Zoe looked down at the setter, which she had noticed in a peripheral fashion, because she was accustomed to the creature’s jumps and barks. About Daisy in this setting, however, there was something very queer. Whatever was she doing here?
Again, Zoe glanced at the ugly bed. Rumpled sheets, half-naked marquess—
Zoe was not short of understanding. Her fiancé had not rumpled those sheets all by himself. No timorous maiden, she marched toward the bed, and grabbed hold of the velvet drapery, and twitched it aside. Her jaw dropped open at sight of her aunt scrunched up in a corner, disheveled and not entirely dressed. Cara looked embarrassed. The marquess looked as if he was trying not to laugh.
What there was to laugh about in such a moment, Zoe couldn’t begin to imagine. “You betrayed me!” she yelled.
“Alas, you have found me out,” said Lord Mannering, with a wonderfully wicked sneer. “I am a vile seducer. Your aunt will tell you so.” He grasped Cara’s wrist and pulled her across the bed toward him. “
Won’t
you, my pet?”
A vile seducer? Lord Mannering? Zoe stared. Granted, he was handling Cara in a very familiar manner, dragging her across the bed and up against his pillows, but still—
Cara shot the marquess a stern look, not without difficulty, because he held her so close, and proximity to Nicky, as has already been demonstrated, wreaked havoc with the workings of her otherwise excellent mind. She did recall, however, that she had been brought to London with a purpose other than snuggling with Nicky. “What are you doing here, Zoe? For a young woman to visit a gentleman in his lodging is a truly shocking thing.”
“Really!” The ribbons on Zoe’s pretty bonnet fluttered, and the roses trembled. “And for an
old
woman it is not? Better that I should ask what
you
are doing here. And with my fiancé!”
Understandable, if regrettable, that Zoe should be in a tweak. Cara tried to adjust her bodice, which had gotten disarranged again in her slide across the sheets. “This isn’t what it seems.”
“What a clanker!” Zoe clucked disapprovingly as Lord Mannering prevented Cara’s further struggles with her uncooperative bodice by clamping his hand around her wrist. “You must think that I’m a flat. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes. I know what I see.”
The marquess arched an eyebrow. “Ah, but appearances can be deceiving, can they not?”
A hit, a palpable hit, but to say that Zoe experienced a twinge of remorse would be to overstate the case. However, she did wrinkle her pretty nose. “You had your hand down the bosom of my dress!”
“Perhaps, but I’m not the one who put it there.”
“Lawks!” breathed Mary, recalling Nick to the presence of his owl-eyed servants. He sent all three of them off to fetch some tea. “Since you were kind enough to inquire, Miss Loversall, I feel like the very devil. It is uncertain if I will ever walk again. Now that you have ascertained the state of my health, perhaps you will go away. And take that dog with you!” Guiltily, Daisy slunk back to the hearth.
Lord Mannering
looked
like the devil, not ill but diabolical. And Zoe’s aunt looked devilishly comfortable, cuddled up against him like that. Cara’s bodice was clearly unbuttoned—she could barely keep it on her shoulders—and her hair was as tousled and tangled as if it had never seen a brush. “Whether you can walk or not, my lord, it is evident that you are well enough to engage in certain other activities.” There was a marked dearth of breakable items in the chamber. Zoe eyed the backgammon board.
“Touch that board and you risk your life,” said the marquess. He sounded as though he meant every word.
Zoe picked up the brightly colored fan instead, and wondered what such a thing was doing in a gentleman’s bedroom, a question her aunt might have answered, though not without giggling. “I have a very delicate constitution, and this outrage must surely be a great shock to my heart.” Languidly, she fanned herself. “Perhaps I may even swoon.”
“If you must,” said the marquess. “Do it by the hearth, where you can’t damage anything.”
Zoe straightened—it wasn’t very
comfortable
to wilt—and gazed sternly at the figures on the bed. Lord Mannering looked as comfortable as any oriental pasha with one of his houris clutched to his side. “I think very poorly of you, my lord.”
Why did that not surprise him? Nick might have been more annoyed about the low esteem in which so many people seemed to hold him had not Cara been pressed up as close against him as if she wished to crawl inside and hide. “Why, I wonder, should you think I care?”
