“To win?” Gemma shifted so that she was astride his lap. Then she could kiss him more fully, stroking her tongue into his mouth in the way she’d learned he liked best. Pulling away a little, she asked, “And what if instead of competition, we engage in a meeting of equals?”
While she waited for her words to filter through the lust, she stroked her hands over his chest, which she had to admit she was very curious to see without all of his coats in the way.
“What are you proposing?” he asked, his blue eyes suddenly suspicious.
It was a notion she’d come up with last night, thinking about how much she’d wanted to continue what they’d started in Pearson Close. She knew it wasn’t precisely the most proper way to go about things, but then propriety wasn’t something she’d ever been all that invested in. She’d ended up betrothed to Cam because of a few stolen kisses. All for propriety’s sake.
When their temporary engagement was at an end, she’d realized, she would very likely never be this close to a man again. She had little doubt she would receive offers once it became widely known she was the sole heir to Lady Celeste’s estate. But she’d made up her mind that she would not give up her inheritance to a man simply for the sake of being wed. Her plans to go through life alone, as her Aunt Dahlia had done, hadn’t changed.
“After we go our separate ways,” she said, leaning back on her heels so that she could look him in the eye, “I will have no other opportunities for these kinds of—”
One of his dark brows rose. “Interactions?” he supplied.
“Yes,” she said with an approving nod. “I have decided that I’ll model my life after those of my Aunt Dahlia and Lady Celeste. I’ll live a solitary life of scholarship. Without the distraction of this sort of thing.”
He made a skeptical sound. “While I admit this sort of thing can be very distracting,” he admitted, “I do not think you can know what your aunt and Lady Celeste actually got up to. Their reputations were unblemished, but who’s to say they didn’t take lovers?”
This was a possibility Gemma hadn’t considered. But it was true that one could never truly know how a person’s private life was conducted. In truth, however, it was beside the point. “Whether they did or not,” she said with what she hoped was dispassion, “I will endeavor to remain unentangled.”
“And what has this to do with me?” he asked. To his credit, he was not looking at her as if she had maggots in her head. Which was another reason why she was certain he was the perfect man to assist her with her scheme.
“Once our betrothal is at an end,” she explained, “I’ll no longer have any opportunities like this. So I wish to take advantage of our proximity while I may. And I hope it will be agreeable to you as well. An experiment of sorts.”
“So, we’re back to this, are we? You wish to use me to experiment?” he asked, brow furrowed now as if he were trying to understand her proposition.
“Yes,” she said with relief. It was one thing to hit upon a notion, but it was another thing entirely to be forced to explain it. “I will have you as my lover for the duration of our betrothal but at the end of it, we’ll go our separate ways as we agreed upon before.”
Now he was frowning. “Gemma, it is no small thing for a gentleman to set aside the morality he’s been brought up to follow from boyhood. Not for me, at any rate.”
She felt the sting of disappointment. She had known there was the possibility that trying to formalize the caresses and pleasure they’d thus far engaged in as the opportunity arose would ruin things. But she’d never been one to find comfort in serendipity. She liked a bit of order and agreement in her world.
Unable to speak, she began to turn so that she might stand. But soon found herself held firmly.
When she wouldn’t look up at him—how could she?—he lifted her chin.
“I haven’t said no,” he said in a husky voice. “But I have some conditions.”
Another thing she hadn’t considered was counterarguments.
“And they are?” she said, trying to sound unconcerned.
“I want your agreement that if there is a child, you’ll marry me without argument,” he said, his expression deadly serious.
Gemma blinked. “There are ways to prevent it,” she said finally, knowing her face was scarlet. Ladies were not supposed to know about ways to prevent pregnancy, of course. It was another means to keep them in their place. But Aunt Dahlia had taught both Gemma and her sister about them.
A circumstance that suddenly had her reevaluating Cam’s suggestion that perhaps Aunt Dahlia hadn’t been as celibate as Gemma had imagined.
