Lord Ruin (10 page)

She nodded, unfazed by the numbers. “Gunter’s, I presume? Aldreth uses them, too.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. He liked a woman who dealt so pragmatically with what life served up. She’d have coped if he’d said invite a thousand guests.

“A turtle dinner,” she mused, tapping the table near her empty bread plate. “Twenty courses? Served à
la Russe
, but cooked à
la Française
.”

“I knew I could rely on you.” And, in point of fact, he
had
known. “Now, in the meantime, I might manage supper two or three times a week if I am not otherwise engaged with parliamentary matters. Restrict your own calls until after the ball. You may visit your sisters. Mama, of course.”

Cynssyr left his chair for the fireplace. Anne watched the play of muscle beneath his shirt, took in the way his upper back narrowed to his hips as he bent to the hearth. A nervous flutter started in the pit of her stomach.

“Continue your acquaintance with Lady Prescott,” he said as he stirred the coals then added more. “I encourage that, if it can be done.”

“Yes, sir.”

He replaced the andiron and repositioned the fire screen. Every movement had a fluid grace. No wasted motion, just power and efficiency. “I’m given to understand the Viscount Wilberfoss has offered for your sister, Emily.” Watching him, Anne tried to decide what gave Cynssyr his beauty. Not just the shape of his cheeks and jaw or the extraordinary eyes. Something else made him compelling. Something far more elemental made her stomach soar when she looked at him.

“Mary wrote me.”

He faced her. “I do not wholly approve of Wilberfoss either, but there are advantages to the match.”

“His support on the pensions bill would be invaluable.” Women, she thought, probably admired and envied his hair and eyes, but she began to think they fell in love with his vitality.

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully, walking toward her. She wondered why she’d ever thought him a dandy. There wasn’t anything frivolous or inconsequential about the man. “It would. If I have Wilberfoss, at least a dozen others are bound to follow, and Castlereagh and his like be dashed.” He stopped behind her chair.

Quite abruptly she recalled he was her husband. Not only did he expect intimacy between them, but she was required to oblige him, and she wasn’t at all certain she was ready for the life before her.

“You are well-informed.” His voice dropped a notch. “I do like that. I wish I’d brought you to town sooner.” The light touch of his fingers on the back of her neck was like lightning, it prickled the skin and left nothing but heat in its wake. “You please me a great deal, Anne.”

“Emily will not marry a man she does not love.” Lord Ruin, she told herself, had never loved any woman. He seduced them. He made them fall in love with him, but he never felt a thing. But, maintaining that low opinion of him was more difficult by the moment. He wasn’t frivolous. Nor vain, though he had every right to vanity. As for his intellectual gifts, she had foolhardily underestimated them.

“Mm.” His hands slowly traced a line down her spine. “Your father has given his permission.”

She steeled herself against the melting of her will. “Did you ever love Emily?”

“No.”

By then, he was unfastening the back of her gown and coherent thought ceased.

“You’re a clever girl,” the dowager duchess of Cynssyr said to Anne. A helmet of gray hair surrounded a face of stern lines and steely eyes pinned Anne to her chair. On her lap, she cradled Caesar, a dog about the size and shape of a modest teapot. His chocolate eyes constantly followed his mistress’s hand in hope of a treat.

“I’d be pleased if you thought so.” Anne pretended to drink her tea, but held her breath when the cup came near. The smell of tea, like wine and an ever-growing list of food and drink, threatened to turn her stomach inside out.

The duchess stared down her nose and watched Anne through half-lidded eyes. “Yes. A very clever girl. I thought so the moment I heard your sister, Mary, was to wed Aldreth. I was convinced of it when my son told me of your sister, Emily.”

“More tea?” said Anne. By the far wall a footman stood solid as an oak, his green livery clashing with the lilac wallpaper. She thought he must get quite tired of standing.

The duchess extended her cup, and Anne dutifully poured. Caesar lifted his head, sniffing eagerly. “Whatever he thinks of you,” the duchess said, stroking the dog with her free hand, “and I don’t imagine it’s much, he will stand by you.”

“Three lumps, am I right? Here are the best.”

The duchess stirred her tea into a whirlpool. “Young women these days have their heads stuffed full of nonsense. Their fathers do not discipline them and their mothers daren’t. In consequence, they make bad marriages and even worse wives.”

“Do have this last cake.”

