Gwen grunted as Alex’s elbow landed in her ribs. “Every day!” he cried in reply, and then, under his breath, muttered, “wave, damn you, or we’ll never make it aboard.”
“Oh.” Numbly, she lifted her hand. The handkerchief flapped an energetic reply, then retreated into the window, which snapped shut decisively.
With a great sigh, Alex slapped his felt hat back onto his head. “All right,” he said. “Quickly, now, before she decides to stick her head back out.” He took Gwen’s arm and turned on his heel, starting down the platform at a rapid clip.
People scattered from their path, either because he was over six feet and dressed all in black, like a thief with midnight plans, or because there was an innate and intimidating elegance to the way he wore his great caped coat. He drew the attention of every female passing by, eighteen to eighty, and this was not simply Gwen’s imagination at work: from the corner of her eye, she spied a silver-haired grandmother on a nearby bench twisting at the waist to ogle him as he passed.
“Here we are,” he said to her. A hiss came from the train; a great roiling mass of steam spilled out from the warming engines. He leapt up the steps into the carriage and turned back for her just as the carriage lurched and began to roll forward.
Gwen, one foot on the stairs, cried out and lost her balance.
He caught her by the waist and hauled her up inside, directly into his chest. She held very still for a moment, in his arms, breathing in the scent of him—wool and soap and the faint, spicy hint of one of those tonics men used to soothe shaving nicks.
And then she began to smile. She pulled away, laughing. “A dramatic beginning!”
He grinned back at her. “No doubt.”
A throat cleared itself very pointedly in their vicinity. They turned. An astonished gray porter stood gawking at them. “Les—les billets, s’il vous plait?” he asked tentatively.
“Ah, yes,” Alex said, and reached into his jacket for the tickets while Gwen sank back against the wall. The train was picking up speed, the floor beginning to shudder beneath her slippers. “I rented the whole damned carriage, so this should work,” Alex said in an aside to her. “Even if she decides to wander, she won’t be able to come back into our section.”
She gazed at him. How . . . cleverly he’d managed all of this.
He glanced briefly toward her, then glanced back again with a frown. “Oh, Christ. And what ails you? Are you about to weep? It’s not too late to jump back down, you know.”
She found a smile. “Yes, it is.” The platform was flying by now. Paris was over.
“The next station, then. I can figure out Barrington myself.”
“No,” she said quickly. “And I wasn’t going to cry. It’s only—” She slanted another glance at his angular face and swallowed her next words.
It’s only that you’re rather frightening, she wanted to say. Alex had come into the room this afternoon and taken the seat next to Elma, ignoring with grave dignity her insistence that he leave or be thrown out by security. Capturing her hand, he had meekly invited her to recite his sins. Meekly! Gwen had never seen him meek in her life.
Naturally, Elma had obliged, unleashing a volley of accusations about his black character and his terrible effect on her charge. In reply, he had nodded, squeezed her hand, and made numerous sympathetic murmurs of accord.
Just when it had looked to Gwen like she was about to be shipped back to London, Alex had introduced, with all apparent amazement, the idea of how trying his behavior must have been for Elma—which insight somehow had led the discussion off-course entirely, traversing various subjects including the misery of a life spent beholden to ingrates, the endless anxieties of keeping face in society, and the woeful injustices to which beautiful women of a certain age proved subject. Another conversational sleight of hand had then narrowed focus specifically to Mr. Beecham, at which point Elma had burst into tears and collapsed onto Alex’s shoulder, wailing as he’d patted her arm.
Indeed, Gwen could feel certain of only one thing: by the end of the conversation, Elma had felt convinced that she was the one in need of a holiday. “From every obligation that troubles you,” Alex had specified. “Including Gwen, of course.”
Now Elma was four cars ahead of them, on the first leg of her journey to Lake Como, in northern Italy. Before leaving, she had secured their repeated and ardent reassurances that they would not breathe a word of her jaunt to anybody, most of all Mr. Beecham. The three of them planned to reunite in Marseilles in five days’ time.
“It was just . . .” She paused. “A very sudden departure. I am a bit—addled, I suppose.”
“Hmm.” He seemed to accept this. “Perhaps you require some dinner.”