“Insufferable!” Zoe gasped, and took a turn about the chamber, much as her aunt had done before her, although without the resultant breakage, and uttering such dramatic phrases as, “I won’t trust myself to express,” and “Things have come to a sorry pass,” and “I do think it very hard,” a phrase that caused Cara to snicker, despite her embarrassment.
“Brava! A performance worthy of Mrs. Siddons,” said Lord Mannering, when he had listened to as much nonsense as he could tolerate, “fleshpots” having been the deciding word. “Now, if you can stop emoting for a moment, perhaps we might put our heads together and discover some way out of this predicament.”
“It is more than a predicament!” Zoe put her hands on her slender hips. “You are supposed to seduce me, Lord Mannering, and here I find you seducing my Aunt Cara instead. You should be ashamed.”
Nick regarded her with the interest he might have accorded a particularly repulsive insect. “Why is that?”
“It should be obvious. Unless you are so great a rogue that you don’t care if Aunt Cara gets her heart broken and sinks into a decline, which very well might prove fatal at her age. Because I must tell you, my lord, that though I mean to be an understanding sort of wife—after all, I shall be having
affaires
of my own—I do not intend that you should have an
affaire
with my own aunt!”
Cara might well have spoken, had not Nick put a hand behind her head and pressed her face back down against his chest. “Too late. And whatever sort of wife you make—which I suspect will be dreadful— you won’t be mine, so I don’t care.”
Zoe wafted the fan. “Don’t be absurd, my lord. Of course you’re going to marry me. You haven’t any choice.”
Cara struggled. Nick held her all the tighter. “You really are a limb of Satan, aren’t you, Zoe? If you start shrieking again, I shall have you thrown out of the house, so you had much better not.”
Zoe opened her mouth and closed it, and opened it again. “You cannot mean that you prefer Aunt Cara! You said I was the most beautiful damsel in all of England. I remember it quite well.”
The marquess recalled what his life had been before Cara had returned to town, his days filled with the usual gentlemanly pursuits, as were his evenings, all uniformly pleasant and unprovocative—and bland. “Your aunt is no longer a damsel, for which I am immensely grateful, and I prefer her above anyone of any age, even when she’s angry with me, as she is at the moment. Will you behave yourself,
cara,
if I let you go?”
Cara nodded. He allowed her to raise her head. However, he still held her against his side, so that she couldn’t scoot off the bed.
Not that she wanted to go anywhere. Nicky’s hand was soothing, and his body warm. His gorgeous, almost naked body. He was behaving outrageously. Cara hoped he knew what he was about. “So,” said the marquess. “You see why this farce of a betrothal must come to an end.”
Zoe saw nothing of the sort. Now more than ever she meant to crush Lord Mannering’s black heart beneath her heel. “You’ll forget about Aunt Cara soon enough, once you’re married to me. And then she will wither away like Cousin Ianthe, which will serve her right.”
Since she was prevented from removing herself to a safer distance by Nick’s strong arm, and since he had just said such very nice things about her, even if they
had
been said merely in an effort to put off Zoe, Cara relaxed back against his broad chest. “I left Ianthe entertaining Squire Anderley and drinking brandy and planning to remove to Bath or Brighton. I think she’s got over her broken heart.
And
she refuses to plan your wedding, and I certainly won’t, so you and Beau are on your own.”
Zoe frowned. “Beau doesn’t know anything about weddings.”
“Except how to avoid them,” observed Nick.
Zoe had wanted St. George’s, Hanover Square, but she was an adaptable miss. “Very well, we’ll be wed by special license, then. Or even better yet, elope! And we will do it soon, before you make any further assault on Aunt Cara’s virtue."
Cara roused from the blissful stupor induced by Nicky’s lazy fingers drawing circles on her arm. “If I don’t give a fig about my virtue, I don’t see why anyone else should, particularly since that horse has long since left the gate.”
A Loversall was seldom shocked, but Zoe was so much so at that moment that she plopped down on the bed. “No virtue?” she gasped.
“None.” Cara snapped her fingers. “Gone. Poof. Like a dandelion in the wind.”
Zoe was impressed. “You’ve only just come to town!”
Nick smiled. “It doesn’t take long.”
