasures and constant companions, offering comfort for her loneliness and escape from a world she didn’t fit into. She lived deeply in the stories she read; caught up in the pages of a book, she became an adventuress, an explorer, a warrior, an object of adoration.

And ironically, her many failures at Miss Boylan’s had endeared her to some of the other young women. There, she’d made friends she would cherish all her life. The masters at the school had long given up on Lucy, which gave her vast stretches of free time. While others were learning the proper use of salt cellars and fish forks, Lucy had discovered the cause that would direct and give meaning to her life—the cause of equal rights for women.

She certainly didn’t need a man for that.

“We stray too far from the virtues our church founders commanded us to preserve and uphold,” boomed the Reverend Moody, intruding into Lucy’s thoughts. She stifled a surge of annoyance at the preacher’s words and pressed her teeth down on her tongue. She mustn’t speak out; she’d promised. “The task is ours to embrace tradition…”

Lucy had a secret. Deep in the darkest, loneliest corner of her heart, she yearned to know what it was like to have a man look at her the way men looked at her friend Deborah Sinclair, who was as golden and radiant as an angel. She wanted to know what it was like to laugh and flirt with careless abandon, as Deborah’s maid, Kathleen O’Leary, was wont to do belowstairs with tradesmen and footmen. She wanted to know what it was like to be certain, with every fiber of her being, that her sole purpose in life was to make a spectacular marriage, the way Phoebe Palmer knew it.

She wanted to know what it would be like to lean her head on a man’s solid shoulder, to feel those large, capable hands on her—

Exasperated with herself, she tried to focus on the mind-numbing lecture.

“Consider the teachings of St. Sylvius,” the preacher said, “who taught that ‘Woman is the gate of the devil, the path of wickedness, the sting of the serpent, in a word a perilous object.’ And yet, my friends, it has been proposed that in some congregations women be allowed to hold office. Imagine, a perilous object holding office in church—”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Lucy shot up as if her chair had suddenly caught fire.

Moody stopped. “Is there some discussion, Miss Hathaway?”

Unable to suppress her opinions any longer, she girded herself for battle. She’d promised Miss Boylan she wouldn’t make waves, but he’d pushed her too far. She gripped the back of the empty chair in front of her. “As a matter of fact, we might discuss why our beliefs are dictated by men like St. Sylvius, who kept paramours under the age of fourteen and sired children concurrently with three different women.”

Scandalized gasps and a few titters swept through the audience. Lucy was accustomed to being ridiculed and often told herself that all visionaries were misunderstood. Still, that didn’t take the sting out of it.

“How do you know that?” a man in the front row demanded.

Well-practiced in the art of airing unpopular views, she stated, “I read it in a book.”

“I’d wager you just made it up,” Higgins accused, muttering under his breath.

She swung to face him, her bustle knocking against the row of chairs in front of her. Someone snickered, but she ignored the derisive sound. “Are you opposed to women having ideas of their own, Mr. Higgins?”

Half his mouth curved upward in a smile of wicked insolence. He was enjoying this, damn his emerald-green eyes. “So long as those ideas revolve around hearth and home and family, I applaud them. A woman should take pride in her femininity rather than pretend to be the crude equal of a man.”

“Hear, hear,” several voices called approvingly.

“That’s a tired argument,” she snapped. “A husband and children do not necessarily constitute the sum total of a woman’s life, no matter how convenient the arrangement is for a man.”

“I reckon I can guess your opinion of men,” he said, aiming a bold wink at her. “But don’t you like children, Miss Hathaway?”

She didn’t, truth be told. She didn’t even know any children. She had always considered babies to be demanding and incomprehensible, and older children to be silly and nonsensical.

“Do you?” she challenged, and didn’t bother waiting for a reply. “Would you ever judge a man by that standard? Of course you wouldn’t. Then why judge a woman by it?”

He made the picture of masculine ease and confidence as he stood and bowed to Reverend Moody. “Shall we remove this discussion to a more appropriate locale?” he inquired. “A sparring ring, perhaps?”

Laughing, Moody stepped back from the podium. “On the contrary, we are fascinated. I yield the floor to open discussion.”

Fine, thought Lucy. They all expected her to disgrace herself. She could manage that with very little effort. She swept the room with her gaze, noting the presence of several prominent guests—Mr. Cyrus McCormick and Mr. George Pullman, whose enterprises had made them nearly as wealthy as Lucy’s own father, Colonel Hathaway, hero of the War Between the States. She spied Mr. Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the late great Emancipator and one of the leading social lights of the city. Jasper Lamott, head of the Brethren of Orderly Righteousness, sat in smug superiority. Watching them, she felt an ugly little stab of envy. How simple it was for men to stand around discussing great matters, secure in the knowledge that the world was theirs for the taking.

