Chapter 5
Next day
Olivia settled into her seat at the breakfast table and considered the letter resting beside her coffee and croissant. It looked official.
Another morning, she might allow this letter to sit unopened until she’d considered all of its possible consequences. This morning, she hadn’t the time to be patient. Lucy and the Duke would be joining her in a few minutes. Without further ado, she took up her butter knife and sliced open the missive.
6 April 1825
To the Estimable Lady Olivia Montfort:
We would like to thank you for considering our services for your estate acquisition needs. However, we deeply regret to inform you that our staff will be unable to assist you in this undertaking. As long-standing retainers of the Montfort Family, it would be a conflict of interest to act in any way contrary to and/or without the Earl of Surrey’s explicit instruction.
Furthermore, we would caution you to reconsider pursuing any line of action which does not involve your gracious father’s express consent. As you are presumably aware, he and the Countess are not expected home from Italy until autumn. Until such a time, we strongly advise that you remain under the protection of the Duke of Arundel.
Your faithful servants in all, but this,
Wortham, Netheram, & Howell
Olivia slapped the letter down. The cheek! What right had these . . . men! . . . to put her in her place? She was the possessor of a significant fortune in her own right, the Duke having returned her dowry after Percy’s “death.” How dare they insinuate that she needed a man’s name to obtain her townhouse?
She needed no man’s “protection,” or anyone else’s for that matter. Mariana would assist her, as surely would her parents, but that wasn’t how she desired to achieve this end. She wanted to accomplish it alone, only then would the life she attained be entirely her own.
She bit down on flaky croissant with more force than necessary. This wouldn’t do. She hadn’t the faintest idea when Percy would return from the Continent, but he would, someday. And she would be firmly established in her own home before that eventuality occurred. She’d clung to the Duke’s safe harbor for too many years. It was time for her to venture out on her own. Why wouldn’t these . . . nodcocks! . . . let her?
She reached for the London Diary to her left and began skimming its vacuous pages in the hope that they would calm her. She hadn’t gotten far when Lucy bounded into the room, followed by the more sedate pace of the Duke.
“Good morning, Mum.” Lucy landed a fat kiss onto Olivia’s cheek and plopped into her usual seat to Olivia’s right.
From the corner of her eye, Olivia watched Lucy pick up the unopened letter that lay beside her place setting. Her mouth pinched tight and released before she half slid it under her plate, seal intact.
It was another letter from Percy. And like every other letter he’d sent his daughter these last six months, it had suffered the same fate of utter disregard. At least, outwardly. Inside, Lucy must feel pained and confused. But Olivia must wait for Lucy to broach the subject when she was ready.
Across the table, the Duke took his customary place. “I trust all is well with you this morning?”
“Thank you, Your Grace, all is well,” she replied, relieved by the welcome distraction of routine.
Lucy, familiar mischievous glint returned to her eye, reached out and lifted the London Diary from Olivia’s hands. “Let’s have a little gossip for breakfast, shall we?”
Olivia couldn’t resist an indulgent smile at her daughter. And judging by the smile tipping up the Duke’s lips as he perused his serious Morning Chronicle, neither could he. Doubt, subtle and sly, wormed its way into her goals for her future independence. The Duke doted on his granddaughter so . . . Wouldn’t it be easier to stay?
No. She couldn’t allow uncertainty to undermine her resolve.
“What have we here?” Lucy began, thumbing through the pages. “A few changes to Almack’s . . . Lady Jersey said . . . boring, boring, and more boring . . . Ah, this is a new feature,” she said, her tone growing bright. “It’s a haiku.” She cleared her throat before reading aloud:
Returned to Albion
How to Orient himself?
Breath held, ladies plot.
“Who could it be?” Lucy stared off into the distance, eyes narrowed.
The Right Honourable Jakob Radclyffe, Viscount St. Alban.
Olivia knew it instantly and with a certainty she would rather not consider. It hadn’t taken long for thinly veiled riddles about him to start popping up in the gossip rags now that he’d officially entered Society.
Two days, it turned out.
“Oh, I know,” Lucy cried out. “This must be the dashing new viscount everyone is talking about.”
