Don't Tempt Me (3 page)

“To offend certain gentlemen is to commit social suicide. Someone like Mr. Brummell is required: a truly fashionable gentleman whose appearance—even if it is only for ten minutes—determines the success of a gathering.”

Silence again while the sisters pondered.

A moment later:

“Still, he must stand
very
high. Lady Holland is not invited anywhere because she's a divorcée.”

“Lord Holland is a baron. Not nearly high enough.”

“How high must the rank be?” said Zoe.

“It's out of the question,” Augusta said impatiently. “We waste our time cudgeling our brains. Of the few noblemen of sufficiently high rank, nearly all are married.”

“How many are not?” Zoe said.

Dorothea counted on her plump, be-ringed fingers. “Three dukes. No, four.”

“One marquess,” said Priscilla. “That is not counting the courtesy titles. Ought we to count those?”

“It is an exercise in futility to even contemplate such a thing,” said Augusta.

“In the first place, how would one of these gentlemen meet her, when no one will invite her to a gathering?” said Gertrude.

Augusta and Gertrude had always been the killjoys.

“Oh, dear,” said Priscilla.

“Even if they could be made to meet her, it's out of the question.”

“You're quite right, Augusta. She, a woman of four and twenty—who's lived in a
harem
, who may or may not have been married to a Mohammedan person,
who cannot speak proper English, and has no notion of what is and is not a fit topic of conversation?”

Zoe had found out that one was not allowed to mention a great many subjects: certain body parts, pleasuring oneself, pleasuring another, desire, impotence, concubines, eunuchs…

The list went on to infinity. She was competent and intelligent, but in this environment she was still too much at sea. She'd recovered her English during the journey home. In coming home, though, she'd entered a world as alien as the harem had been at first. Precious little of what she'd been taught up to the age of twelve had stuck in her brain as well as her native language had done.

“She can learn,” Papa said. “Zoe always was a clever girl.”

“She hasn't time to learn,” said Gertrude. “Papa, if you would only put your parental affection aside—”

“I hope I should never do so.”

“That is a worthy hope, I am sure, Papa,” said Augusta. “But the difficulty is, it prevents your viewing the matter objectively. What nobleman, I ask you, would want Zoe when he might have a fresh, young,
innocent
bride of eighteen or nineteen?”

The door to the small drawing room opened.

“His Grace the Duke of Marchmont,” the butler announced.

As he usually did upon entering a room, Marchmont paused to size up the situation. Even now, after the bottle or two or three, his gaze was not as sleepy as it appeared to be.

He saw:

1. Lexham standing in front of the fire, looking ready to tear his hair out.
   
2. Lady Lexham fluttering upon the chaise longue, in her best dying moth imitation.
   
3. At the large central table, the four married Lexham daughters, all in black, a color particularly depressing in women of their complexion. As usual, the two eldest appeared to suffer from an ob
   struction of the bowels. As usual, the two younger ones suffered the consequences of a lively conjugal life. They looked ready to drop brats any minute now—twins or ponies, judging by their circumference.
   
4. and at the window…
   

A girl with golden hair and startled blue eyes, the bluest eyes in all the world, set in a heart-shaped face, all creamy white and pink…

That was as far as Marchmont got. He was aware of his own eyes widening and a curious galloping sensation in his chest and a feeling of being set on fire, then thrown into a deep pool of water. He was equally aware of the way the pink in her cheeks deepened and the way her shoulders went back while he stared and the way the movement drew his attention downward to a figure with the elegant curves of a statue of Venus he'd seen somewhere or other.

All of this happened so quickly that it disrupted the already uncertain connection between his tongue and his brain. Even at the best of times, he might speak first and think later. At present, thanks to the bottle or two or three, his mind was in a thickish haze.

He said, “Ye gods, it's true. That dreadful girl is back.”

“Marchmont.”

The masculine voice uttering his name in a familiar,
patient tone made him blink. He climbed out of the very deep pool and into the present. He tore his gaze from the girl and aimed it at his former guardian.

Lexham's expression had changed to one all too recognizable: a mixture of exasperation and affection and something else the Duke of Marchmont chose not to put a name to.

“Thank you, sir, I should indeed like a glass—or ten—of something,” Marchmont said, though he knew perfectly well that Lexham was not offering a drink. The duke recognized all of his former guardian's tones of voice. When he said “Marchmont” in that way, it meant,
Recollect your manners, sir.

Nonetheless, His Grace persisted, as he often did, in willfully misunderstanding. “Something strong, I think,” he went on. “I find myself in need of a bracer.”

Zoe.
Here. Alive. It wasn't possible. Yet it must be, because there she was.

He looked at her again.

She looked right back at him, up and down, down and up.

