Royal Regard (26 page)

As he reached her lobe, tugging gently, he
asked, “You have said you will do anything for me,
n’est-ce
pas
?” He removed his hand from her mouth so she could
answer.

Breath wispy, she agreed, “
Oui,
Monseigneur
, anything you ask.”

He increased the pressure of his hand between
her legs and quickened the rhythm, sliding two fingers inside and
pressing his thumb against her tender bud, until she was moaning in
earnest, twisting her head back and forth on the pillow. The bed
shook.

“Show me.” Pulling away, leaving her
whimpering, he fell back onto his pillows, hand pushing her head
down to his burgeoning shaft. “If your mouth is the very best I
have ever had,
ma chère
, I will give you what you so desire
before I go back to Town in the morning.” He stroked her cheek with
one hand and hair with the other.

“Now, suck my cock while I tell you what we
are going to do.”

“It is absolutely outrageous!
Ridiculous!” Bella’s shrill voice echoed in the small hothouse in
her Russell Square garden. Her speech was rapid, face red, not
blushing prettily. “I will not stand for it!”

Situations of this type were the primary
reason Nick discouraged intimacy with women. He had never heard an
animal howl in as much rage as this, nor had he ever been so afraid
of one’s bite. The sweat breaking out on his forehead had little to
do with the sun beating down through the glass walls.

He had thought he was doing a masterful job
expressing Myron’s proposition, enumerating every benefit,
explaining why it should please her, and making her eager for the
alliance.

“You must understand, my sweet, there are
many dastardly men who may attempt subterfuge in pursuit of the
fortune Huntleigh will leave. Under my protection, your money can
be managed entirely to your benefit.”

So,” she said slowly, “you believe no
gentleman might choose to pursue me out of interest in my
person?”

He sidestepped that cannon blast: “No,
darling, that’s not it at all. You are well worth the effort a man
might put into knowing you. I only mean… well… your husband and I
think it best to have your interests firmly in hand before such an
occasion should present itself. Merely as a precaution against
anyone with less-than-honorable intentions.” He nodded his head
firmly, sure he had now explained to everyone’s satisfaction, and
certain there was no way she could argue.

Her sweet smile seemed almost grateful. “The
two of you think it best?”

His deep sigh echoed with profound relief at
her instant understanding. “Yes, we do. And you needn’t be
concerned for your place in society. You will be a duchess, my
dear, and may do anything you like, short of murder. You can
entertain any way you like—or not at all—wear anything you like.
You will set fashions every time you hire a dressmaker. I shall
open Wellstone if you prefer it, so you may abandon London.
Anything you’d like, sweeting. Anything you choose.”

Her head tilted. “As long as I first choose
to marry you.”

“Well… yes. That is the plan we are
proposing.”

“
We
, meaning you and my husband, who
think it best?”

His shoulders tensed. Something was very
wrong. “Yes?”

Then, the awful tirade began.

Bella threw a trowel onto a worktable so hard
the recoil broke a clay pot. “I am not a commodity, Wellbridge, and
this is not an Arabian bazaar where one can sell a woman for
sixpence!”

“We both know a woman costs more than
sixpence at an Arabian bazaar,” Nick said, trying to tease her. He
reached out to gently touch her face, but she literally snapped her
teeth before he snatched his finger away. Then, like a simpleton,
he compounded his mistake. “One with hair and eyes like yours must
be worth at least ten riyals. Plus a camel and a herd of
goats.”

Her hand shot like a musket ball into his
shoulder. Arms flailing for a handhold, his feet went right out
from under him, dumping him gracelessly and painfully on his
behind, legs sprawled on the tiled floor. Next to him, on top of a
pile of broken pottery and loam, sat a crumpled and pungent
rosemary shrub he had dragged off the table on his way down.
Examining the punctures and scrapes on one hand, rubbing his hip
with the other, he stretched to ease the bruise he would have by
nightfall, finally kneeling to right himself.

She looked down her nose at his indignity,
then swept past to the greenhouse entrance. By the time he regained
his feet to follow, he found his nose flattened against the glass
in the slammed door. Once steady on the gravel path around the rose
bushes, she was only a few steps from the morning room door. When
he tried the latch, the lock turned and the curtain dropped across
the diamond-paned windows.

He banged on the door with his fist, rattling
the glass: “Bella! Open the door! Let me explain!” He watched her
shadow disappear behind the sheer curtain and cursed, “Demme,
Bella! It wasn’t even my idea!”

He slammed his hand against the door jamb one
last time purely to channel a bit more ire, then turned to leave,
assuming he might have to jump over the wall to get to the street
from the back garden, and would ruin his clothes in the ivy doing
so. Before he could identify the lowest point over which to vault
himself, the glass door reopened. He turned back, ready to fall on
his knees and beg forgiveness if it would end the harangue until he
could marshal better arguments.

Bella’s husband sighed as he shut the door
gently, then motioned Nick to a cast-iron bench underneath a beech
tree. Huntleigh sat awkwardly, leaning his cane against the tree,
stretching out his bad leg before him, heel cradled in soft dirt
and thick grass.

“I’m sorry for the scene, Wellbridge. I
should never have agreed to let you initiate the conversation. I
know better.”