“Everyone?” Olivia asked, unable to resist.
“Oh yes, everyone,” Lucy confirmed, but a faraway note sounded in her voice, indicating she’d lost interest in the subject.
Their dance with its talk of bodies, essences, and scents wedged itself into Olivia’s mind, softly insinuating that, indeed, everyone found Viscount St. Alban irresistible.
She gave herself a mental shake. The haiku was simply a few lines written in a rag. He was nothing to her.
A little more than nothing.
The memory she’d been suppressing since yesterday refused to be subdued any longer: her collision with him on Ludgate Hill as she’d been returning from Jiro’s studio. While she tried to dismiss it as mere curiosity—what had the dratted man been doing in the East End anyway?—her body overrode all the intellectual considerations she threw at it.
Perhaps the high drama of the moment explained her reaction. After all, the instant her footing had slipped out from beneath her, and her body had begun to fall backward into the street, the thought had flashed across her mind that it might be the end for her.
Instead of the inevitable impact of a horse’s hoof against her skull, she’d been snapped upright into full—there was no other word for it—carnal contact against Lord St. Alban, the insistent pressure of his body against hers. She’d only wanted to soften against the long, rigid length of him.
Oh. That wasn’t quite the correct way of putting it.
It was simply that over the last decade she’d forgotten the specific pressure of a man’s body clasped tight against hers. And Lord St. Alban’s body . . . It was best if she never considered the particulars of his body ever again.
She swallowed, hard. What was a lady’s proper reaction after having been snatched from the jaws of death supposed to be? Etiquette books offered no guidelines for that particular scenario.
A servant’s voice cut in. “Lord St. Alban has arrived, Your Grace.”
“Please show him into the room,” the Duke said without looking up from his newspaper.
Lucy’s face lit up, and she squealed. Olivia’s butter knife clattered onto her plate. Had her thoughts the power to conjure the dratted man out of thin air? She steadied her voice before asking, “Why is Lord St. Alban . . .” She stopped short. “Your protégé.”
Movement caught the corner of her eye, and her gaze swung over in time to watch Lord St. Alban stride through the doorway, looking every inch the noble lord from his hunter green cutaway coat to Wellington boots buffed to a mirror shine. He was the viscount of a young lady’s fantasies.
Of course, given the clamor surrounding his arrival at the Dowager’s Salon, it wasn’t only young ladies who fantasized about this particular lord. Everyone did.
Why did the thought unsettle her so?
“Speak of the devil,” the Duke said over his paper, an ironic twist to his mouth. “If it isn’t the most dashing viscount in London.”
Lord St. Alban’s brow lifted. It was possible he had the most handsome face she’d ever laid eyes on. From an artistic perspective, of course.
“Perhaps I’m interrupting . . .” he began.
“Nonsense,” the Duke dismissed, “I instructed the servants to bring you through.” He pushed away from the table and stood. “St. Alban, this is my very silly granddaughter, Miss Bretagne.” Lucy giggled. “And you’ve met Lady Olivia.”
St. Alban turned and found Olivia’s eyes. “My lady.”
Across the table strewn with various and sundry breakfast items, their gaze held, and Olivia’s heart accelerated as she returned a simple, “My lord.” It was all she could manage. For such a short acquaintance, they had certainly accumulated a fair amount of history between them.
“Now,” the Duke said, “if you will follow me to my study, we can converse about the only five matters a gentleman of means need attend to.” He held up his hand and ticked the items off, finger by finger. “Lords to befriend. Lords to avoid. The right tailor. The right club. And the right horse.”
The Duke strode out of the room, and St. Alban turned to follow his host, but not before casting one more glance in Olivia’s direction. The look was one part bemusement, one part curiosity, and wholly familiar. It struck her that she was beginning to be able to read the dashing viscount. How very disconcerting.
Then he was gone. Next, Lucy was pressing a good-bye kiss against Olivia’s cheek. “Drummond has brought the carriage around.”
Drummond was the Duke’s ancient, mostly retired valet who saw it as his sacred duty to escort Lucy to school every morning.