Her lips thinned, and Caesar, too, seemed to stare at Anne with a jaundiced eye. “A marriage of opposites so seldom succeeds.” She fed a bit of cake to the dog before her attention landed once again on Anne. “I wonder, will my son’s?”

Anne lifted her cup and smiled. “Does it often rain in London this time of year?”

“The boy’s been between the sheets with half the ladies of society.” Much to Caesar’s disappointment, the duchess ate the last bite of cake. “Ah. Jubert. A genius.” Her eyes closed while she savored the taste, then she laid down her fork. “Have you enough starch in you to manage my son?”

“I have no wish to manage him.”

Caesar yipped, and the duchess cradled him to her chest, stroking his chin. “There, there. Such a willful boy,” she said, addressing the dog more than Anne, so that for a moment she wasn’t entirely sure if the duchess meant her son or the dog. “And proud.”

“Pride is not one of Cynssyr’s vices.”

“He’s a handsome devil who knows too well how women admire him. But, he was born to greatness and God has seen fit to make him capable of achieving it.”

“Some would say he has.”

“He has not been happy since he came home from the fighting. He changed after that, and though war made a man of him, I wish he had changed less.” She bent her head to the little dog, and Caesar stretched up his nose toward her. “The joy went out of him.” A moment later, the iron eyes once more studied her. “I have long prayed he would find solace in marriage. Well. Perhaps he may find it in his children.”

“I hope, your grace, that will be true for us both.”

“What kind of woman are you, I wonder. Have you malice toward my son? Can you make him happy?”

“My tears are shed, Duchess. As for his happiness, that is in his control, not mine.”

“And your happiness?”

“Is my own affair.”

The duchess rose, tucking Caesar into the crook of her elbow. “I take my leave of you. The hour grows late and you must be at your best tonight.”

Anne returned to her room after the duchess left, and though the ball was hours away, she found Tilly beside herself with anxiety. In her bath, with Tilly’s strong fingers working on her scalp, Anne could not stop thinking of the duchess. Could a mother feel anything but disappointment for a beloved son so unsuitably married? How sad, she thought, to have such lofty, loving hopes bitterly dashed. And yet, the duchess had made no personal attacks. Who could blame a mother for wanting her son’s happiness? She wondered if happiness was now beyond both their reach.

The delicate scent Ruan had come to associate with Anne wafted to him when he entered to a blizzard of petticoats, chemises and stockings. Four silk shawls draped various surfaces. No fewer than five pairs of slippers were scattered about the floor. He plucked a lacy garter off the mantle and dropped it on a chair heaped with frilly drawers. He rescued a sheer white stocking from the fireplace grate and deposited it with its mate on an ottoman. Well did he recognize the results of a woman preparing for an important event.

His wife appeared surprisingly calm. Tilly, however, hovered like a robin over its nest, picking up a stocking and dropping it somewhere else, smoothing the lace on Anne’s sleeve, adjusting the tiny yellow roses atop her head or realigning the ribbon wound through her hair.

Madame Louise had earned her steep fee, which pleased him both financially and personally. Anne’s ballgown fit like a dream. His dream, anyway. Deliberately, he slid his gaze over her, letting her and even the maid—he didn’t care what Tilly thought, though he should have—see his admiration. The gown was not anywhere near as low as it might have been, but it was low enough to more than hint at her shape.

“Cynssyr,” Anne said when her husband stood there fingering the clasp of the box he held. Closely tailored clothes suited his leanness. Nothing so tight as to be uncomfortable, but there wasn’t any doubt of his superb condition, either. Time in the saddle shaped the muscles of his thighs and taking a hand at the ribbons of a coach-and-four gave his shoulders and arms breadth. He wore no hat and in the light cast by the lamps, his hair was an intensely deep brown. She’d begun to think she’d never get used to him. He didn’t wait for an invitation to sit, he just cleared a chair of a petticoat that had not passed muster and sat as if he had every right. Well. In fact, he had.

“There was another incident.”

“Oh, no.” Though he spoke in a singularly uninflected tone, she understood how deeply the violence affected him. Personally, even. Her heart went out to him.

Truly. But she knew better than to let him see the weakness.

“This afternoon. At Marylebone Gardens.” He settled himself on the chair. “However, this time, they did not succeed.”

Tonight his eyes were greener than ever. His coat was the deep red of port wine, his shirtfront and cravat snowy white. “Thank goodness.” He was like a cat, sleek and even motionless, wholly confident of his strength. “How did it happen?”