Nick sat heavily on the bench, sodden as a
sack of parboiled beans. “It’s my fault. I talked about fortune
hunters and financial arrangements and the advantages afforded a
duchess until she wanted to dispatch me herself.” He should have
said something about lo—affection.
Affection isn’t even a
falsehood
, he thought.

“Yes, I was listening from the library.
Remarkably dim-witted for a man of your intelligence. ‘Your husband
and I think it best’ was a dreadful turn of phrase, which I suggest
you never repeat in the hearing of any woman.”

Nick brushed dirt from his sleeve and left a
thumbprint on his cuff trying to remove a spot. “Thank you so much
for your thrice-damned opinion, Huntleigh. Quite helpful at this
juncture, of course.” If he tugged at his jacket much harder, he
would tear the stitches, and the roiling of his tensed shoulders
threatened to make short work of Weston’s tailoring.

Inveterate pacing threatened to flatten the
grass alongside three boxes of the nasturtiums, edging the roses
acquired from the king’s garden. The roses that had, each and every
one, left bloody thorn wounds in various locales on his person. His
fingers, running unevenly through his hair to avoid going anywhere
near a rose bush, dislodged the riband holding the blond length off
his face.

“Damn and blast!” He threw the errant cord
onto the garden path, then kicked it under a rosebush like a wild
dog trying to bite him. “What do I do now, Huntleigh? Wait for her
to serve my proposal to me for supper?”

As he turned, his tails caught on a thorn,
ripping the fabric and almost pulling the bush from its
moorings.

“She’s already done that,” Huntleigh
chortled, “or were you not paying attention?”

Unhooking the thorns from his coat, he
crouched down to make sure the shrub’s roots stayed well buried.
The last thing he needed now was to destroy one of the new roses.
As he leaned forward, a thorn dragged across his cheekbone and
would have put out his eye, had he not yanked himself away, lost
his balance, and fallen on his backside again.

This attempt to remain upright ended in a
yelp, as he snatched at one of the spiky branches. The plant barely
survived the episode, but his palm and cuff did not, both now
covered in blood. “Heavens to Hellfire!” He was forty years too old
to be sprawled across the garden with scraped hands and a bruised
posterior.

As Nick dragged himself to his feet twice in
a quarter-hour, this time much the worse for wear, he snapped, “If
you have nothing useful to say, you can bloody well go back
inside.”

Huntleigh laid his cane across the bench,
turning the silver globe handle between his palm and thigh. “What
shall I say, Wellbridge? You are the master of seducing men’s
wives, not I. By all accounts, you should be better at handling
her.”

“Handling her?
Handling her?”
Nick
stopped his pacing to kick the bench. “Can
you
jolly well
handle
her?”

“I can.”

His toe recoiled against the ironwork. “The
Devil you can!” He hopped a few times on the foot he hadn’t just
wrecked, and almost fell into Bella’s experimental seedbed, quite
the worst plants in the garden to crush. Huntleigh half-stood on
his bad leg to snatch Nick away from that horrifying
consequence.

Once Nick had his balance and Huntleigh fell
back into his seat, the old man stunned the younger with a look
more fatherly than ten combined fathers.

“Of course, I am old enough to be her
grandfather, and she responds as such. When I tell her to control
her temper, she does so, as I can tell you to restrain your
language, and you will. You will never have that luxury with her,
so you had better find another way. Now sit, before you kill one of
her plants and are forced to explain that, too.”

Nick dropped onto the bench. “I’m sorry,
Huntleigh. Insufferable to storm around your garden screaming like
a madman.”

“Indeed. Now, if you intend to act more
reasonably, we can adjourn to my study and discuss the best course
of action while you have a drink or two.”

“Or ten.”

“Or ten,” Huntleigh agreed as he pulled
himself up. Refusing Nick’s arm, he leaned heavily on his walking
stick. “I am sure Bella is in her sitting room cursing us both
roundly by now, so you should be safe walking upstairs in my
company.” Huntleigh laughed wryly, “If need be, you may hide behind
me, and I shall protect you from anything she might hurl at
you.”

“Bloody Hell,” Nick sighed.

Bella had been pacing her sitting
room so long she was surprised there were no holes through the new
Turkish carpet. The lovely, finally finished room, which had
brought her so much joy until she faced more pressing concerns,
might as well have been invisible.

Charlotte had tried to distract her cousin
from the frustrated anger by complimenting the moss-green walls and
silver gilt accents, making much of the tapestry-covered Robert
Adam chairs that had replaced the fussy French rococo. For the last
half-hour, though, she had been playing Patience at Bella’s
roll-top desk, the shuffling of cards playing counterpoint to the
raindrops running down the window, the tapping of her fingernails
on the table keeping the rhythm of Bella’s mad ranting.

“They are monsters! Expecting me to do their
bidding because I am a weak-minded woman and they the wise,
all-knowing gentlemen. Gentlemen! Ha! Gentlemen do not sell their
wives! I am no longer a child to be given to some man to line my
father’s pockets!”

Frowning at the mention of Uncle Jasper,
Charlotte simply let Bella’s bluster continue. After her last run
of three turned up no new cards, Charlotte peeked at the hidden
stack. Disappointed to find none to complete a row, she gathered up
the deck to start again, shuffling it loosely through her
fingers.

“Of course you are not a child. But ladies do
not gainsay their husbands, and you are a lady, no matter how much
you screech. Myron is right. You could do much worse than
Wellbridge.”