Cam must have considered it too because he didn’t look particularly scandalized. “All right,” he said with a nod. “If you need my help procuring them…”
She shook her head.
“Another condition,” he said, “is that if at the end of our betrothal in a few months you find you’ve changed your mind, you’ll let me know. I am not against the idea of a marriage between us.”
“You aren’t?” she asked with a frown. “But I thought—”
“Opinions change,” he said with a shrug.
When he didn’t elaborate, she pressed, “What else?”
So far, he’d surprised her with all of his conditions. She could only imagine the others would be equally as shocking and she wanted to get this part over with.
“You’ll agree not to put yourself in danger while we search for your fossil,” he said firmly.
“What has that to do with my proposal?” she asked, puzzled. “I consider the two to be entirely separate.”
“I’m not foolish enough to think you’ll follow my orders any other way,” he said. “And I’m not finished with this one—if you should happen to endanger yourself, you’ll agree to marry me. No arguments, no wheedling. As soon as I discover you’ve put your life at risk, the betrothal becomes real.”
“That is most irregular,” she objected.
“And proposing that we become lovers for the duration of a pretend betrothal is entirely aboveboard?” he asked. There was that brow again, she thought with a scowl.
“Fine,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “But you must promise not to lure me into dangerous situations so that you can force me into wedlock,”
“I am a gentleman, Gemma,” he said. “I keep my word.”
“So we’re agreed then?” she asked. “I agree to all of your conditions, and you agree to mine?”
“It would appear that we are,” he said, and she noted that his eyes had darted to her lips.
Leaning into him, she pressed those lips against his.
“Sealed with a kiss,” she said softly. She made to pull away, but he deepened the meeting of mouths. By the time she pulled away, they were both a little breathless.
“I’ll figure out a way to get to your rooms tonight,” he said, allowing her to pull away and stand.
That brought her up short. “Here?” she asked, and realized it sounded rather like a squeak.
“You’ve given me a three-month limit,” he said with a shrug. “I mean to use every day of them.”
Gemma blinked. What had she got herself into?
She’d just smoothed out her gown, and Cam had patted down his hair, which looked just as if she’d been running her fingers through it, when Serena entered the room, followed by Sophia and Benedick.
“I hear you’ve had a bit of excitement,” Benedick said. And Gemma couldn’t help the guilty glance she turned Cam’s way.
“Lord Paley, he means,” Sophia said, reading far more into the exchange than Gemma had wanted her to. Her sister knew her far too well.
“Yes, of course,” Gemma nodded. “It was quite the scene. But Lord Cameron did the right thing and he and Lord Paley came to an agreement.”
“I agreed to let him live,” Cam agreed with a nod.
At her scowl, he shrugged. “And we may have discussed some things about Sir Everard and learned a great deal of new information about that fellow’s activities. I don’t think anyone will be surprised to learn that he was just as much of a scoundrel in other parts of the collecting world as he was with Gemma’s fossil.”
Serena excused herself to check on Jeremy, and the two couples moved to the seats before the fire.
“What else had Sir Everard been up to?” Benedick asked, oblivious to the glances being exchanged between his wife and her sister.
Gemma, however, was very much aware of her sister’s searching look. As Cam explained what they’d learned from Lord Paley, Gemma shook her head slightly to warn her off. The look Sophia gave her—lips pursed and brow furrowed—indicated that she would revisit the subject later.
Which was fine with Gemma. As long as they didn’t discuss the fact that she and Cam had agreed to engage in an affair in front of his brother the vicar, she was content.
My, how her standard for contentment had changed this week, she thought wryly.
Then she turned her attention to the subject of Sir Everard.
But beneath her concentration on that matter, a little hum of excitement ran through her.
Tonight, it seemed to repeat. Tonight he would come to her.
Just then, Cam caught her eye. And she knew he was thinking the same thing.