“I believe,” she said, “that women have as much right as men to hold office in the church or the government. In fact, I intend to support Mrs. Victoria Woodhull’s campaign for president of the United States,” she concluded grandly.

Higgins’s brow descended with disapproval. “That woman is a menace to decent people everywhere.”

Lucy felt a surge of outrage, but the heated emotion mingled strangely with something unexpected—the tingling excitement touched off by his nearness. “Most unenlightened men think so.”

“Her ideas about free love are disgusting,” Jasper Lamott called across the room, instigating rumbles of assent from the listeners.

“You only think that because you don’t understand her,” Lucy stated.

“I understand that free love means immorality and promiscuity,” Higgins said.

“It most certainly does not.” She spoke with conviction, trying to do honor to the great woman’s ideas, even though she knew her mother would be calling for smelling salts if she heard Lucy debating promiscuity with a strange man in front of a crowd of avid listeners.

“Isn’t that exactly what she means?” Randolph Higgins asked. “That a woman should be allowed to follow her basest instincts, even abandoning her husband and family if she wishes it?”

“Not in the least.” In the audience, heads swung back and forth as if they were watching a tennis match. “The true meaning of free love is the pursuit of happiness. For men and women both.”

“A woman’s happiness is found in marriage and family,” he stated. “Every tradition we have bears this out.”

“Where in heaven’s name do we get this tradition of pretending a marriage is happy when one of the parties is miserable? Marriage is a matter of the heart, Mr. Higgins, not the law. When a marriage is over spiritually, then it should be over in fact.”

“You’re almost as much of a menace as she is,” he said with a harsh laugh. “Next you’ll be telling me you approve of divorce.”

“And you’ll be telling me you believe a fourteen-year-old girl forced to wed an alcoholic should stay with him all her life.” That was precisely what had befallen Victoria Woodhull. But rather than being beaten down by circumstances, she’d begun a crusade to free women from the tyranny and degradation of men.

“People must learn to live with the choices they’ve made,” he said. “Or is it your conviction that a woman need not take responsibility for her own decisions?”

“Like many women, Mrs. Woodhull wasn’t allowed to decide. And sir, you know nothing about me nor my convictions.”

“You’re a spoiled, overprivileged debutante who deals with boredom by stirring up trouble,” he stated. “If you really cared about the plight of women, you’d be over in the West Division, feeding the hungry.”

A smattering of applause came from some of the men.

“Women would be better served if men would simply concede their right to vote.”

“You should relocate to the Wyoming Territory. They allow women to vote there.”

“Then they don’t need me there,” Lucy insisted. “They have already won.”

“Such passion,” he said.

“Whether you’ll admit it or not, the entire universe revolves around feelings of passion.”

“My dear Miss Hathaway,” Mr. Higgins said reasonably, “that is exactly why we have the institution you revile—marriage.”

A curious feeling came over Lucy as she sparred with him. She expected to feel offended by his challenges, but instead, she was intrigued. When she looked into his eyes, a shivery warmth came over her. She kept catching herself staring at his mouth, too, and thinking about the way it had felt when he had whispered in her ear. The feeling was quite…sexual in nature.

“The institution of marriage has been the cornerstone of mankind since time was counted,” he said. “It will take more than an unhappy crackpot female to convince the world otherwise.”

“The only crackpot here is—”

“I beg your pardon.” Like a storm of rose petals, Phoebe Palmer entered the salon, her face a mask of polite deference. The finishing school’s self-appointed doyenne of decency always managed to reel Lucy in when she teetered on the verge of disgrace. “Miss Lucy is needed and it’s ever so urgent. Come along, dear, there we are.” For a woman of the daintiest appearance, Phoebe had a grip of steel as she took Lucy by the arm. Without making a scene, Lucy had no choice but to follow.

“There is a name for the institution you advocate, Mr. Higgins,” she said, firing a parting shot over her shoulder. “Fortunately, slavery was rendered illegal eight years ago by the Emancipation Proclamation.”

Phoebe gave a final tug on her arm and pulled her through the doorway. “I declare,” she said, scolding even before they left the room, “I can’t leave you alone for a moment. I thought a Christian lecture would be safe enough, but I see that I was wrong.”