The carriage Alex had booked contained three sleeping compartments and a small sitting area, where lunch was served atop trays the porter screwed into the floor. The spread was far more impressive than what the English railway might have mustered: first came the prawns, radishes, and chilled Marennes oysters, accompanied by a fine Madeira. The main course, to be delivered in an hour’s time, would consist of braised partridges with garnishes of Gruyère cheese and salade à la Romaine. For dessert, they were assured a choice selection of fruits, coffees, and cognacs.
It promised to be a long dinner in which to avoid Alex’s eyes.
“Enough,” he said curtly after the prawns arrived. “Something ails you. If you’re regretting your rashness, tell me. I can put you on a returning train at Lyons.”
“Nothing ails me,” she said for the fifth time. She stared fixedly out the window. They were traveling past breathtaking scenery: ancient manors perched atop cliffs that glowed in the vermilion sunset; stands of woods that rose up suddenly and cast the compartment into a darkness broken only by the dim light of the single lamp above them; and then, as the woods fell away again, great fields of sunflowers, beyond which, in the distance, lay small towns, church spires, and the turrets of crumbling castles, picturesque as any fairy tale.
She felt curiously divided in herself—on the one hand, painfully alive, vibrating in sympathy with the entire universe, so that even the great metal tube in which she rode seemed somehow of a piece with her. The train flew through the countryside, carried by its own unstoppable momentum, unembarrassed by the way its shrieking, clanging, squealing progress scattered flocks of sedate sheep and startled sleepy birds from branches into great cawing clouds of disapproval.
On the other hand, the train had a known destination, whereas she felt strangely unmoored, as if she were hurtling freefall through the sky. Hours before, Alex had pulled Elma into his arms and spoken gently and persuasively to her of possibilities she had not dared imagine for herself. Elma had been persuaded by his speech. Gwen had felt bespelled by it.
Last night, she had not dreamed she would be leaving Paris. This evening, she would be halfway across the country from it. Was this always the way he lived? The freedom of it seemed mad and dangerous and exhilarating. The world stood so open to him.
And now he had laid it open to her.
She dared a glance at him. Interrupted in his own study of her, he smiled. That smile, while designed to be an admission—Yes, you caught me looking—seemed so companionable and charming that it hit some sweet, painful nerve in her breast. She felt almost breathless, and on the footsteps of that sensation came an odd and unsettling fear.
This fascination she felt for him was clearly unidirectional.
I want to touch you, she’d told him last night, brazen as any harlot. How demoralizing—no, how purely horrifying that her desire seemed to have survived his rejection. In all her life to date, she’d never had the bad taste to continue to long for someone who spurned her. The viscount could go spit for all she cared. She’d loathed Trent from the moment she’d opened that note in which he’d begged forgiveness for having to break their engagement. But now, after Alex had replied to her advances with a shrug and some nonsense about his deep regard for her brother, what did she do?
She found herself staring again at his lips!
She found herself envying a silvering matron the privilege of being cozened by him, simply because it entailed the right to curl up against his chest.
She sighed and tipped up her chin. Beyond Alex, in the mirror affixed to the length of teak that formed a privacy screen dividing the sitting nook from the corridor, a redheaded girl in mauve silk gazed back, her brown eyes a bit . . . woeful.
She tried to smile at herself, to put on a saucy expression befitting the Queen of the Barbary Coast. The whole point of this adventure was to seize hold of that glorious, reckless confidence that immunized her to caring for others’ judgments.
Her smile faltered. If her aim was to cast off others’ opinions, then desiring Alex was more than an inconvenience. For she very much wanted him to approve of her. How not? When he smiled at her, when he offered encouragement, she felt as if anything in the world was possible for her.
Which was absurd, really. Had she not learned her lesson, yet, about hitching her prospects to the good opinion of a man? And of all men, Alex was the last whose notions of admirable behavior should appeal to her. “I feel very bad for what you did to Elma,” she said. “She’ll feel so foolish when she comes to her senses.”
He reached out to select a prawn from the platter. “Why so? I only gave her an excuse to do exactly as she wished. She doesn’t enjoy playing the tyrant, Gwen.” He paused. “Or has it escaped your notice that the woman’s desperately unhappy?”