“She believed she was to meet an unknown admirer. A
gentleman
, though I hesitate even to use the word, who these last two weeks has been sending her poems declaiming her beauty and his adoration.”

“But it must be a gentleman.”

His eyes snapped to hers. “No gentleman would do such a thing.”

“Who else could it be but someone who passes for a gentleman?”

“God help us if you’re right. The girl jumped from the carriage and broke her head in the fall. I called on the girl’s family, but she was not conscious. In any event, her father would have refused my request to interview her.” One hand curled into a tight fist. “They’d already found the letters and burned them all. Every blessed one.”

“Will she be all right?”

“Uncertain. They’re preparing to leave town the moment her condition permits. She saw them. The girl saw them, and she’s as lost to me as Miss Dancy, whom even Devon cannot find. Never mind that this scoundrel will surely go on to another innocent woman.”

“You will stop him. I know you will.”

Cynssyr shuddered, and slowly his fingers unfurled. “Forgive me, Anne, for broaching so distasteful a subject.” He drew a deep breath and like that, all the emotion she’d sensed was smothered. “On this night in particular.” His glance took her in from head to toe. The man who stole hearts as easily as a thief stole a purse vanished in his cold, assessing gaze.

“Mary helped choose my gown,” Anne blurted out. From some impulse she didn’t fully understand and could not explain to Mary, she’d tried to match her gown to Cynssyr’s eyes. The pure, piercing green of his eyes wasn’t easily duplicated.

“She has excellent taste,” he said, bending one leg so that his ankle rested across his knee. He popped open the box’s clasp and immediately closed it. He’d not meant to tell her about the girl, but the words had just come out. However inappropriate it was to tell a woman his affairs, he now felt the better for his indiscretion. Even as he resolved never to fail again to keep his counsel, he wondered if he could. Damn, but he must constantly remind himself she was only a woman.

She glanced at him, swept over the box in his hand without really seeing it. “What of Bow Street?” she said. He was like the devil, she decided, luring souls to their eternal doom. Luring her. “Would not a Runner be of help?”

“So far they’ve turned up nothing. Perhaps this time they’ll have more success. I leave that business to Devon, for he’s contacts there I haven’t.” Her spectacles perched about halfway down her nose, low enough for him to see the jet black lashes. Eyes a man could watch forever and never tire of the sight. They changed constantly; on a whim, for the color of her gown, for deep emotion such as she held back from him in the marriage bed and elsewhere. Tonight, the color was more gray than blue. Slate with a hint of sky. “Enough of this unpleasant conversation, Anne.”

“I’d like to help.” She knew his body now, the shape, the feel, even the taste. The times when his needs forced him to her bed, and he stroked her and called out her name, when his mouth and hands and body took hers, why, he almost convinced her she was beautiful. When he was inside her, she felt with such richness, such completeness, that it took all her control not to simply hand him her soul and her heart with it. She wanted to cry that a man who did not want her should make her feel like that. She needed a good deal of control around him. Perhaps more than she possessed.

He lifted his hands. “How?”

“Perhaps you need a woman’s point of view.”

“This is men’s business.” He rested a hand on the box. “Though if any woman could help, it would be you.”

“Then let me.”

“I am forever telling you things I ought not.”

“You take on too much, sir.” She touched her chest, but she meant him. “I would ease the burden on you, if only I could.”

“Do not attempt to manage me.” He hated himself for snapping at her. “I despise women who think I can be managed.” Her eyes filled with hurt and then shuttered. Hell, he thought. He was a brute, and damn himself for that.

“I am not managing at all, your grace.” She walked to her dressing table where she gathered up a ribbon and stood twining it in her hands. After a bit, she threw it down. “Not a bit, sir.”

“Yes, you are. Come now, Anne, and tell me you forgive me.”

She faced him. “Of course.”

“You manage me quite well, the deuce take it.” He eyed her. A pair of dainty satin slippers, green like her gown, covered her feet and put a deadly feminine curve to as fine a pair of ankles as he’d ever seen. He felt the stirring of arousal. “Damnation, but you do manage me.”

“Green, I know you dislike it, sir, but it matches your eyes almost exactly.” She squeezed a handful of her skirt. “Madame Louise warned me, but I thought—” She touched her skirt, facing him again. “I never had so fine a gown in all my life. I feel out of place wearing it, and I thought, what difference will it make if it’s green or orange or any color in the world?”