Wicked Becomes You (18 page)

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.”