“You should have heard what they were saying,” Lucy said. “They said we were the gate of the devil.”

“Who?”

“Women, that’s who. You would have spoken up, too.”

Phoebe’s mouth twitched, resisting a smile. “Ah, Lucy. You’re always shooting your mouth off and getting in trouble. And I am constantly trying to stop you from committing social suicide.”

“I think I did that already, last August when I burned my corset at that suffrage rally.” Lucy extracted her arm from Phoebe’s grip. “Speaking of trouble, how is Kathleen getting along?”

“That’s why I came to get you.” Phoebe gestured toward the French doors, draped by fringed velvet curtains. “She is flirting outrageously with Dylan Kennedy.”

Lucy followed her gesture and spied Kathleen O’Leary in an emerald gown, her head of blazing red hair bright against the backdrop of Mr. Dylan Kennedy’s dark suit. Watching them, she felt a keen sense of satisfaction. Kathleen was much more than a lady’s maid. She was their friend. And tonight, she was their pet project.

Their prank was a social experiment, actually. Lucy claimed it was possible to take an Irish maid, dress her up in finery, and no one would ever guess at her humble background. Phoebe, an unrepentant snob, swore that people of quality would see right through the disguise.

Framed by the French doors, Kathleen tilted her head and smiled at Mr. Kennedy, one of the most eligible bachelors in Chicago. The night sky in the background seemed to glow and pulse with the city lights. As she watched, Lucy felt a tug of wistfulness. They were both so attractive and romantic, so luminous with the sparkling energy that surrounded them. She could not imagine what it would be like to have a man admire her that way.

“Well,” she said briskly to Phoebe. “One thing is clear. I have won the wager. You must donate a hundred dollars to the Women’s Suffrage Movement.”

“There’s still time for Kathleen to stick her foot in her mouth.” Phoebe sent Lucy a wry smile. “However, tonight that seems to be your specialty.”

Lucy laughed. “Only tonight?”

“I was trying to be polite.” She linked arms with Lucy again. “I wish Deborah had come with us this evening.”

A frisson of anxiety chased away Lucy’s good humor. “She seemed quite ill when we left Miss Boylan’s.”

“I’m sure she will be fi—Good heavens, it’s Lord de Vere.” Without a backward glance, Phoebe sailed off to greet the weak-chinned English nobleman, whom she hoped and prayed she might marry one day.

Lucy caught herself thinking about Mr. Higgins, and the way their public disagreement had led to private thoughts. It was a rare thing, to meet a man who made her think. She should not have antagonized him so, but she couldn’t help herself. He was provocative, and she was easily provoked.

As more people filed out of the lecture salon, she spotted him moving toward the adjoining room, and felt herself edging toward an admission. An admission, followed by a plan of action, for that was Lucy’s way. She saw no point in believing in something without acting on that belief.

What she admitted to herself, what she had come to believe, was that she was wildly attracted to Mr. Randolph Higgins. Until tonight, she’d never met a man who made her feel the lightning sting of attraction. It had to mean something. It had to mean that he was the one.

That was where her plan of action came in. She wanted him for her lover.

When he went over to a long table, laden with punch and hors d’oeuvres, she marched straight across the room to him. He gave no sign that he’d seen her, but when he turned away from the table, he held two cups of lemonade.

“You,” he said, handing her a cup, “are the most annoying creature I have ever met.”

“Really?” She took a sip of the sweet-tart lemonade. “I take that as a compliment.”

“So you are both annoying and slow-witted,” he said.

“You don’t really think that.” Watching him over the rim of her cup, she added. “I am complimented because I have made you think.”

Lord, but he was a fine specimen of a man. She felt such a surge of triumph that she could not govern the wide grin on her face. She’d found him at last. After a lifetime of believing she would never meet someone who could arouse her passion, share her dreams, bring her joy, she’d finally found him. A man she could admire, perhaps even love.

“Do I amuse you?” he asked, frowning good-naturedly.

“Why would you think that?”

“Because you keep smiling at me even though I have just called you annoying and—”

“Slow-witted,” she reminded him.

“Yes,” he said. “Rude of me.”

“It was. But I forgive you.” She glanced furtively from side to side. “Mr. Higgins, do you suppose we could go somewhere…a little less public?” Before he could answer, she took his hand and pulled him toward the now-empty lecture room. The dry windstorm that had been swirling through the city all evening battered at the windows. Gaslight sconces glowed on the walls, and orange light flickered mysteriously in the windowpanes. Rows of gilded chairs flanked a central aisle, and just for a moment, as she led him along the crimson carpet runner toward the front of the room, she had the fanciful notion that this was a wedding.

