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“Not to me,” she said. “I crossed seas, and it was like crossing years. To everyone it must seem as though I have come back from the dead. If only I had done so in truth, I might have brought your brother with me.”
One devastating moment of shock, a sting within as of a wound opening—but then:
“Good heavens, Zoe!” a sister cried.
“Pay her no heed, Marchmont,” said another. “She has acquired the oddest notions in that heathenish place.”
“What does he care? Blasphemy is nothing to him.”
“That doesn’t mean one ought to encourage her.”
“One oughtn’t to encourage him, either.”
“But I must speak to him,” the girl said. “He is a duke. It is a very high rank. You spoke of dukes and marquesses. Will he not do?”
A collective gasp from the harridans.
“Do for what?” he said. The wound, if wound it had been, vanished from his awareness. He glanced from sister to sister. They all looked as though someone had shouted, “Fire!”
The intensely blue gaze came back to him. “Are you wed, Lord Marchmont?”
“‘Your Grace,’” Dorothea hastily corrected. “One addresses him as ‘Duke,’ or ‘Your Grace.’”
“Oh, yes, I remember. Your Grace—”
“Zoe, I must speak to you privately,” said Priscilla.
Marchmont frowned at Priscilla before reverting to the youngest sister. “Marchmont will do,” he told the girl who was and wasn’t Zoe.
Part of his brain said this was the same girl who once tried to injure him with a cricket bat, who climbed trees and rooftops like a monkey and fell into fish ponds and wanted to learn gamekeeping and blacksmithing and was so often found playing in the dirt with the village children.
But she wasn’t the same. She’d grown up, that was all, he told himself. And she’d done a first-rate job of it, as far as he could see.
Since the others so obviously wished to stifle her, he decided to encourage her. “You were saying?”
“Have you any wives, Marchmont?” she said.
“Oh, my goodness,” said one harridan.
“I can’t believe it,” said another.
“Zoe, I beg you,” said another.
Marchmont looked about him. The sisters were undergoing spasms of some kind. Lexham had turned away to study the fire, as he usually did when considering a problem.
Marchmont shook his head. “Not a one.”
The others started talking at Zoe all at once. A lot of shushing and “Don’t” and “Please don’t” and “I hope you are not thinking” this or that.
Even had he been thoroughly sober, the Duke of Marchmont could not have guessed what they were about. This was nothing new. It would not be the first time he’d interrupted one of their incomprehensible family squabbles. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time they promptly recommenced while he was there. After all, they did regard him as a member of the family, which meant they felt as free to abuse him as they did one another.
He crossed to the table, where a decanter sat untouched, surrounded by wineglasses. He might as well have a drink while he watched the entertainment.
He had lifted decanter and glass and was about to pour when her voice, with its exotic lilt, rose above the rest.
“Marchmont, will you please marry me?” she said.
Mama let out a little scream.
Gertrude leapt up from her chair and tried to drag Zoe out of the room. Zoe broke away from her and moved closer to her father.
“A duke, you said,” she told her sisters. “Or a marquess. He is a duke. He has no wives. Wife,” she quickly amended. In England, it was only one wife to a man, she reminded herself.
“You don’t simply offer yourself to the first nobleman who walks through the door,” said Dorothea.
“But you said the dukes and marquesses would not come to us,” said Zoe.
“I’m afraid to imagine what will be said about this,” said Priscilla.
“You said I could not hope to meet such men,” said Zoe. “But here is one.” And she wasn’t about to let him get away if she could help it.
“Ooooh,” said Mama. She fell back upon the pillows.
“Look what you’ve done to Mama!”
“The girl is hopeless.”
“Of course he’ll tell all his friends.”
“Papa, do something!” Gertrude cried as she flung herself into her chair.
Papa only looked briefly over his shoulder, his glance going from Zoe to the tall, fair-haired, shockingly handsome man with the decanter and glass in his long-fingered hands. The Duke of Marchmont’s beautifully shaped mouth had fallen open. His eyes had widened slightly.
As she watched, he closed his mouth and shuttered his eyes again.
She’d seen those stunningly green eyes wide open, for one dizzying heartbeat in time, when they’d first lit on her. The impact had nearly toppled her from her chair. She’d felt for a moment like the little girl spinning helplessly until landing on her bottom on a muddy patch of grass.
“I cannot wait,” she said. “Marchmont, you are the highest of rank here. Tell them to be silent and let me speak.”
“We shall never live this down,” Augusta said. “What a tale he’ll have for his friends at White’s.”
Marchmont slowly filled his glass. When that was done, he said, “I must have heard aright, else your sisters would not be shrieking at quite that pitch. You have asked me to marry you. Is that correct, Miss Lexham?”
The last time her heart had pounded so hard was on the day she’d fled the palace of Yusri Pasha and found the gates of the European quarter closed to her. Then she’d been terrified of what would happen to her if she was caught.
Yet she’d been exhilarated, too, to risk everything in one desperate bid for freedom.
This appeared to be her only chance to live the life for which she’d taken that desperate risk.
However grand his rank or handsome his face or splendid his physique, this was still a man, she told herself. Though he hid his eyes, she knew he was mentally taking off her clothes and liked what he saw. She felt, rather than saw, the slight tension in his posture: the alertness of the predator when it marks its prey.
A harem slave would be tearing off her garments about now.
Zoe knew she could not entice him in that way. Not here, at any rate. Not now. She must appeal to him from mind to mind. It must be business. The way men did it.
Or at least it must seem so.
She adjusted her shawl and her own posture, making herself as alluring as she could without being too obvious abou
t it, while she filled her mind with the ritual formulae employed on similar occasions.
In a logical and orderly fashion, she summarized for the duke her sisters’ and absent brothers’ assessment of the situation and their reasons for wanting to send her away.
“They say the only other solution is for me to marry a man of the highest rank,” she went on. “They say others must defer to him. They say that a man so highly placed will want an innocent girl of eighteen. I am not truly innocent, and I am not eighteen, but I am a virgin.”
“Ooooh,” said Mama.
Zoe went on determinedly, “Yusri Pasha gave me as a second wife to Karim, who was his eldest son by his first wife. But Karim could not make his…his…”—though Marchmont kept his eyes half closed, she knew the duke regarded her intently—“his instrument of delight. The limb a man uses for pleasure and to make children. What is it called?”
Shrieks from the sisters.
Zoe ignored them. “No one will tell me what it is in English,” she said. “If I ever learned the word, I have forgotten it.”
He made an odd sound in his throat. Then he said, “Membrum virile will do.”
The two older sisters put their heads in their hands.
“He could not make his membrum virile hard,” Zoe said. “He was sickly, you see. He was unable to be a true husband, though he was so fond of me, and I did everything they taught me to awaken a man’s desire. Everything. I even—”
“Zoe,” her father said in a strangled voice, “it is unnecessary to explain in detail.”
“One wishes it were not necessary for her to speak at all,” a sister muttered.
“One wishes the floor would open up and swallow one.”
“We shall never, never live this down.”
“Never mind them, Miss Lexham,” said Marchmont. “Please continue. I’m all ears.” He drank some more.
“I shall be an excellent wife to you,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound as desperate as she felt. She told herself that if this didn’t work, she’d go to Paris or Venice as she’d threatened, though those had never been her first choices. She wanted to live in her native land and have the life she’d dreamt of for twelve long years. It looked as though the Duke of Marchmont was her one chance to have that life. He was handsome and young and healthy and not excessively intelligent, and he desired her. He was perfect.