“I’ll see you later, my love,” Olivia said to Lucy’s retreating back. Like that, she was alone in the room. Life tended to happen fast around Lord St. Alban.
She’d vowed to leave that man in the past, which was, of course, an impossibility when he collided with her on fetid East End byways and arrived during breakfast for viscount lessons the next day. He wasn’t part of a past left behind and unbegun. In fact, with each passing day, their lives grew ever more entwined. How very curious.
She pushed away from the table and stood, intent on proceeding with her day. Her plan was to spend the morning salvaging her sketches, if they were salvageable. If not, she would return to Jiro’s studio tomorrow to begin a new set from the original paintings. Another example of the strange way this new viscount kept influencing and entangling himself in her life.
When she reached the doorway, her resolve faltered. To her left, lay a short series of hallways that led to her studio and the rest of her day. To her right, she picked up a low murmur of voices drifting from the Duke’s study. She supposed they were discussing one of five topics.
Of their own volition, her feet hooked a right. It would be only a minor detour.
As she drew level with the Duke’s study, his voice rang out, “Lady Olivia, my dear, can you answer us a question?”
She hesitated. They weren’t supposed to have noticed her. That wasn’t part of the plan. She should make an excuse and continue on her way. Yet her body continued moving forward, and she was inside the room in three steps.
The Duke turned to St. Alban. “You’re on Cleveland Row, you say?”
“Aye,” Lord St. Alban responded in the curt manner of a sailor, calling to Olivia’s mind the rumor that he’d been a ship captain.
“Then you’re all set with horses. The Russell Court Mews is just up the street from you. Mention my name, and you’ll find yourself the owner of a fine piece of horseflesh. Now, Olivia,” the Duke said as he pivoted toward her, “how many servants would suffice as the skeleton staff of a closed estate?”
“It depends on the estate, Your Grace.” She stepped deeper into the study, which smelled of old leather, rich mahogany, and earthy tobacco. “Is it a working agricultural estate with tenants and cattle? Or an ornamental estate with a grand house and nothing much else?” Keen awareness of Lord St. Alban’s steady gaze on her profile suffused her body, cell by cell. Why hadn’t she turned left and gotten on with her day? “Mrs. Landry might be a better source for the information you seek.”
“Excellent point, my dear,” said the Duke, already moving toward the door. “I haven’t yet had the bell in this room repaired. Keep the dashing viscount company while I seek out Mrs. Landry, will you?”
She responded with a gracious, “Of course.” One didn’t refuse the request of a duke lightly, except now . . . Only she and Lord St. Alban occupied this room.
The study, immense and airy with its floor-to-ceiling windows and vast swaths of uncluttered space, had ever been a place of refuge and safety where the mind could wander unfettered by concerns outside its four walls. But now it contracted into a tight cocoon, dense and close, as its rich woods and scent of earth turned stifling and dangerously intimate.
In desperate need of distraction, she skirted a leather chaise longue and made her way to the bookcase running the length of an adjacent wall. She pulled the first book at hand and set about feigning interest in a collection of Alexander Pope’s poetry. She abhorred Alexander Pope.
“Can you answer me one question?” Lord St. Alban asked from his place at the periphery of her vision.
“Possibly.” She kept her gaze fixed on the Pope as if riveted. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“Why does the Duke keep calling me ‘the dashing viscount’?”
Her eyes flew up to meet his bemused gaze, and a surprised chirrup of laughter escaped her. “I take it you don’t read the London Diary.”
“Never heard of it.”
“You may want to acquaint yourself with its pages. According to the London Diary, you are the most dashing viscount in all of London this Season. I suspect its readership agrees.”
“And are you counted amongst its readership?” he asked, his sharp focus pinning her into place.
“To my everlasting shame, I am,” Olivia said and stopped dead. She’d stumbled neck-deep into that one. Her cheeks flamed with sudden heat.
He cocked his head, and amusement warmed his pale, glacier blue eyes. “I must admit you fascinate me more with each passing day. Yet I know so little about you or your past.”
“My past has naught to do with you.”
