Not Wicked Enough (21 page)

“Yes.” He held her gaze.

“Your grace. If you have a room in which to give me raptures, I should very much like to see it.”

“Lily,” he said, laughing at last. “Lily, you’ll drive me mad.”

“I don’t see why.”

“May I show you?”

She nodded, fully aware that she was agreeing to more than a tour of a usually inaccessible part of the house. “I should like that.”

“Come along then.”

She followed the duke out of the stone gallery hall. They turned a corner, then another, and at the end of that passage was a plain wooden door with a threshold worn to a curve in the middle from all the feet that had passed over it. Decorative ironwork covered the door from the hinges to the latch. Beside the door was an empty niche the height of her two hands with a scallop design carved into the stone above it. She took his candle while he fit a key to the lock and opened the door.

Mountjoy stepped across the threshold, his back to the door, keeping it open for her. Narrow stone stairs spiraled upward. As she went in, he pulled the door closed, and she said, “Do keep the key safe, your grace.”

“I will.” He took the lead in climbing to the very top of the tower. The passageway narrowed as they ascended. At the top was a door with no landing, just a stone threshold
curved in the center simply from centuries of feet stopping there. Mountjoy opened that door, too. The latch operated by a simple rope one pulled to lift the bar on the interior of the door. He took his candle from her and they went in.

“I came across this room shortly after we moved here,” he said. Lily set her candle on a stone table by the door while the duke set his candle next to hers. The air inside was cool. She could not see much beyond a few feet, though she could tell the room was round and that there were windows in the opposite wall.

With a flint he took from the stone table just by the door, he lit a lantern. “Nigel was at Rugby by then,” he continued. “I don’t recall where Eugenia was. Visiting our aunt and uncle in Haltwhistle, I think.” He snuffed out their candles and lifted the lantern. “Mind your step,” he said. He walked farther in.

Lily, too, walked into the center of the tower room. “Oh.” The walls were bare stone, and it seemed that every inch was carved with fanciful figures, grotesqueries, and scrollwork.

“What do you think?” he asked.

She put a hand to her heart and found she could barely speak. “Magnificent.” She spared him a glance before she craned her neck to see the ceiling. “Thank you. Thank you for bringing me here.”

“You’re welcome.” Mountjoy crossed the circular room, which was not large, and lit a second lamp. Here, the windows were deep wells that narrowed to panes of glass. An archer could have stood in the well, before the glass had been installed, aiming at advancing hordes. But it was the carved stone in between the windows that caused her stunned admiration.

Mountjoy cleared his throat. “My apologies if you are offended.”

“I’m not offended.” She stifled the urge to giggle. “What a marvelous sense of humor the stonemasons must have had.”

“They’re lewd, Wellstone, not comic.”

“A fine line, sir. Very fine.” She took a step closer. “Marvelously fine.”

“In that case, I’ll give you a key so that you may take sketches at your leisure.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “For Professor Farnsworth, you understand.”

“Yes, thank you.” She looked at him from over her shoulder and returned his grin. “I think you’ll find him very grateful.”

His gaze traveled slowly from her head to her toes. “I hope so, Wellstone.”

She went to stand beside him at one of the windows. “The view from here must be breathtaking during the day.”

“It is.”

She examined the room, aware that Mountjoy was watching her. The ceiling, too, was covered with stone figures and yes, some of the figures were engaged in sexual acts. “This is astonishing,” she said. She turned in a circle, slowly, taking in as much detail as she could.

“I hoped you might appreciate it.”

Absurdly touched that he’d thought to bring her here, to a room that was so plainly a private retreat, she could barely speak. There were Turkish carpets on the floor and blankets piled on a chest against the wall because with no fireplace the air here would certainly never be very warm. There was one chair that looked quite comfortable to sit on, and beside that a table with several books and near that a chaise that couldn’t be more than a few years old. On the table beside the door were a decanter, a humidor, a flint, glasses, and several bottles.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“I don’t allow anyone in here but a few trusted servants.”