Gwen cast him a startled glance. “Elma is nothing near to unhappy,” she countered. “She adored being in Paris; you should have seen her counting her collection of calling cards. And she was thrilled to think of returning to London—full of talk about the parties, the bachelors, the—”
“Thrilled for you,” he said curtly. He bit the head off the prawn. “Thrilled to live, vicariously, through you. She has no children. Her husband doesn’t give a damn about her. Alas, he has the bad taste to keep kicking, so she can’t search out a replacement. In the meantime, she’s growing older. My hope is that she finds a nice Italian bloke in Lake Como. Kick up her heels for the weekend.”
“An—affair?” All right, this she could object to most vigorously! “Have you forgotten poor Uncle Henry—”
“Poor Uncle Henry ignores her completely, from what I can tell. God knows I’m no advocate of adultery; if you’re idiotic enough to take the vow, you might as well honor it. But he seems to be doing a very poor job of that, so let him pay the piper, for once.”
Gwen fixed him with a glare meant to telegraph outrage.
He laughed. “So righteous, are you? Come now, Gwen, what would you have preferred? That we bundle Elma into a trunk and dispatch her screaming to England? Your approach left something to be desired. What did you say to her, anyway? Oh, cheers, Auntie Elma, thanks for the company these last ten years, but now I’m off to flash my knickers to the lads.”
She flushed. “Of course not! Really, Alex. I always suspected you thought me stupid—”
“Did you?” His brows lifted.
“—but I’m not that thick. I simply said I was ready for a bit of independence.”
He snorted.
“Manipulation made more sense, I suppose,” she said icily.
His smile looked sharp and feline. “Darling, your hypocrisy is a beautiful thing to witness.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that you are not one to moralize when it comes to the gentle art of manipulating affections.”
She went still. “I will ask you to clarify.”
“You didn’t convince London society to adore you by commanding it to do so.”
“No,” she said, “I didn’t. I befriended them.”
“Certainly. Your friends and admirers felt persuaded to adore you because you made it seem like the most natural and advantageous thing to do.” He took a long sip of his wine. “Tell me,” he said, “how many sweaters did you promise to knit the orphans? It’s no wonder you demonstrate a natural talent for bribery; you’ve been practicing in wool.”
“That is not at all the same!”
He tapped his shrimp fork against the rim of the plate, a delicate, considering sound. “You think your success was accidental, then? That your popularity was simply the product of the smiles you give so freely?”
“Of course not.” She was hardly so naïve. “As you always point out, there is also the matter of my three million pounds.”
The fork went still. “I pointed that out to you once,” he said slowly. “In service of a very specific argument. It’s you who continue to mention it now. One would almost think you really do tally your worth in terms of pounds and pence.”
The question stirred some obscure, wounded anger. “Well, it’s true, isn’t it? If I weren’t rich—”
He sighed. “Spare me. If you weren’t rich you wouldn’t have had a chance of entering high circles—of course that’s true. But money is not what won your popularity.”
The floor shuddered and set the dishes to rattling as the train slowed for a station. “Oh, please let’s not talk about how nice I am.”
“Wasn’t going to,” he said. “You’re shrewd. And disciplined as hell.”
Shrewd and disciplined? This idea startled her into a pause. Soldiers were disciplined; so, too, were religious widows who spent entire nights on their knees in prayer. But she? And as for shrewd—ha! “You were right about that Aubusson in the Beechams’ library,” she said. “I had it checked before leaving London.”
“And?”
“And, you said I was shrewd.”
“Not in buying carpets,” he said. “But in your social success, yes. Far too complete to be the product of luck and charm and smiles alone.”
“Then what?” she asked. “I did not purchase my friends, if that’s what you mean.”
“No,” he said. The train had come to a full stop, now, and his voice sounded painfully precise in the new silence. “You gamed them.”
“Gamed them?” She speared up a prawn. Curious things, prawns. They seemed so peculiarly naked, curled around themselves, their delicate veins exposed so plainly. “You make it sound like my life was all a sham.”
“Wasn’t it?” He made a sound in his throat that managed to convey amusement and skepticism at once. “Don’t tell me you believed in it for a moment. You cracked that little world by mastering the rules and using them to suit yourself.”
He paused, and she kept her eyes on the prawn, hoping he was finished. Her skin seemed to be crawling. There was something curiously . . . humiliating . . .in hearing him analyze her so cold-bloodedly. She was not so calculating as he painted her, but she could see how a stranger might be persuaded by his view.