He took a step closer, and she instinctively pressed back against the bookcase. She inhaled the huff of pique that wanted release. Such a reaction was so very silly of her. The man was all the way across the room.
“Perhaps,” he began, drawing out the word, “but I can’t help wondering what is true and what is false. Or should I look to the pages of the London Diary for my answer?”
“You will find no truth in those pages.”
“Then tell me the truth from your own lips.”
He was pushing her . . . why? She cleared her throat. “My past is just that . . . the past.” It was a weak response, but it would have to do. A stronger defense might further provoke his curiosity.
He nodded his acceptance, even though she sensed he wasn’t satisfied by her answer. He stepped forward, and her heart pitter-pattered in her chest. He was coming to join her at the bookcase. He moved with a fluidity unusual for a man of such great height, his body a vertical line of power and grace, mayhap a product of his years spent at sea.
“From what I’ve gathered,” he said, stopping one row of bookcases removed from her, “you’ve had two marriages?”
He’d drawn near, too near, and was distracting her from her purpose, which was to busily feign indifference to him “I can see how you might reach that conclusion, but, no, I’ve had only the one marriage.”
His brows creased together as he surely added one and one together and calculated two. “How is it possible? You are a widow and a divorcée.”
“I divorced the man who first made me a widow,” she replied in a matter-of-fact tone, thoroughly unmoved by the observation that his voice had become very like the consistency of crushed velvet.
“That seems . . . improbable.”
“Indeed.”
The silence that followed pulled taut, and he began scanning the book titles at his eye level before reaching up and running his fingertips across embossed leather spines. She followed their unhurried progress, and her mouth went dry as Saharan sand.
His hands were . . . gorgeous . . . and large. But it wasn’t just the size of them, it was the sheer capability of them. They’d saved her life. What more were they capable of?
Her body heated up by a degree.
His fingers hesitated on a title, tilted it, and slid it out. She watched, transfixed, as his forefinger rose to his lips and he touched tongue to its calloused tip. It dropped to the book and began ruffling through its pages. When had she last blinked?
By sheer strength of will, she tore her gaze away from him and swiveled around on a deep inhalation. How long had it been since she’d last drawn breath?
She’d allowed him to get too close to her. Close enough that she noticed his scent of cloves blending with the study’s aroma of cigar and earth. They combined to add a sweetness to the air. It was nice, if she was being honest.
Honesty was an overrated virtue.
She pretended indifference and meandered away from him, her heartbeat present and insistent. She’d never really noticed her heartbeat. A simple function that she took for granted every day, every moment of her life. Yet she was so very aware of its ceaseless pounding.
Because of him.
And his hands.
And his sweetish scent.
And the tip of his pink tongue.
What was keeping the Duke?
“At the Dowager’s Salon,” she heard behind her, “a few words were bandied about you. Unconventional. Bohemian.”
She placed a steadying hand on the elegant maple curve of the pianoforte and set the dreadful Pope onto its polished surface. Lord St. Alban’s serious, unrelenting gaze sent pinpricks of heat racing down her spine.
It unnerved her. It quickened her pulse.
“They would use those words about me.”
“Why is that?”
“For developing a different point of view.”
“That answer only purports to be an answer.”
She deserved that. She could remain silent and give him nothing more. He would deserve that. But she felt a strange urge to reveal more.
She steeled herself and faced him, her back against the pianoforte. “In the years between my widowhood and my divorce, I developed a most scandalous”—A hard edge of irony laced her tone—“interest in the arts.”
“As a patroness?” he asked. “Or an artist?”
“Both.”
He moved forward, again cutting the distance between them in half, a concentrated alertness about him. He was truly, intensely interested in this conversation. How very odd.
“About the sketches you dropped yesterday—”
“Oh? I don’t recall dropping any sketches, my lord,” she interrupted, drawing herself up to her fullest, primmest height. Her feet, at last, found firmer ground as she took refuge in self-righteousness, possibly her only escape from being swallowed whole by quicksand. “As I recall, they were knocked from my hands.”
“Are they ruined?”
“I’ll know later.”
“If they are, will you still have access to the originals?”