They were interrupted at this juncture by Mary with the tea tray—a task the male servants decided she could handle on her own, although she had promised to report back to them each and every detail of what was going on. It quickly being established that Lord Mannering was either unable to leave his bed, or in no mood to do so, and additionally that he wasn’t willing to let Lady Norwood do so either, the tray was set down carefully on the counterpane. Nick would have preferred brandy to tea, but had been told that he may not have it, and so Mary thoughtfully fetched some more of the laudanum draught. Since Zoe felt in need of refreshment, and Daisy in need of company, all four ended up snug as bugs in the great carved bed—or like a pasha surrounded by two houris and a hound.
Zoe’s desire to pitch a fit was temporarily superseded by her amazement regarding her aunt’s behavior. She leaned against a carved bedpost. “I know we Loversalls are victims of our tumultuous passions, but this seems a little
fast.”
Nick lifted one of Cara’s hands to his lips and gazed soulfully at her. “You refer to the abruptness of our, ah, connection. A mere moment can seem a lifetime when one is in the grasp of a fatal passion.”
Cara gazed soulfully back at him. “Ah, but what signifies a lifetime when one’s senses are overwhelmed?”
Zoe munched on a biscuit and pondered the queer circumstance that Lord Mannering was looking at her aunt the way she’d wished him to look at her. “Isn’t it unusual that a gentleman should have a fan in his bedroom?”
Cara smiled. Lord Mannering looked wolfish. “Not at all,” he said.
Zoe dropped her gaze to the fan, and contemplated the many uses to which such a thing might be put. Daisy crawled closer and poked at it with her nose.
“No!” said Nick, and reached for the fan, and groaned from the resultant pain. Cara placed her hand on his bare back and rubbed. He purred.
It was a very nice bare back, as Zoe had already noted, as was his front, not that she had viewed a great number of nude male torsos, but she was sufficiently her father’s daughter to appreciate the aesthetics of the thing. “I am still willing to walk on you, my lord. Beau says I have gifted feet.”
“No!” snapped Cara, wearied with the game. “Keep your feet right where they are. Just so you know it, Zoe, I’m not going to let you marry Nicky even if I have to elope with him myself.”
The marquess looked intrigued.
‘Would
you elope with me?”
“No!” said Zoe. “Because then you would abandon her and break her heart, because it’s clear to me now, my lord, that you are a swine.”
“Swine,” mused Nick. “There’s a new one for the list.”
Zoe was still ruminating. “You must have known Aunt Cara before, because even a female of our family wouldn’t give her all so quickly as this.”
As Cara recalled, it hadn’t taken her very long to give her all after she’d first set eyes on Nicky. She glanced at him. He winked.
Zoe tsk’d. “But then you came upon me alone in the front hallway, and couldn’t help yourself, and made a dead-set at me, which was a very shabby thing to do. Don’t elope with him, Aunt Cara. He’ll just cast you aside.”
Perhaps it was the laudanum that made this conversation so damned difficult to follow. “Why should you think I would cast Cara aside?”
Zoe knew what she knew. This
was
the same man who had accosted her in Papa’s front hall. Or allowed her to accost him, which was practically the same thing. Although she had to regard her aunt with a new respect, for thinking about a thing (as Zoe had), and doing it (as Cara
clearly
had), were two entirely different things. “I shan’t allow you to be cruel to Aunt Cara. It’s perfectly all right if you’re cruel to
me,
because I don’t care. I was going to break your heart anyway.”
Lord Mannering looked sardonic. “You were.”
“I was.” Zoe rubbed against the carved bedpost, which made an excellent back-scratcher. “And I probably still will, so you shouldn’t fall in love with me, because I wish to have a child someday, and you are—”
“Too old.” Nick picked up the fan and trailed it along Cara’s arm, which gave Zoe a notion of what else he might have done with it, the naughty man. A less self-centered miss might have found herself embarrassingly
de trop.
Zoe merely nibbled on a scone.
The laudanum was working its magic. As was the realization that Cara hadn’t removed herself from the bed, though she could have done so easily enough, had she truly tried. The marquess decided he
would
be able to engage in amorous congress again, aches and pains be damned. But first he must manage to get himself un-betrothed, because he had been so cockle-brained as to tell Cara that he wouldn’t quench his appetites with her while he was betrothed to another, and if he didn’t quench said appetites soon, he would surely go mad; and were he to go mad, she would say he deserved it for the way he had treated her earlier, which had indeed been shabby, not to mention cockle-brained. He didn’t doubt for an instant she would have her revenge.