Was this really how he saw her?
He spoke more gently as he continued. “Gwen . . . had you taken that world so seriously—had you placed faith in any of the people in it—you’d never have played them so cleverly. You do know that, don’t you?”
The flaw in his argument emboldened her to look up. “Everyone knows there are rules,” she said. “Everyone, Alex. Otherwise etiquette guides wouldn’t be so popular.”
His blue eyes held hers steadily. “I’m not speaking of etiquette. I’m speaking of subtler arts. Flattery, for one. And the talent for well-timed obliviousness. You recall the soiree Caroline threw, three years ago? In June, I think it was.”
She shrugged and returned her attention to the prawn on her fork, twirling it around once. “There were so many—”
“Vomit in the lobby,” he said.
“Oh. Yes,” she said reluctantly. Vaguely she remembered it now. An unseasonably muggy day. Caroline had pitched a pretty striped tent in case of rain. For herself, she’d been abuzz with her impending wedding to Lord Trent. But half the guests had gotten sick, her fiancé included, because the shellfish—
She looked askance at prawn, then returned it to her plate. “The shellfish was off,” she said. “Thank you for reminding me.”
He laughed. “Yes, that was the single time I ever mistook Caro for Belinda. Her rage was extraordinary to behold.”
“I didn’t realize you were there.”
“I had no intention of coming. I was at the docks, overseeing the unloading of some shipment. When the guests started falling ill, Caro fetched me over to help load portly MPs into their carriages.” He smiled at some private memory. “Sweet God. Some of those men must eat. At any rate, I was there long enough to overhear you speaking to some grande dame or other. She introduced you to her friend as the daughter of a corner-shop apothecary who’d discovered a remarkable talent for capitalism.”
“Oh.” This sounded familiar. In the way that one sometimes recalled dreams, days or weeks later, it stirred some hazy emotional echo in her. As a policy, she never dwelled on such incidents.
“It was an insult,” he said cheerfully. “Undisguised. But your smile never wavered. You thanked her for being so kind as to remember your late father.”
“Did I?” She plucked up a radish from the plate and bit down on it. At first taste, these French radishes were mild and sweet, but they fought back with a spicy aftertaste that took the palate by surprise. She was forming quite an appreciation for them. “I don’t remember that,” she lied.
“No? I’ll never forget it.” The sudden sobriety of his tone drew her eyes. He held her look. “That was no piece of etiquette. It was a very clever strategy that you used to checkmate a hag.” More softly, he said, “You daft girl. Of course I never thought you were stupid.”
Her face went warm. The effect of the radish, maybe. “Perhaps I do remember now,” she said. “It was Lady Fulton, no?”
“Maybe,” he said with a shrug. “You know I take pains to avoid knowing any of that lot.”
Yes. It had been Lady Fulton. With the mention of the woman’s name, the moment returned to Gwen with perfect clarity. She’d been fretting over the humidity, which had melted the curl from the hair she’d frizzled over her forehead and made her feel like a sausage in overtight casing; such long, tight sleeves fashion had required that year! The remark had come out of nowhere, startling her from her more mundane miseries. She had looked around very quickly before replying, to make certain that Lord Trent had not been near enough to have overheard the slight.
How odd to think on it now. She’d been afraid. Rightly she should have looked to her fiancé to defend her. Instead she’d worried that a stray comment might change his opinion of her.
Well, for all she knew, a stray comment had changed his opinion. He’d never given a proper explanation for his defection.
These men.
“I loathe Lady Fulton,” she said. Loathe. What a lovely word. Why had she never used it before? “That woman is a mean-tempered little snob.”
“No doubt. As I said, I was greatly impressed by your restraint. Shriveled witch.”
“Shriveled,” she said. “Yes, that is exactly the word for her. I expect her soul resembles nothing so much as a withered corn husk.”
“I was thinking of her face, but I’ll concede the other, too.”
Together they laughed. It occurred to her that if Alex ever were to marry, his fiancée would not need to conceal such insults from him. He would be glad to step up and parry them for her.
Not that he would ever marry, of course. She turned her thoughts away from this dangerous ground. “But what you’re saying, then, is that you’ve always thought me a very clever hypocrite.”
