The Perfect Mistress (16 page)

She assured her maid that everything was all right, then sent the girl to the kitchen to fetch her nightly posset of warm milk and brandy. When she was alone again, she went to the window and parted the lace curtains, staring into the darkened street below.

Why was it always the same thing? Why was it they couldn't be in the same room, the same house for two minutes without a bloodletting? She saw his life so clearly… saw the possibilities in it, saw the disappointments and regrets in store for him. She recognized them because they were some of the very ones she had experienced. And because of their turbulent history, she was helpless to make him see it.

All she wanted for him was a good and decent family life with someone who was clever and reasonable and good-hearted, someone who was strong enough to withstand his gales and blasts and soft enough to love him in spite of them. But, she knew too well the way he had lived his life in recent years, and she feared that no decent, honorable, and loving woman would have him.

If only he weren't so much like his father—so handsome, so licentious, so arrogant. And so utterly contemptuous of
her
.

"All you can do is try, Beatrice," she said quietly. "All you can do is try."

Like a twelve-year-old
, Pierce thought, staring out the carriage window as he sped through the night. That was how his mother treated him whenever they were in the same room for more than two minutes. She refused to relinquish one jot of the power she wielded as the Countess Sandbourne and spared no opportunity to try to run his life and make his choices for him.

In the last several years she had made it her crusade in life to see him married and converted to her brand of respectability. She was determined to shackle him to some pampered and extravagantly pedigreed female whose notions of life came from Eugenics Society journals and who swooned at the sight of her own ankles. She wanted him hobbled and broken, made into one of the dismal wretches who lined the walls of ballrooms dressed in the grim uniform of the upper-crust male—counting their drinks, complaining of their feet, and praying that neither their skill nor their corsets would fail during the next waltz—society's matrimonial geldings.

And despite her oft-repeated exhortations to produce her some grandchildren and secure himself an heir, he had long known that her true reason for wanting to see him sacrificed upon the altar of matrimony was that she simply couldn't bear the thought of him enjoying himself. Well, she could keep her cursed money; he didn't need it. He wasn't about to submit to her tyrannical demands, no matter how urgent the requirements of duty and dynasty. If he had to
beget
, then he would just bloody well do it at sixty, when he had no juices left for anything else.

He sat back in the cushioned seat, calmer now for having purged the vitriol from his system, and his gaze fell on the seat across from him. Juices.

How had
that
gotten into his mind? A moment later memories filtered into his awareness; a snatch of white silk, a burst of robin's egg blue, the scent of biscuits. His mood improved steadily as he turned his thought to the possibilities of "three o'clock tomorrow."

Anticipation.

As the carriage halted before the exclusive Brooks's Club, he alighted, whistling a tune. When he put words to the melody in his head, he stopped stock-still. He was humming: "
Whoops, Alice!… the lad-der is bend-ing
. . ."

7

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T
he next afternoon Pierce arrived at Maison LeCoeur as required, with an armful of flowers. He had spent the morning raiding every florist in London for a bouquet befitting the occasion. And in describing his needs to deferential shop attendants, he quickly discovered that he wasn't at all certain of the occasion. He was either courting or seducing a young girl, willingly or under protest, in pretense or in earnest… all depending on where he was and who he was with at the moment. And he needed a gesture to impress, not the girl—who was well-nigh unimpressible—but her eagle-eyed mother with his reckless generosity and the fevered depths of his desire. Just what sort of flowers were appropriate for a pretense of gripping passion and impending sin? For a seduction within a seduction?

Now, as he stood in the entry hall, waiting to be shown upstairs, the blended fragrance of jonquils, tulips, and hothouse roses wafted up from the two bouquets lying in his arms. Unable to decide, he had finally bought an assortment that combined the best of "spring" and "smelly." And he was glad of it when Rosalind floated out of the drawing room and greeted him.

She eyed with approval the abundance of flowers in his arms and breathed in deeply as she resumed her original course toward the dining room.

By the time he trotted up the great staircase behind Gunther, he was feeling rather confident. He had passed muster with the amorous expert in the family and now anticipated the glow of delight in Gabrielle's blue eyes when he told her so.

Thus, he was unprepared for the way she accepted his gift with girlish enthusiasm—"
Ohhh
, how lovely, your lordship! They're glorious!"—and then tossed the flowers onto the tea table the instant the door was closed. He stood feeling a bit unmanned as she hurried to the door and listened, focused entirely on the impact his gesture was making
outside
that chamber.

"I think that went well." With a wilt of relief, she turned her back to the door and inquired, "Did she see you? With the flowers?"

"Of course."

"Excellent." She strolled closer, looking him over in a rather businesslike fashion, noting with approval his handsome charcoal coat and pinstriped trousers. "After yesterday, something a bit more traditional was probably in order. My mother had a few well-chosen words for me after you left."

"I can imagine," he said, wishing he couldn't.

"I must say, I was a bit surprised to find her so rigid in her notions of romance," she said with a puzzled look and a shake of her head. "She thinks you have a rather eccentric taste in 'musical foreplay'… whatever that is."

He groaned quietly.

A moment later, a knock on the door startled them both. When she answered it, there stood Gunther, holding a large crystal vase filled with water and a pair of heavy shears. "Madam thought you might wish these,"

he said, glancing smoothly past her into the room for a glimpse of Pierce.

She accepted the vase and shears, closed the door, then carried them to the tea table, where the still-wrapped bouquets lay, and turned to him with fresh determination.

"Well, your lordship, what shall we do to pass the time today?"

He studied the stubborn glint in her eye and glanced at the flowers.

"Aren't you going to at least put them in water?" He tucked his chin, annoyed by her attitude toward his gift. "—after all the trouble I went to find suitably romantic flowers?"

