Scandal of the Year (17 page)

“And if I do manage that monumental feat, what do I receive in return?”

“Crowing rights?”

She smiled sweetly. “Not good enough. You will agree to dance at least one waltz with each of the beautiful, charming, potential duchesses I’ve selected for you to meet. All six of them, including Lady Frances and Miss Heyer. And you’ll promise me, on your word of honor, to keep an open mind about them.”

He didn’t even hesitate. “Done.” He downed the last of his port and set the glass on the table. “Midnight,” he reminded, turning away. “Don’t be late.”

Aidan waited for her in the center of the maze, trying not to pace amid the ornamental pieces of Danbury’s medieval lawn chess set. It was a glorious night, warm for May, and the strains of piano music and the sound of laughter drifted through the open windows of the house and down to where he sat. The moon was full and bright, and the knee-high granite sculptures scattered around him cast distorted shadows of knights and castles across a chessboard of turf and flagstone squares. He studied the chess pieces as he waited, feeling rather at a loss regarding his own next move.

It was a strange thing, but though he was thirty years old, he’d never actually had to seduce a woman before, and he had absolutely no idea how he was going to set about it. Worse, challenging her to meet him for a midnight rendezvous had been a spur of the moment impulse, and he was not a man given to impulsive things. And just the thought of seducing her, of being able to relive at least some of those tantalizing moments last year, was sending renewed lust through his body that he wasn’t absolutely certain he could contain.

She would come. He knew that. It wasn’t the arrogance of which she had accused him that made him confident. Julia, he felt certain, would never run away from a challenge like the one he’d thrown down a few hours ago. She might laugh in his face or act cold as a stone, but she’d come. He knew that as surely as he knew anything.

What he didn’t know, and what he should have had the wits to foresee, was that she would not come without reinforcements.

“Spike?” He stared in disbelief at the fat bulldog that trotted into the center of the maze with Julia several minutes past midnight. “You brought Spike with you?”

She laughed, flashing an impudent smile at him in the moonlight. “You didn’t say I couldn’t.”

“No,” he conceded wryly, “I didn’t. I should have, but I’m afraid I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. You’ve outwitted me there. I admit it.”

What he didn’t say was that he had no intention of allowing something as inconsequential as an overfed bulldog with delusions of grandeur to stop him now, but when he took a step toward her, the overfed bulldog in question growled in a very menacing fashion.

“This is hardly fair,” he said as he took another step and earned another warning from the animal by her side.

“If fairness were on your mind, you wouldn’t be trying to seduce your secretary,” she pointed out, her smile widening. “You’d have allowed her to perform the duties you hired her for and never suggested a midnight rendezvous in the maze.”

“Point taken, and you needn’t smirk, Julia. You haven’t won yet. In fact, with Spike here, how do you expect to prove anything? Best if you tie him.”

“Not a chance.” But she glanced at the dog, and seemed to decide on a compromise. “Sit,” she ordered.

Spike planted his bum on the turf at once, but his square head moved watchfully back and forth between her and the distrusted man nearby.

“Satisfied?” she asked, looking at him again.

“Not nearly.” Aidan resumed walking toward her, but he kept one eye on Spike, well aware that a protective dog was not a thing to take lightly. Still, as he came closer, he noted that Spike wasn’t baring teeth, and when faced with his direct stare, the animal looked away. Those, he knew, were very good indications that he could gain the upper hand.

He halted in front of her. He leaned closer, but once again, he was stopped by a growl of warning from Spike. “Are you going to do something about this animal of yours?” he murmured, his lips an inch from hers.

She smiled, seeming confident she was the one with the upper hand just now. “What would you suggest?”

“Shooting’s out of the question, I suppose?” His gaze slid down for another quick look at the bulldog as he leaned even closer to Julia, and when Spike growled again, he was ready.

With a savage sound that caused Julia to jump back in alarm, Aidan moved. Within the blink of an eye, he’d taken Spike by the muzzle and hip and pushed him down onto his side in the grass, and using his superior body weight, he kept the animal firmly pinned. “No,” he said in a calm, firm voice. “No, Spike.”

