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“You are abominable,” said Zoe, and she flounced away.
Zoe expressed her disgust with him in the time-honored fashion of women everywhere, by shopping exhaustively.
The sums she spent would have daunted most men, certainly, for she was determined to have everything of the best and most fashionable, from head to toe. Among other things, she bought dozens of corsets. Unlike other modistes, Madame employed her own corset maker, in order to assure a perfect fit for her gowns.
As she’d made clear earlier, Zoe had strong opinions on this topic.
Before she went into the fitting room, she not only explained to Madame precisely how her breasts ought to be most comfortably and attractively arranged but demonstrated, by holding them in the desired position.
“Not in front of the shop window, Miss Lexham, I beg,” the duke said. And not in front of me.
“I forgot,” she said. “I must not take hold of my breasts before others who are not my husband.” She turned to Madame. “I lived in another place, and the rules there are different for what is said and done and what is not.”
“Oui, mademoiselle,” said Madame. “Let us go into the fitting room, if you please.” She kept her face neutral. From elsewhere in the shop, Marchmont heard giggles.
“I don’t want the short kind,” Zoe said as Madame led her to the curtained alcove. “They press the ribs under my breasts, and they do not enhance the shape in the way I wish. I want the kind that comes to here.” She indicated the place on her hips. “And it must have the shape that makes the pretty curve from the waist and makes the bottom—But no. Augusta said I should not mention my bottom. It is vulgar, she said. Jarvis, what is the word they use? For the same thing?”
“That’s derrière, miss,” said a scarlet-faced Jarvis.
“A French word, yes. Now I recall. My French is execrable. What little I learned as a girl, I forgot. Thank you, Jarvis. What I wish, Madame Vérelet, is for the corset to shape exactly to my derrière. When I wear a dress of fine muslin or silk, I want the shape behind to make a curve, very round.” She curved her hands over her buttocks to demonstrate.
“Miss!” said Jarvis.
“Oh, yes.” Zoe released her derrière. “I forgot.”
She disappeared into the fitting room. Madame closed the curtain, but it was only a curtain. Marchmont could hear Zoe talking about her breasts and hips and derrière. He heard the rustle as Madame took out her tape and measured. He heard her murmur the measurements to the assistant, who wrote them down.
His mind instantly produced supporting illustrations.
He remembered the softness and warmth of her body melting against his.
His body reacted as one would expect, his temperature climbing upward, along with his cock.
And that was a bloody damned waste of energy, when the gods only knew when he’d have time for amours, at the rate things were going. He told himself it was only for a fortnight—if he didn’t kill her before that.
He looked round the shop at the hordes of females.
“Someone get me a drink,” he said.
When he returned her to Lexham House, Marchmont promised to call the following day.
“I don’t care,” said Zoe, nose in the air.
They stood in the vestibule while a parade of footmen unloaded parcels from his curricle. Most of Zoe’s frocks would not be ready for several days. However, when the Duke of Marchmont entered Madame Vérelet’s shop, all of her other customers dropped in priority to forty-second place. She had ordered her seamstresses to alter a few garments intended for other ladies who were not the Duke of Marchmont’s protégée.
Zoe was wearing one of these dresses. The duke had ordered her damaged gown burned.
He and she had spent an hour in a shoe shop as well, where she made sure he saw her prettily turned ankles, the evil little tease.
They had bought stockings, too, heaps of them.
He banished from his mind the provocative glimpses he’d had of her legs. Like it or not, he needed to think. With Zoe, a man needed his wits about him.
“It hardly matters whether you care or not,” he said. “I shall come to collect you at two o’clock. If you choose to spend the day in this house instead, you’re welcome to do so. I certainly have sufficient to occupy me. I shall not die of grief because I cannot escort a sulky young woman about London.”
“If you find me so disagreeable, I wonder why you came back into the dressmaker’s shop,” she said.
“What sort of paltry fellow do you take me for, to be put off by a temper fit?” said he. “Especially one of yours. It was hardly the first I’ve seen, and I am certain it won’t be the last. You ever were a pain in the a—Ah, Lord Lexham, I see you have escaped Westminster’s clutches.”
“Temporarily.” Zoe’s father, who’d quietly entered the vestibule between servants, stood watching the parade of parcels. “Zoe’s been shopping, I see,” he said.
“Oh, this hardly signifies,” said Marchmont. “These are merely some fripperies and trinkets we bought in the futile attempt to sweeten her ghastly temper.”
Zoe stormed out of the vestibule, hips swaying, skirts swishing.
“Never mind, sir,” Marchmont said, pitching his voice so that she’d hear him. “I promised I would see this thing through, and I shall, no matter what.”
Seven
Zoe might have become calmer and more rational if her sister Augusta hadn’t condescended to join the family after dinner that evening.
She had nowhere else to go, she said. She still did not dare show her face to her acquaintance. She wondered if she ever would dare, or whether she ought to remove to the country permanently.
“After Zoe’s carryings-on this day, I do not see how even the Duke of Marchmont can restore the family honor,” she said.
As Marchmont had predicted, news of their contretemps, in Grafton Street and in the dressmaker’s shop, was already making the rounds of the Beau Monde. Augusta enlightened their parents.
“Oh, Zoe,” Mama said. “How could you?”
Even when Zoe gave her version of events, her father, to her dismay, did not take her side.
“Marchmont was right to shout at you,” said Papa. “In his place I should have done the same. That was damned reckless of you, to pull a child from an overturned carriage. You should have left it to Marchmont. He’s perfectly capable of dealing with such matters.”
“You made him look ridiculous,” said Augusta.
“I?” Zoe said. “I have not noticed you or any of my other sisters showing him any respect. All of you criticize him and say he is useless and lazy—”
“We don’t say it in public. But you act like a ten-year-old child—and an ill-bred ten-year-old at that. Throwing a vase at him. Does that not strike you as childish?”
“It was a book!”
“Oh, Zoe,” said Mama.
“You are very lucky he came back, after the vulgar display you treated him to,” said Augusta. “But he at least thinks of Papa and his obligation to him. You think of nobody but yourself.”
“Obligation?” Zoe said.
“He’s under no obligation to me, I’m sure,” said Papa.
“You know he has always regarded you as a father,” Augusta said.
Did you think I wanted to find that your father had been taken in by an imposter? Did you think I wanted to see him made a fool of?
The words hung in Zoe’s mind. She remembered Jarvis’s interpretation of his words: Everybody knows he don’t care about much, but what he said to you means he cares about your father.
Now the memories flooded in, of the summers when Lucien and Gerard joined the Lexhams in the country. The two families had often spent weeks together, but she didn’t remember the early times, when the boys’ parents were alive. She didn’t remember what the duke and duchess looked like or sounded like. She remembered vividly, though, the dreadful time after Gerard was killed, when Lucien shrank into himself and avoided everybody. Papa took
him away, only the two of them, for what had seemed to her a very long time: months and months. When they returned, Lucien was himself again, or nearly.
Marchmont had returned to the dressmaker’s shop because of Papa. Zoe looked at her father.
“Obligation has nothing to do with it,” Papa said. “Everyone knows that Marchmont would never run away from a fight. Everyone knows that he regards his word as sacred.”
I promised I would see this thing through, and I shall, no matter what, he’d said.