“No. Well, perhaps,” he said with a grin. “But if hypocrisy is what the game requires, who am I to judge a hypocrite?”
“How flattering,” she said dryly.
“You should be flattered. I adjudged you to be good at the game. Indeed . . .” He gave her a slow smile that seemed to lick down her spine like flame. “I admired your performance enough to invite you to join a game of my own.”
She was no proof against that smile. He’d first shown it to her inside the elephant at the Moulin Rouge, and she had yet to build immunity to it. She inhaled slowly. “Tell me what I must do.”
“Bluntly put, you’re my ticket into the party. That’s more than enough. Barrington will certainly ask you to sing, but there’s no call to oblige him.” He paused, then set aside his wine. “Gwen, you do realize that Barrington is under the impression that we’re lovers?”
She could not control her blush, but she held his blue eyes by sheer dint of will. How casually he spoke that word. “Yes,” she said.
“So you understand that we’ll be sharing rooms, then.”
She swallowed. “Yes.”
“And most likely there will be only one bed provided.”
Her fingers dug into the plush velour of the cushion beneath her. “Of course,” she said, attempting nonchalance. But even to her ears, her voice sounded too breathless.
“Good. Simply behave prettily toward me, then, and keep the fictions about the Barbary Queen to a minimum. The fewer lies, the harder to get tripped up.”
She nodded, growing conscious of some rising dissatisfaction. The role he was outlining for her was that of a prop. But she wanted to be of use to him. “What are you looking for, anyway? Do you think he gulled Lord Weston out of the land, somehow?”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “Would be easier if I had an inkling. Something’s not right—certainly Barrington doesn’t present as a simple land baron. If he’s got the money to buy a house off the old guard on the Rue de Varenne, this entire trip may be a fool’s game. Perhaps he’s buying up English land just for the hell of it and never replied to my offer because he has no care for the profit he might make.” His mouth twisted at this idea. “What a perverse thing to collect,” he said softly.
“But how odd,” she said hesitantly. “If he’s so wealthy, it seems that one of us should have heard of his family, at least. Where did his money come from?”
“Yes, it’s damned odd,” Alex agreed. “But that still doesn’t mean it has aught to do with Gerry.” He drummed his fingers lightly atop the table, then shrugged and looked out the window. The train had begun to move again; the iron girders of the station were passing slowly by the window, and faces on the platform were lifting toward the departing train, turning after it like pale flowers toward the sun. “Either way, this is my one attempt to find out. I’ll give it two days.”
She hesitated. “May I ask why you care?”
He glanced blankly back to her. “About Gerry?”
“No,” she said, laughing. “About Heverley End. That is, I’m sure it’s lovely—but I thought you had no regard for the countryside. And it was a very minor estate, wasn’t it? Never entailed. What matter if he sold it?”
“None to me,” he said. “And yes, the estate is minor. But my sisters have taken the sale badly—so there’s that. And I can’t dismiss the idea that my brother has gotten in over his head, somehow. Not without looking into it, at least.”
She began to smile. “And you say you aren’t brotherly!”
“Oh, nothing noble to this, Gwen. I’m saddled with a passel of incompetents—a pompous bore of a brother and two shrill, complaining sisters who prefer fretting to fixing things. It’s easier this way—take care of the matter and they leave me alone. Until the next matter arises,” he added in a mutter.
Until the next matter arises. How reluctantly and matter-of-factly he acknowledged this: whenever the need arose, he would step in, with no hesitation. He would always be there to help, whether he liked it or no.
As always when anyone spoke of family affairs, she became conscious of a stir of fascination. Envy, too: she would admit it, although it spoke ill of her character. Even in their quarrels, the Ramseys belonged to each other, permanently. For all the worry and grief Alex’s roaming caused his siblings, they always welcomed him home with open arms. For all the irritation the twins felt at Lord Weston, they still convened at his house on Sunday evenings for dinner. And Alex, who held himself aloof from polite society and preferred to be away from England whenever possible, did not fail to attend those dinners when he was in town.
It was so different than the upbringing Gwen had known. For the sake of their children’s advancement, her parents had willingly fractured their family. Sometimes she wondered what life might have been like had they proved less ambitious.
She looked away from that thought, physically. She looked up into Alex’s face—blue eyes that made no pretense at generosity or optimism and glinted, always, with a cynical light. His brow rose, questioning, and without conscious direction, her fingers closed very tightly in her lap.