The dog whined in protest at this unexpected challenge and wriggled fiercely, trying to extricate himself from Aidan’s hold. Aidan, however, didn’t move and didn’t relax, and after several minutes of futile struggle, Spike’s whines lessened, and his efforts to get away became halfhearted. At last, he went completely quiet and still. Aidan waited a bit longer to be sure he’d established his dominance, and then he relented.

“Good boy,” Aidan said and stood up, letting go of the animal, but holding on to the leash and watching for any sign of aggression.

There was none. The dog stood there, quiet and calm, looking at him, then looking away. When Aidan gave the leash a gentle tug and started walking, the animal followed him. He glanced around at the chess pieces scattered about and looped the handle of the leash around one of the crenellations along the top edge of a rook. “Now,” he murmured, returning his attention to her, “where were we?”

Chapter Fourteen

J
ulia’s confidence that this midnight rendezvous was within her control went from reasonably high to dismally low in about three seconds, the exact amount of time it had taken Aidan to make a snarling sound meaner than any dog she’d ever heard and toss her beloved Spike down to the turf.

A few minutes later, the dog she’d bought because it hated men—her loathsome former husband in particular—was docile as a lamb and safely leashed, and she was beginning to fear she’d made a big mistake in coming here at all. When Aidan began walking back toward her, she had to fight the impulse to run away.

She’d been prepared to let him kiss her. She’d come expecting that, knowing the only way she could put an end to this idea he had in his head was to prove she didn’t want him by being unaffected by his attempts at seduction. Bringing Spike with her had been a whim, the sort of joke that appealed to her mischievous side, and the look on his face, a rather charming combination of humor and chagrin, had made the joke worthwhile. He did know how to make her laugh, she had to admit, usually when he wasn’t trying. But now, with Spike leashed to a granite sculpture and Aidan walking toward her, his expression much more serious and purposeful than before, she wasn’t laughing, and the closer he came, the more her confidence deteriorated.

She tried to remind herself that she was on familiar ground here. She’d kissed him before, quite a few times, in fact, that afternoon last August, so it wasn’t as if there were any surprises in store.

But she couldn’t deny that she’d developed a strange, most inconvenient nervousness around him during the past few days. As he halted in front of her, as she saw his thick brown lashes lower a fraction, as she realized he was thinking erotic things about her and what they had done that afternoon ten months ago, that nervousness flared up, and she forced herself to speak.

“Where did you learn to do that?” she asked. “What you did with Spike. I’ve never seen anyone do that to a dog before.”

“My father had mastiffs and Alsatians, and I learned as a boy how to deal with aggressive dogs. The best thing, of course, is to steer clear, since a dog bite can be quite serious. But in this case, I felt establishing my dominance was a better course of action.”

He took another step closer, and she reacted without thinking, stepping back, but when she hit the tall boxwood hedge behind her and she could retreat no further, panic rose up, panic that was vastly out of proportion to the circumstances. “Is that what this is about then?” she asked, giving him a challenging look. “Shall you be attempting to exert dominance over me?”

“Over you?” He laughed, seeming genuinely amused by the notion. “That would be like trying to hold on to a running stream of water.”

Something in her relaxed, and she let out a long, slow breath. “Oh.”

He caught that faint sigh of relief, and he tilted his head to one side, seeming puzzled by it. “I did what I did with Spike simply because I didn’t want him to sink his teeth into my leg at an inopportune moment.” He leaned down as if to take her hand, his puzzlement deepening when she stupidly jerked away. He straightened. “Are you nervous?”

“Me?” The question came out in a squeak—worthy of Felicia Vale, she thought in disgust. Her hands curled into fists, but she strove to speak in a natural way. “I’m not nervous at all. Why do you ask?”

He leaned down again, and this time, she let him clasp his hand round her wrist. “I only ask,” he said, as he lifted her hand in the air, “because you’re clenching your fists, and that’s usually a sign of either anger or nervousness. I hope it’s nervousness, because anger, I fear, would put a damper on our evening.”

“I’m not angry,” she said, and made a concerted effort to relax her hands. “And I’m not nervous. What do I have to be nervous about?”

He met her eyes. “Nothing,” he said, entwining their fingers, “unless you don’t know how to waltz.”