The back of his neck prickled. He was used to women eyeing him. This sort of survey usually occurred, however, in gatherings of the demimonde or in a private corner of an ostensibly respectable social event. It did not happen in the open in an unquestionably respectable domestic setting.

He was not disconcerted. Nothing disconcerted him. Disoriented was more like it. Perhaps he should have had a little less to drink before coming here. Or perhaps he hadn't had enough.

“But of course you want something to steady your
nerves, dear,” said Lady Lexham. “I fainted dead away when I saw our Zoe.”

This didn't surprise him. The calamity of twelve years ago had sent Lady Lexham into a dangerous decline. While she did recover physically, she did not recover the steadiness and strength of mind she'd once possessed, though he was not sure she'd ever possessed great stores of either quality. These days her ladyship spent much of her time agitated, swooning, or trembling—sometimes all three at once.

At the moment, he himself felt oddly light-headed. “Zoe, indeed,” he said. “So it is.”

He made himself meet the assessing blue gaze again.

The girl smiled.

It was and it wasn't Zoe's smile, and for some reason the image of a crocodile came into his mind.

“And now I've lost a thousand pounds,” he went on, “for I made sure I'd find another Princess Caraboo in your drawing room.”

“Good grief!” cried one of the sisters.

“Is that what they're saying?” said another.

“What would you expect?”

“I daresay it isn't the worst of the rumors.”

Marchmont's gaze swung toward the Four Harridans of the Apocalypse.

“You ought to see the satirical prints,” he said. “Most…inventive.”

“You needn't rub it in.”

“You find it all hilarious, I don't doubt.”

“If you'd been harried from pillar to post, as we have been—”

“Don't waste your breath. He—”

“You are a duke,” came a feminine voice that didn't belong to any of them. It was like theirs but different.

Marchmont turned away from the Matrons of Doom and toward the girl at the window: the girl who was and wasn't the Zoe he'd known so long ago.

She had risen from the chair. Her deep red cashmere shawl set off handsomely the pale green frock and was draped in a way that perfectly framed her figure. The high-necked frock's narrow bodice outlined an agreeably rounded bosom. The fall of the skirt told him her waist was smallish and her hips full. She seemed taller than her sisters, though it was hard to be sure, given that two of them had expanded so much horizontally, and all four of them were seated.

In any event, she was not a pocket Venus by any means but a full-sized model.

Her potently blue eyes held a speculative glint. Or was he imagining that? His vision was in good order. He had no trouble focusing. His brain, on the other hand, was unusually sluggish.

“You speak English,” he said. “More or less.”

“It was much less at first,” she said. “Lord Winterton hired a companion and a maid for me. They couldn't speak Arabic. No one else but he could, and he would not. For all the journey home, I had to speak English. And it came back.” She tipped her head to one side, studying his face as though it, too, were a forgotten language. “I remember you.”

In the voice that was like and unlike her sisters' he detected no trace of anything one might call a foreign accent. Yet she spoke with a lilt that made the sound exotic. It was a voice with shadows and soft edges.

“I should hope so,” he said. “You tried to kill me with a cricket bat once.”

She nodded. “I went round and round, then I fell on my bottom. You laughed so hard you fell down.”

“Did I?” He remembered all too clearly. The mental cupboard would not stay closed.

“I remembered that while I was away,” she continued. “I often pictured you falling down laughing, and the recollection cheered me.” She paused. “But you are…different.”

“So are you.”

“And you are a duke.”

“Have been for some time,” he said. “Since before you went away.” Forever. She'd gone away forever. But she was back. He knew her, yet she was a stranger. The world was not altogether in balance.

She nodded, her smile fading. “I recall. Your brother. It was very sad.”

Sad. Was that the word?

It was in the way she said it. He heard a world of sorrow in that word. He remembered how she'd wept and how shocked he'd been, because Zoe Octavia never wept. And that had somehow made his own grief all the more unbearable.

“It was a long time ago,” he said.

“Not to me,” she said. “I crossed seas, and it was like crossing years. To everyone it must seem as though I have come back from the dead. If only I had done so in truth, I might have brought your brother with me.”

One devastating moment of shock, a sting within as of a wound opening—but then:

“Good heavens, Zoe!” a sister cried.

“Pay her no heed, Marchmont,” said another. “She
has acquired the oddest notions in that heathenish place.”

“What does he care? Blasphemy is nothing to him.”

“That doesn't mean one ought to encourage her.”

“One oughtn't to encourage
him
, either.”

“But I must speak to him,” the girl said. “He is a duke. It is a very high rank. You spoke of dukes and marquesses. Will he not do?”

A collective gasp from the harridans.