“Miss Hathaway, what is this about?” he asked, taking his hand from hers.

“I wanted to speak to you in private.” Her heart raced. This was a simple matter, she told herself. Men and women arranged trysts all the time. She should not get overwrought about it.

“Very well.” He propped his hip on the back of a chair, the pose so negligently masculine and evocative that she nearly forgot her purpose. “I’m listening.”

“Did you enjoy the lecture tonight, Mr. Higgins?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“It was a crashing bore.”

Clearly he didn’t share her passion for debate. She pulled in a deep breath. “I see. Well, then—”

“—until a certain young lady began to speak her mind,” he added. “Then I found it truly interesting.”

“Interesting?”

“Yes.”

“And…provocative?”

“Most definitely.”

“Did you think it was…stimulating?”

He laughed aloud. “Now that you mention it.”

Her spirits soared. “Oh, I am glad, Mr. Higgins. So glad indeed. May I call you Randolph?”

“Actually my friends call me Rand.”

She most definitely wanted to be his friend. “Very well, Rand. And you must call me Lucy.”

“This is a very odd conversation, Lucy.”

“I agree. And I haven’t even made my point yet.”

“Perhaps you should do so, then.”

“Make my point.”

“Yes.”

Ye gods, she was afraid. But she wanted him so much. “Well, it’s like this, Mr.—Rand. Earlier when I spoke of passionate feelings, I was referring to you.”

His face went dead white. His mouth moved, but no sound came out.

“You see,” she rushed on, “I’ve always wanted to have a lover. I never did encounter a man I wanted to spend my life with, and if I took a lover I would simply have no need of a husband.”

“Lucky you.” Some of the color, and arrogance, returned to his handsome face.

She could sense suppressed laughter beneath his wry comment. “But I wouldn’t want a love affair just for the sake of having one. I’ve been waiting to meet a man I felt attracted to.” She looked him square in the eye. “And I’ve found you at last.”

The humor left his expression. “Lucy.” The low timbre of his voice passed over her like a caress.

“Yes?”

“Lucy, my dear, you are a most attractive girl.”

She clasped her hands, thoroughly enchanted. “Do you think so?”

“Indeed I do.”

“That is wonderful. No one has ever thought me attractive before.” She was babbling, but couldn’t help herself. “My mother says I am too intense, and far too outspoken, and that I—”

“Lucy.” He grasped her upper arms.

She nearly melted, but held herself upright, awaiting his kiss. She’d never been kissed by a man before. When she was younger, Cornelius Cotton had kissed her, but she later found out his older brother had paid him to do it, so that didn’t count. This was going to be different. Her first honest-to-goodness kiss from the handsomest man ever created.

Late at night, she and the other young ladies of Miss Boylan’s would stay up after lights-out, whispering of what it was like to kiss a man, and of the ways a man might touch a woman. One thing she remembered was to close her eyes. It seemed a shame to close them when he was so wonderful to look at, but she wanted to do this right. She shut her eyes.

“Lucy,” he said again, an edge of desperation in his voice. “Lucy, look at me.”

She readily opened her eyes. What a glorious face he had, so alive with character and robust health and touching sincerity. So filled with sensual promise, the way his lips curved into a smile, the way his eyes were brimming with…pity? Could that be pity she saw in his eyes? Surely not.

“Rand—”

“Hush.” Ever so gently, he touched a finger to her lips to silence her.

She burned from his caress, but he quickly took his finger away.

“Lucy,” he said, “before you say anymore, there’s something I must tell you—”

“Randolph!” a voice called from the doorway. “There you are, Randolph. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

Lucy turned to the back of the salon. There, in the doorway, stood the most stunning woman she’d ever seen. Petite, blond and willowy, she held her lithe body in the shape of a question mark, clad in a beautiful gown bearing the trademark rosettes of Worth’s Salon de Lumière. In a rustle of perfumed silk, she moved toward them, hand outstretched toward Rand.

“I’ve found you at last,” the gorgeous blond woman said, her words an ironic echo of Lucy’s.

Rand’s pallor quickly changed to dull red as he bowed over her hand. “Miss Lucy Hathaway,” he said, straightening up and stepping out of the way, “I’d like you to meet Diana Higgins.” He slipped an arm around her slender waist. “My wife.”