She expelled a long-suffering breath, picked up both bouquets, and plunged them, tissue and all, into the vase. Then she turned back from the table with a folding chessboard in her hands. "How about a game of—"

"That's it?" He planted his hands on his waist. "You're just going to leave them there… like that?"

"She expects me to arrange them for you," she declared calmly. "That is why she sent up the vase and shears. Flower arranging is one of the romantic arts, you see. It's supposed to demonstrate my flair and sensitivity for aesthetic pursuits. That, and it's supposed to inflame your"—she thought better of her choice of words—"good opinion of me." She held up the chessboard. "Now, how about a game of—"

"What will happen when she learns you didn't arrange them?" he demanded.

She hesitated, trying to think of an excuse, and produced a vengefully cheery smile. "I'll just say that you kept me far too busy."

"And have her think I've been appallingly 'eccentric' again?
Ohhh
, no."

He tugged down his vest and strode to the table, looking over the flowers and shears, evaluating the size of the task. "If you're not of a mind to do it, then I shall."

He lifted the flowers from the vase and tore the soggy tissue from them.

But there he paused, uncertain how to proceed. Under her watchful eyes, he seized a tall purple spike and plunged it down into the vase, where it promptly keeled over and lay sticking out at an angle. He tried adding a few more stems, but had to hold each in place, so that soon his hands were too full to pick up more flowers. She watched him and bit her lip to keep from smiling.

"It helps if you cut the stems. The flowers don't droop as much and they will get more water," she offered. As a second tangle of blossoms grew, she came to lean against the table and watched the determined set of his mouth.

His long, graceful hands moved with such gentleness over the flowers that she felt an odd sort of emptiness growing in her stomach. It wasn't quite a hunger; it was more like… a longing. She rubbed her waist, thinking it was strange. She had never experienced such a consuming desire to arrange flowers before.

"There are rules to flower arranging, you know," she said, leaning over to choose a few taller spikes to plant in the center of the vase and brace with others.

"Rules?" He snipped the end of a stem and thrust it with defiant randomness into the vase. "Rules are made to be broken."

"Don't be silly." She frowned at him. "Rules are there to provide order and safety and security… even beauty. You see, formal arrangements are done to a geometric form that will both please and uplift the beholder… the most popular being a triangle." With a finger, she traced the shape that was formed by the stems she had just placed. He folded his arms and stroked his chin with his thumb and forefinger, considering it and her.

"But flowers don't grow in perfect triangles in nature. No more than people in their natural state grow in precise, orderly patterns and turn predictably into modest, honest, virtuous, and dutiful souls. Rules aren't natural." He leaned closer to her. "And nowhere is that more obvious than in the ridiculous rules society lays down regarding men and women and how they must behave toward one another."

"Which rules?" she demanded, looking up, suddenly intensely aware of how close he was standing.

"The hypocritical rules about who can ride in a carriage together, dance together, sit together, eat together, even
speak
together. And touching—God forbid!—you practically have to hang out the family pedigree to be permitted to touch a woman in any meaningful way. Pleasure is outlawed in any and every form." He snipped off the end of another stem with a vengeful flourish. "The entire purpose of such rules is to give some people an excuse to disdain and gossip about others. Think… if there weren't any rules, there couldn't be any scandal. No scandal; no gossip. Then what would the dragons of society do?"

She paused, her attention piqued, searching his face. He had just revealed more of himself than he knew. In the depths of his handsome eyes she glimpsed a past littered with broken rules and very likely broken hearts as well.

"Is that why you agreed to pose as my lover?" she asked quietly, holding that insight carefully and wondering what it meant to her. "To break a few rules?"

He searched the clear, perceptive blue of her eyes and felt a dry, whispery sensation in his middle, as if her gaze had brushed something unexpectedly sensitive inside him. He looked quickly away and seized another blossom, giving the stem a snip.

"I am here as a result of a bargain, remember? I want proof of the prime minister's perfidies, and I think you're the one to provide them"—he flicked a glance around them—"if I can ever get you out of this blessed chamber."

She took the blossom he handed her and placed it with care in the vase, then paused to study him again. "Why do you want to discredit the prime minister?"

"It's simple. He's the prime rule maker, the standard setter, the leading arbiter of what is good and proper and allowable in government and society.

And he conveniently exempts himself from his own rules. He demands decency and morality of others, while placing no such constraints upon his own behavior. That makes him a hypocrite, in my view. And if there is one thing I cannot abide, it's a hypocrite."

She paused in the midst of stripping a few extra leaves from a stem and thought of the old man who had dragged her into his kitchen and tried to get her to change her ways. He had seemed perfectly, even frighteningly sincere to her.

"What if he isn't a hypocrite?" she said. "What if he really is trying to help those women change their lives. Heaven knows, someone needs to help them."

"And what would you know about 'those women'?" he said, piqued by her audacity in challenging his opinion.

"I happen to know a great deal about 'those women,' " she declared, tossing the flower she held onto the table and setting her hands on her waist. "Prostitutes, tarts, roundheels, trollops, soiled doves… I've made the acquaintance of a number of them. And I can tell you that they often live very bleak and difficult lives." She interpreted his glower as both disbelief and disapproval.

"It's true." The spark struck in her eyes confirmed her words. "D'Arcy, the village where I lived in France, is home to a large foundling hospital, run by Catholic sisters. Many women came from Paris to leave their babies with the nuns." Her face grew sober as her gaze fastened on some inner scene. "Most had to walk the twelve miles from the city limits, carrying the child they would give up. Some wept much of the way. Others were too weary or too hardened to do more than just make the journey. They spoke of the horrors of their lives with deadened voices that came from deadened spirits. Some claimed seduction as the cause, but many were far beyond such attempts to salve pride and simply admitted there had been so many men that they had no idea who the father of their child was.