“Do for what?” he said. The wound, if wound it had been, vanished from his awareness. He glanced from sister to sister. They all looked as though someone had shouted, “Fire!”

The intensely blue gaze came back to him. “Are you wed, Lord Marchmont?”

“‘Your Grace,'” Dorothea hastily corrected. “One addresses him as ‘Duke,' or ‘Your Grace.'”

“Oh, yes, I remember. Your Grace—”

“Zoe, I must speak to you privately,” said Priscilla.

Marchmont frowned at Priscilla before reverting to the youngest sister. “
Marchmont
will do,” he told the girl who was and wasn't Zoe.

Part of his brain said this was the same girl who once tried to injure him with a cricket bat, who climbed trees and rooftops like a monkey and fell into fish ponds and wanted to learn gamekeeping and blacksmithing and was so often found playing in the dirt with the village children.

But she wasn't the same. She'd grown up, that was all, he told himself. And she'd done a first-rate job of it, as far as he could see.

Since the others so obviously wished to stifle her, he decided to encourage her. “You were saying?”

“Have you any wives, Marchmont?” she said.

“Oh, my goodness,” said one harridan.

“I can't believe it,” said another.

“Zoe, I beg you,” said another.

Marchmont looked about him. The sisters were undergoing spasms of some kind. Lexham had turned away to study the fire, as he usually did when considering a problem.

Marchmont shook his head. “Not a one.”

The others started talking at Zoe all at once. A lot of
shush
ing and “Don't” and “Please don't” and “I hope you are not thinking” this or that.

Even had he been thoroughly sober, the Duke of Marchmont could not have guessed what they were about. This was nothing new. It would not be the first time he'd interrupted one of their incomprehensible family squabbles. It certainly wouldn't be the first time they promptly recommenced while he was there. After all, they did regard him as a member of the family, which meant they felt as free to abuse him as they did one another.

He crossed to the table, where a decanter sat untouched, surrounded by wineglasses. He might as well have a drink while he watched the entertainment.

He had lifted decanter and glass and was about to pour when her voice, with its exotic lilt, rose above the rest.

“Marchmont, will you please marry me?” she said.

 

Mama let out a little scream.

Gertrude leapt up from her chair and tried to drag Zoe out of the room. Zoe broke away from her and moved closer to her father.

“A duke, you said,” she told her sisters. “Or a marquess.
He
is a duke. He has no wives. Wife,” she quickly amended. In England, it was only one wife to a man, she reminded herself.

“You don't simply offer yourself to the first nobleman who walks through the door,” said Dorothea.

“But you said the dukes and marquesses would not come to us,” said Zoe.

“I'm afraid to imagine what will be said about this,” said Priscilla.

“You said I could not hope to meet such men,” said Zoe. “But here is one.” And she wasn't about to let him get away if she could help it.

“Ooooh,” said Mama. She fell back upon the pillows.

“Look what you've done to Mama!”

“The girl is hopeless.”

“Of course he'll tell all his friends.”

“Papa, do something!” Gertrude cried as she flung herself into her chair.

Papa only looked briefly over his shoulder, his glance going from Zoe to the tall, fair-haired, shockingly handsome man with the decanter and glass in his long-fingered hands. The Duke of Marchmont's beautifully shaped mouth had fallen open. His eyes had widened slightly.

As she watched, he closed his mouth and shuttered his eyes again.

She'd seen those stunningly green eyes wide open, for one dizzying heartbeat in time, when they'd first lit on her. The impact had nearly toppled her from her chair. She'd felt for a moment like the little girl spinning helplessly until landing on her bottom on a muddy patch of grass.

“I cannot wait,” she said. “Marchmont, you are the highest of rank here. Tell them to be silent and let me speak.”

“We shall never live this down,” Augusta said. “What a tale he'll have for his friends at White's.”

Marchmont slowly filled his glass. When that was done, he said, “I must have heard aright, else your sisters would not be shrieking at quite that pitch. You have asked me to marry you. Is that correct, Miss Lexham?”

The last time her heart had pounded so hard was on the day she'd fled the palace of Yusri Pasha and found the gates of the European quarter closed to her. Then she'd been terrified of what would happen to her if she was caught.

Yet she'd been exhilarated, too, to risk everything in one desperate bid for freedom.

This appeared to be her only chance to live the life for which she'd taken that desperate risk.

However grand his rank or handsome his face or splendid his physique, this was still a man, she told herself. Though he hid his eyes, she knew he was mentally taking off her clothes and liked what he saw. She felt, rather than saw, the slight tension in his posture: the alertness of the predator when it marks its prey.

A harem slave would be tearing off her garments about now.

Zoe knew she could not entice him in that way. Not here, at any rate. Not now. She must appeal to him from mind to mind. It must be business. The way men did it.