“When he told me that one day I would welcome all the silliness of one of those young men or another like them, I told him I never would. I would rather marry him any day, I told him. He would not believe me at first. It took me several days to convince him. Dear Leonard. He did not want me to tie myself to an old man, he said. I am afraid I won him by trickery in the end.” She smiled guiltily at her plate and peeped sideways at the earl.
“Oh?” he said. He had one hand over his mouth. He was afraid that at any moment he would offend her by laughing out loud. She was a veritable delight.
“When he told me that he would be leaving Bath within a few days,” she said, “I threw my arms about his neck and burst into tears and told him that Dennis would marry me to some horrid young man if he did not rescue me. He patted my back and told me he would marry me. And then he told me how he loved me. He never stopped telling me so for the next eight years.”
“Very naughty of you,” Lord Wetherby said.
“Yes,” she said, smiling brightly at him again. “But, you see, it was not all trickery. I really was crying, and Dennis probably really would have married me to someone horrid— or tried, anyway. He is trying it again now.”
“Is he?” he said. “Are not matchmaking relatives an abomination?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling at him. “Is that what has happened to you?”
“Yes, partly,” he said.
They smiled at each other with mutual sympathy.
If he did not get out of that room soon, the earl thought, he was going to disgrace himself and terrify Mrs. Hunter out of her wits by leaning forward, taking her chin in his hand, and kissing that very alluring upper lip.
“Are you finished?” he asked, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet. “Shall we move to the sitting room?”
“Would you not rather stay for your port?” she asked.
“No,” he said, “I will forgo the pleasure.” Though if he were wise, he thought, he would sit over the port for the next two or three hours.
“Leonard never would, either, when we dined alone,” she said with a laugh. “He used to say”—she lowered her voice in imitation of a man’s tones— “‘Why should I sit alone with the port, dearest, when I can be in the drawing room drinking in the sight of you instead.’ He was always being silly, as I said earlier.”
Perhaps not so silly, the earl thought, taking her hand on his arm to lead her from the dining room. Of course, the old codger had been free to take her off to bed with him after drinking of her kisses in the drawing room. As for him, he should have reserved his drinking for the port.
“Cards?” he said as they entered the sitting room. “Do you play?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, turning her head to smile up at him. “But I must warn you that I am an expert. My husband was a very good teacher.”
“I will not play the gentleman and allow you to win, then,” he said. “If you are to win, you must do so by your own skill.”
She laughed.
Chapter 3
Rosamund was sitting on her bed, her knees drawn up against her, her arms encircling them. She felt quite snug and warm with a coal fire blazing in the hearth and one of Mrs. Reeves’ voluminous nightgowns covering her from chin to toes.
He had planned to be here with his mistress. In this room. In this bed. She was to have worn one of those nightgowns— for a few minutes. Rosamund felt uncomfortably warm suddenly and plucked the linen away from her, shaking it to create a cool draft.
She wished for perhaps the hundredth time since her arrival that afternoon that he were not so handsome. Although he was very easy to talk to and she could forget herself when they were talking, there were occasional silences—and very uncomfortable they were, too.
They had played cards until nearly midnight—a half-hour before—and spoken scarcely a word, concentrating on the games. At least he had been concentrating. She had lost all but one hand quite ignominiously despite the boast she had made at the start.
She had been too busy being aware of him to be able to concentrate fully, particularly his long-fingered, well-manicured hands. She had kept imagining them stroking over that white lace—for a few minutes. And moving beneath that lace after a few minutes. The trouble was that she had not only seen them doing so in her mind, but had also felt them doing so.
It was hard to concentrate on cards when one was having such lascivious thoughts about one’s opponent, unwilling though they had been.
And she was not the only one. Oh, he must have been concentrating harder than she to have won most of the games so handily. But he had not been indifferent to her presence either. His eyes had been on her almost every time she had found the courage to peep up at him—lazy, heavy-lidded, very blue.
It really was a very awkward situation she had found herself in, Rosamund thought, plucking at the nightgown again. And why was she sitting on the bed instead of lying in it at almost half-past midnight? She knew why. Was she going to do it? If so, she might as well get on with it. If not, she might as well blow out the candles and climb beneath the bedclothes and go to sleep. That was what she would do, in fact.
But when she stepped off the bed, she did not pull back the blankets and climb between the sheets as any virtuous and sensible young lady would have done. She crossed the room to the trunk and opened the lid. And drew out the white lace nightgown. She would just look at it.
But looking was not enough. She found herself one minute later undoing the buttons of the flannel nightgown with reluctant, hesitant fingers, drawing the garment off her shoulders and letting it fall in a heap at her feet. She fingered the white lace again, picked the garment up from the bed, and lifted it over her head.