She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“Waltz.” He nodded in the direction of the house. “Can’t you hear it? Strauss’s Blue Danube. I’m asking you to dance.”

“Oh.” She cocked her head and heard the sound of the piano. “It’s not very impressive without the violins, is it?”

“A bit tinny, perhaps,” he agreed, “but good enough.” He put his right hand on her waist and began to sway. “And one and two and three.”

As they began to waltz, he said, “I want you to know that this is a very unusual situation for me. I don’t usually like to dance. Most of the time, I’d prefer to be stuffed with nails and rolled down a hill.”

She laughed at his wry tone, but she couldn’t help noticing that he guided her across the grass in perfect steps. “But you dance beautifully! Why don’t you like it?”

“Too many boyhood sessions of practice with my mother. Every step had to be perfect, you see, every move exactly proper, every figure executed just right. Over and over and over. Had she not been a duchess, my mother could have been an army general.”

“Your mother taught you to dance?”

“Well, my tutor couldn’t do it,” he answered with a touch of humor. “Herr Brunner was this old German fellow, very stout. He always trod on my feet.”

“You couldn’t take lessons with the other local children?”

“God, no! My mother and father would have been horrified by such a prospect. Future dukes,” he told her, “don’t associate with the lesser mortals unless and until absolutely necessary. No, until I was twelve and sent away to school, I was taught at home, in splendid, ducal isolation.”

She caught the bitter undertone of his voice. “That must have been lonely.”

His mouth tightened and he looked away. “It was hell.”

She studied his profile in the moonlight as he swirled her around the fountain, their footsteps swishing on the grass in time with the faint, tinny notes, his body leading hers with effortless ease. She imagined what life must have been like for him, a boy prevented from having either friends or amusements, for whom even dancing was turned into an exercise in discipline. “Going away to school must have been a godsend.”

He chuckled. “Not at first. I felt terribly awkward, and I was shy, to boot. I was teased without mercy that first year, and harassed, even beaten. Because I had no siblings, I never learned how to fight back, you see, and it was a miserable year. I came home for the summer holidays, and I knew I had to do something or my second year at Eton would be as horrific as the first. And there was no way I could avoid going back.”

Julia remembered their first meeting on that bridge, and how he’d pokered up so stiff when she’d teased him. Now she knew why. “What did you do? Go to your father?”

“God, no. My father would have cuffed me on the side of the head and told me to be a man, and stop bothering him with schoolboy trifles.”

Listening to him, Julia felt a fierce wave of outrage rising up within her on his behalf. “Bastard.”

He shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “I hired the local blacksmith—who was quite a sound pugilist—to teach me to fight. The day after I returned for fall term, one of the upperclassmen tried to have a go at me, and I gave him the thrashing of his life. Afterward, I stood over him, fists clenched, blood running down my face, and I dared any other boy who had issue with me to come forward and demonstrate it now.”

She smiled, picturing it. “My head is bloody but unbowed,” she murmured.

He stopped abruptly, bringing her to a halt as well. “ ‘Invictus,’ ” he murmured, staring at her in the moonlight. “That is one of my favorite poems.”

“Is it? Mine too.” In a rush, she blurted, “It’s rather how I always think of you. That is, when I think of you. I mean—”

She stopped, agonizingly self-conscious all of a sudden.

“Do you know how I always think of you?” he asked. “With your legs over the side of the bridge and your pretty feet in the water.”

Warmth washed over her like the sun coming out between clouds, chasing away shadows and darkness.

“You see?” he added, smiling a little, “you’ve been bedeviling me since we were seventeen.”

“I thought so,” she admitted, “but then, that night in St. Ives, you met Trix, and I thought I was wrong. I—” She stopped, too proud to confess how keen her disappointment had been. “You paid your addresses to her.”

“You were married. I don’t enter dalliances with other men’s wives.” He grimaced. “At least, I’ve always believed that it was morally wrong to do so.”

I’m sorry, Aidan,
she thought.
I’m sorry.

“Still,” he went on in a lighter voice, “you’re no longer married, I have you in my sights again, and I can’t bear the thought of walking away now, not if there’s the slightest chance you want me as much as I still want you.”