* * *
Despite his distraction over his assignation later with Gemma, Cam was able to concentrate on the matter of Sir Everard and her missing fossil as soon as he saw that his brother wasn’t as oblivious as he’d seemed.
This, Ben had conveyed with only a slight narrowing of his eyes. Anyone else would have missed it, but Cam had spent his entire boyhood learning his brothers’ silent cues. And if he wasn’t mistaken, his brother the vicar had not missed the heated look Cam had just exchanged with Gemma.
Fortunately, Sophia was there too, and was more interested in discussing Sir Everard than her husband seemed to be.
“Do you believe Sir Everard’s suspicion that your fossil was, in fact, this Beauchamp Lizard?” she asked Gemma, who also seemed able to concentrate on the matter at hand. “If he was a fraud about his own abilities as a scholar, I mean, who’s to say he wasn’t simply wrong and intended to pass off your fossil as Lady Celeste’s?”
“I’m not as familiar with Sir Everard’s work as Cam is, I fear,” Gemma said with a shrug. “I do know that my first instinct on seeing the skull fossil was that it could be quite exciting. But I didn’t have the time to examine it properly, or to compare it against other important finds in this area to see if it bore any relationship to them.”
“I have been acquainted with Sir Everard for some years,” Cam said, “but I never found him to be the scientific equal of some of the other prominent members of our circle. I had no notion he was such a fraudster but nor did I think him a genius. I think to know whether it is, in fact, Lady Celeste’s lizard, we’ll need to find some sketch or description of it.”
“She never wrote about it in any of the scholarly periodicals?” Sophia asked. Cam supposed her knowledge of the natural science world came from being Gemma’s sister. It spoke well of their relationship. His brothers, whom he held in great affection, had never bothered to learn any of the details of his passion for collecting.
“I have examined all of the scientific papers and books in this library,” Gemma said, gesturing to one wall of books and bound documents, “and I’ve never seen any mention of it. I suppose there may have been something in her diaries, but when we made a point of reading through them, we weren’t looking for scientific things.” As Cam understood it, when the heiresses had first come to Beauchamp Hall they’d undertaken to read through all of Lady Celeste’s personal journals in an effort to find their benefactress’s killer.
“It sounds as if we have some light reading in our future,” said Ben, stretching out his shoulders as if in preparation for some physical endeavor.
But Gemma, who was wearing the expression Cam had come to recognize as the precursor to an outlandish idea, shook her head. “I don’t think we’ll need to go to the journals yet.”
She turned to her sister, “Do you recall how I used to make you draw the items I found whenever I went fossil collecting?”
“How could I forget?” asked Sophia with a sigh. “I was never more pleased than when I stumbled on the idea to teach you to sketch them yourself. I know artists are supposed to enjoy drawing in and of itself, but stones are deadly dull as subjects go.”
Cam knew at once what Gemma was getting at. “You think Lady Celeste must have some sort of collecting journal or sketchbook.”
It wasn’t a bad notion. Most collectors, wanting to have a way of showing their best finds without lugging them cross-country in a trunk or valise kept some kind of descriptive record. Lady Celeste’s collection, as he’d seen on the tour, was quite extensive and if she’d been as active in the collecting community as she was said to have been, she would have had sketches.
“It’s a logical idea,” he agreed. “Especially if she intended to hide it. She’d want to know precisely what it looked like without needing to remove it from its hiding place each time she wanted to see it.”
“I don’t understand why she would have buried it, though,” Ben said. “If Sir Everard’s tale was even true.”
Cam did, though. “Collectors are all a little mad about their finds,” he explained. “And I’ve seen them do all sorts of things to stop other collectors, or worse thieves, from making off with their most prized discoveries. As schemes go, burying it in the cliffs where she found it wasn’t all that bad. After all, she’d already found it there. Why would someone search there again?”
“But it’s quite common to search the same place again if it yielded something important earlier,” Gemma argued.