“Yes.”
He cleared his throat. “It must be unusual for such subject matter to be seen in London, much less strewn across a rank sidewalk.”
“I daresay, my lord.”
“Might I view the originals sometime?”
She detected a strange tentativeness not only in his voice, but in his entire demeanor, as a puzzling ribbon of tension twisted through the air between them. “That isn’t a request I can grant.”
“But you know who can?” he pressed. Was that a note of frustration in his voice?
Even across the colorful expanse of an intricately Aubusson carpet, she detected in his bearing a burning desire to have her reply. She opened her mouth and shut it. She would’ve never taken Lord St. Alban for an art lover. The sketches were part of a world that was hers alone, and she wasn’t about to share it with this man who was no longer a stranger, but not a friend either. A change of subject was in order. “I take it you’re unfamiliar with the running of English estates.”
A subtle, but distinct, flicker of dissatisfaction crossed his features. She might be developing too sharp a sensibility of the viscount, if she was able to gauge his moods by his facial expressions.
At last, he replied, “That’s correct. Life aboard a merchant vessel is simple. Buy, sell, trade, transport. Land in England, it seems, has none of those qualities.”
“Then the rumors are true?” she asked, unable to resist being drawn into this line of conversation, to know him better. “You captained a ship?”
He nodded. “My mother descended from a long line of Dutch traders, and my uncles were only too happy to show me the ropes. I took to it like a duck to water.”
An undeniable note of bitterness underlay his admission. A bitterness that spoke of a life lost, not one gained. She understood something essential to this man: he had no desire to be a viscount. He would be sailing a ship this very moment, experiencing the adventure such a life offered, if he had his way.
In its stead, he had London, a gray sort of life. While she experienced the vibrancy of London, she could understand that a man accustomed to sailing the seven seas would feel hemmed in by the city’s walls. Sympathy for him stabbed through her. She knew what it was to have one life suddenly end and another begin without asking for permission.
“I can see how the lure of freedom and adventure would be impossible to resist,” she said.
“Not impossible.”
A wry smile curled about his lips, and she intuited his meaning. He was here, a viscount, in England. Not impossible.
She followed his lead and tried to lighten the mood. “And now you’re learning how to be quite the conventional viscount?”
“Oh, yes, quite. Complete with club memberships, fine horseflesh, and a proper wife.”
Wife. The word, like the prick of a needle, shocked Olivia upright. “A wife?”
“Really, a stepmother for my daughter.”
“A stepmother for your daughter is a wife to you.” The seed of an unwanted emotion sprouted open within Olivia, and she tamped it down. She wouldn’t give it water or light to grow. How entirely inappropriate, silly even, to feel jealousy over a man who wasn’t and never would be hers.
“I haven’t given that part much thought, to be honest. It could be a matter of semantics.”
“Hardly.”
“Well, the Dowager has a great number of proper candidates.”
There was another word. Proper. “I’m sure she does.”
Olivia fixed her attention on smudging out a fingerprint, likely her own, on the shiny finish of the pianoforte. Why did her tone have to sound so pettish? What was Lord St. Alban’s proper wife hunt to her anyway?
The Duke strode into the room with the housekeeper, who looked flustered, flattered, and delighted all at once, and spared Olivia from having to consider an answer. “The most capable Mrs. Landry has the answers to all our questions,” the Duke announced. As if he’d only just registered the positioning of Olivia and Lord St. Alban, his gaze darted back and forth between them. “Have I interrupted something?”
“Your timing couldn’t be better,” Olivia said, perhaps too fast on a wave of relief. “I need to get on with my day before it gets away from me.”
She pushed herself off the pianoforte and neatly sidestepped the towering Lord St. Alban—and his gorgeous, capable hands. She crossed the room to land a quick kiss on the Duke’s cheek. Without another glance toward Lord St. Alban, she fled the room in a graceless exit, if ever there was one.
Her heels clicking across gleaming white marble, she gave her head a tiny shake. The sanctuary of her studio lay ahead. She tethered the dashing and problematic Lord St. Alban to the far reaches of her mind.
Where he belonged.