She opened her mouth to tell him there was no chance, but other words came out of her mouth instead. “I thought I was here to prove I don’t want you.”

His gaze was unblinking, steady, looking into hers. “I’m hoping you fail.”

I won’t fail because I don’t feel.
“And if I can prove I don’t want you?” she asked, her whisper sounding harsh to her own ears. “What then?”

“I suppose I shall be dancing about half a dozen waltzes on Friday with your idea of suitable duchesses, which, now that you know I don’t like to dance, should prove quite entertaining for you, given your wicked sense of humor. But—” He paused, and slowly, ever so slowly, he eased his body closer to hers. “You can save me from that fate, Julia. When I kiss you, all you have to do is kiss me back.”

How could he want her now, after everything that had happened? After she’d used him and exploited him? He didn’t remember most of it, but he knew he’d been manipulated, the knight she’d used to checkmate Yardley. She’d never have thought he could want her now, but he did. It was in his eyes when he looked at her. It was in his voice. He wasn’t like her, she knew, for he could still want and need and make love and not be afraid of it all.

Pull away
, she told herself, but she could not seem to make her body comply with the demand of her mind. She stood as if paralyzed, afraid tonight would only prove he knew more about her innermost feelings than she did.

Aidan’s eyes, dark in the moonlight, were locked with hers, and in their depths was not only desire, but also the question they were here to answer. His fingers entwined with hers, and his other hand pressed against the small of her back, bringing her closer. Her heartbeat, already quick and fast, began to beat even harder in her chest.

His fingers slid up her spine, a light, delicate caress that was like the rekindling of a fire amid the ashes, and when his palm cupped her cheek, warmth flared within her.

“Why are you doing this?” she whispered as he tilted her head back.

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m turning the tables. This time, I’m seducing you.”

“But why?” she cried, growing desperate. “I’m a female Iago, remember? How can you want me now?”

“How can I not?” His gaze roamed her upturned face. “You started this, you know. Ten months ago. But I don’t remember how we finished it.”

She licked her dry lips. “Yes, you do. We finished it that day in the divorce court.”

He shook his head. “No. That afternoon in Cornwall still holds some very vague but tantalizing blank spaces for me. Things I don’t remember. Things I want to remember very badly. They echo back to me again and again, and the more I see you, the more I imagine filling in those blank places.” He gave a caustic chuckle. “The details become more erotic each time my imagination sets to work, I’m afraid.”

Julia stared up at him in dismay. He didn’t know, not really, just why and how she’d done what she’d done. And when he found out, when he learned the extent of her duplicity, when he figured out that she was dry as dust and as erotic as a fence post, he wouldn’t want her anymore.

Best if she just called a halt now and let him think whatever he liked, imagine whatever he wanted, as long as he never learned the truth. And yet, as he lowered his head, she just couldn’t find the will to turn her face away. If she was cold and dead, why did she feel so warm inside?

He paused, his mouth only a hairsbreadth from hers. “C’mon, Julia,” he whispered, his lips brushing hers in a feather-light caress. “Refresh my memory.”

He kissed her, and it was like sunshine, bringing heat and light and radiant glow, lighting her up from the inside, sending heat to her fingertips, to her toes, to the ends of her hair and the tip of her nose. And it was like rain, drenching a parched soul, and like food for a starving body.

There was no conscious thought; she was aware of only the most primitive sensations—hunger and pleasure—as she rose up on her toes, seeking more. And when his lips opened against hers, the hunger in her became need, and the pleasure deepened into lust.

He felt it, too. His hand let go of hers, and his arms slid around her waist, pulling her even closer. She came willingly, pressing her body to his, and when his tongue entered her mouth, she welcomed it, tasting, savoring, surrendering to a luscious carnality she hadn’t felt in years.

With that surrender, something seemed to unfold inside her. Like leaves unfurling, tight-budded roses spiraling open, shoots pushing up through dark soil to reach the light. It began to hurt, this pleasure, but not like any pain she’d ever felt; it was a pain that came from deep inside her and spread through her body, sharp, acute, and sweet. It was joy. The blissful sting.