“Yes, but she owned that particular bit of beach,” Cam said. “She would have no fear of someone else coming onto her property to dig there. At least, no one but you.”
That made her eyes widen. “You don’t think she buried it there for me to find, surely?” Despite the negative way she’d asked the question, it was obvious that she found the notion tempting. It must weigh on her that she’d not been left a specific quest as her fellow heiresses had been.
“You’ll have to figure out if your fossil was, in fact, this Beauchamp Lizard,” Sophia reminded them. “So you have to find the sketches. Then you’ll know more about her motives.”
“Agreed,” Gemma said. “You don’t happen to recall seeing anything like that in your studio, do you?”
“Alas, I do not,” Sophia responded. “I should think you’d have the most luck in the collection, or the workroom.”
But Gemma shook her head. “I’ve inventoried everything in both rooms and there was nothing like that. I’m afraid there’s only one place where they can be. I feel foolish for not considering it earlier.”
“The attics?” Sophia asked.
Gemma gave a quick nod. “I think that’s our only option now.”
“We’ll discuss our strategy over luncheon,” Ben said, rising to his feet.
“We wrangled an invitation as soon as we saw Serena,” Sophia explained, linking arms with her sister. “It’s too cold to go back to the vicarage without sustenance.”
“Why do I get the feeling you pressed for that invitation so that you wouldn’t miss any gossip,” Gemma said with skepticism in her tone.
“You are free to draw whatever conclusion you wish,” her sister returned tartly. “I get luncheon either way.”
Walking behind the sisters, Cam glanced at his brother.
“How’s your jaw?” Ben asked. “I may have hit you harder than I originally intended.”
“Nice of you to say that now that the damage is done,” Cam said, his hand going to the bruise.
But if he wanted an apology, he would be doomed to disappointment.
“I didn’t say you didn’t deserve it,” Ben said. Though he was a vicar, he was still an elder brother with all the arrogance that came with it.
Cam didn’t argue. But he felt Ben’s gaze on him.
“What?”
They’d just reached the hallway in time to see Gemma and Sophia’s skirts disappearing around the corner.
“Why do I get the sensation that I owe you another thrashing?”
Thinking back to his earlier discussion with Gemma, Cam reflected that he was probably owed more than a few thrashings for what they’d agreed to embark upon. But at the end of it, he had every intention of making said thrashing unnecessary. His brother could hardly fault him for touching his own wife.
He’d simply need to convince Gemma to take on the role.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said to Ben, adopting his most innocent air.
“You’re such a terrible liar,” Ben said, shaking his head in disgust. “I thought we taught you better.”
“I must admit, it never fails to amuse when my brother the vicar reminds me that he is a better liar than I am,” Cam said.
“Don’t change the subject.”
To Cam’s surprise, Ben stopped in front of him and looked him in the eye. “Let’s speak frankly, shall we?”
At Cam’s nod, he continued. “I want your word that if things go too far, you’ll marry her.”
“Of course I will.” Cam was a bit offended that there was even a question of it.
“Do not look so put out,” Ben said. “You’re the one who told me you never wished to marry.”
“Perhaps I’ve changed my mind,” Cam said in a grudging tone. He hadn’t had any intention of telling his brother that his revelations of the reasons for their father’s infidelity had shifted something inside of him. Whatever impediment he’d harbored that stopped him from considering happy ever after for himself was gone.
That took Ben aback, he was perversely happy to see.
“Have you indeed?”
“I just said so, didn’t I?”
Ben examined his face for a moment before, apparently, satisfied by what he saw there, clapping him on the shoulder. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“Don’t be so pleased yet,” Cam said. “I haven’t convinced Gemma to go along with it.”
But this didn’t worry his brother in the least, it would seem.
Grinning, he grabbed Cam in a one-armed hug. “You’re a Lisle boy, Cam,” he said with all the arrogance that statement entailed. “I have every confidence in your powers of persuasion.”
That made one of them, Cam thought wryly.
For now, it would have to be enough.