They wanted, she thought, a hand to hold. The right to reach out for someone, for him, any time she required his aid. Suddenly, with a physical ache in the pit of her stomach, she wanted—impossible things. Not marriage. God, not something so easily broken or betrayed. Something more than marriage—a bond as fierce and unbreakable as a physical embrace. Tight. Even suffocating. She would not struggle.
She’d hoped a wedding would guarantee such a bond. She had looked at Pennington and seen the father of her future children—four, five, six children, enough to begin to fill the bedrooms in that huge, empty, echoing estate her parents had built. Enough children to ensure that she would never be alone, and neither would they.
Instead of a hand, she closed her fingers over Richard’s ring, which she had strung on a chain around her neck.
But her eyes would not move from Alex.
She could not have him, of course. But God above, she wanted him.
It was inevitable, perhaps, that any period of extended conversation between them should turn, eventually, to Richard. They remained in the dining nook long after the dishes had been cleared away, sharing memories, swapping tales, laughing together like friends. And by the time the moon rose, round and heavy in the star-strewn sky, Gwen had regained her peace around him. All of this common ground, this love they had shared for her brother, made it very difficult to feel anxious in his presence.
How curious, then, that the longing still persisted. She had always supposed that attraction thrived on nerves and uncertainty, but the more comfortable she felt with him, the closer she wished to be.
After they had parted ways and gone to their separate compartments—her unassisted disrobing made possible by the simple clasps of the Pretty Housemaid corset she’d purchased in the Galeries du Louvre the day of her scandalous shopping spree—it occurred to her that she might be confusing her emotions. Perhaps what she felt for Alex was only an extension of her love for Richard.
She tossed the corset onto the floor. It subsided with a sad, cheap flop, and so did she, into the single small chair.
She stared at the corset. “Pretty housemaid,” indeed. What sort of name was that? Certainly it had succeeded in inspiring her to buy it, but only as a lark; she’d imagined gifting it to Caroline just to hear her shriek with laughter. Housemaids could be pretty, and the corset was priced to appeal to that demographic, but it seemed rather lewd, associating an undergarment with the wearer’s source of income.
And the corset itself was not, in fact, pretty. No housemaid would wear it if seduction was on her mind. Indeed, the insert did not even advertise it as pretty; rather, the manufacturer assured her, it was both strong and cheap.
She frowned. Was that a lewd reference, as well? A strong, pretty, cheap housemaid?
She slid down in her chair and kicked the thing across the small space. It went skidding up against the bed, where it sagged dispiritedly. It knew there were far prettier corsets in the world, far more appealing to men, and stronger, too. She had several lovely corsets to her name, each designed to mold her body slightly differently, the better to flatter the line of particular gowns. She’d often thought, while half-dressed in front of the mirror, that some of her corsets were almost too fetching to be covered up—that somebody should get to see her in them.
But not the Pretty Housemaid. She scowled at it. She should not have abandoned her other corsets in Paris. What had she been thinking? Corsets were not articles to be abandoned lightly; they were the benchmarks of a lady’s success, in some circles. Amongst the girls who had debuted with her three years ago, everybody had aspired to marry no later than the age that corresponded to the measurement of their corseted waists. Twenty-four had marked the beginning of proper spinsterhood.
Corsets had shortened in the years since, and lacing had grown more vicious. The current lot probably all wished to marry before they turned twenty-two.
Why . . . she sat up. The very fact that she had not overheard the other debutantes discussing the current equation of waist to marriage age was probably a sure sign that her age fell somewhere above the acceptable limit.
Or that her waist was too large!
Heavens. She put her hands to her hips, squeezing lightly. Would she still look pleasing only in her underclothes? Cream puffs and champagne took their toll, of course. If only she had brought her sea-green corset with her, a bit too long now for current gowns, but cunningly trimmed in matching ribbon and ivory lace. If it were with her, that was what she would wear into Alex Ramsey’s compartment.
She clapped a hand to her mouth.
Good Lord!
She was thinking of undergarments because somewhere, in the course of their conversation earlier, she had made a decision: the Pretty Housemaid would not serve for the seduction she planned to undertake tonight.
She could not have him forever. But she meant to have him now.