Lily put a hand on his arm. “I’m honored you’ve shown me. It needn’t go in the professor’s book, you know. It’s enough that I’ve seen this.”

He gave her a sheepish grin. “I was quite a young man when I came to Bitterward. You can suppose the effect this room had on someone of my tender years. I kept it secret
from Nigel and Eugenia. They were far too young to see…” He gestured at a vaguely bearlike creature in congress with a centaur.

“I understand completely.”

“Before I knew it, this room was the only place where I could escape my fate.”

“Sanctuary.” She tilted her head, her hand still touching his arm. “I have a similar retreat at Syton House. Without the stonework, alas. I am green with envy that you have monsters and gargoyles.”

“By all means study them.”

“I will.” She turned to the wall and drank in the cavorting beasts and monsters.

From behind her, Mountjoy said, “I remember the day the attorney came to Haltwhistle, that’s where Eugenia, Nigel, and I were living at the time, with our mother’s sister. He sat at the best table in the only parlor we had and showed me the family lines that led to me. I made him go over and over it, and each time, he ended up at our branch of the Hamptons. With me.” He let out a breath. “He’d been researching five years, he said, on behalf of the dukedom. Following the branches. They’d somehow lost track of my father’s branch for a while. I suppose in those earlier days they thought us too remote. The attorney, it happens, had set out to prove the line was extinguished. Instead, he found me. Each time we went over what he claimed was incontrovertible proof, I thought sure he’d find he’d made a mistake, that if anyone was to be the next Mountjoy, it would not be me.”

She turned just enough to see him. “Yet, here you are.”

The duke shrugged. “There was no time to air out the country smell or knock the dirt from my boots.” Lily went still when he came to stand behind her. She found it difficult to concentrate on anything but him. Why, oh why, had he been so kind as to show her a room like this? He would break her heart. He truly would. “I went from Haltwhistle to the house in London, then Bitterward and a seat in the Lords with hardly a breath in between.”

“Who doesn’t dream of one day discovering one is secretly royalty?” To her left stone animals cavorted above and between the windows; a stag, a bear, a boar, and even a swan. She could make out the broken chain that identified the creature as representing the Hampton family sigil that had found its way into the Mountjoy coat of arms, with the later addition of the ducal coronet.

He leaned a shoulder against the wall where there was a smooth space between the window-well and the carved stone forest. His mouth twitched. She did so like the way he looked when he was trying not to smile. “I never did. Never once.”

“Well, I can assure you I grew up convinced I was a princess.”

“You would.”

Lily’s stomach did a flip. They stood so close. So close. “Hidden away for safety while my father bravely and in secret fought against our country’s enemies. I was to have married a prince and taken my place on the throne of my beloved subjects.”

“Where you would prove yourself a fair and benevolent ruler.”

“Precisely. Alas, no one ever came to the house with papers to prove my true identity. My father is my true father. Not that I’d want any other. I love him. Despite everything.”

“I’ve not met the man, but I’ll own I do not care for what I’ve heard.” He frowned. “He neglected you when you were a girl. He abuses your generosity now that you are a woman. Was there no one besides you and your father in the house? A governess to see to your education?”

She tipped her head to one side. “Our housekeeper taught me to read and do figures. To sew and knit, too, and how to cut fabric. She was a genius with scissors and a needle.”

“And she taught you to run a household.”

Her urge to touch him rose up again, threatening to overwhelm her. “Skills that have stood me in good stead all these many years, I must say.”

“Could your father not spare twenty pounds to educate you?”

“Why would he, when I was so wicked that my education would surely have been a waste?”

He backed up a step to allow her to advance along the wall and continue her study. “Because he was your father. Did he never sing to you or read you stories?”

“Others are not as lucky in their families as you were.”

“I’m no prince, but I was indeed fortunate in my parents.”

“There’s still hope that someone will inform me that I am a princess and much beloved by my subjects who long to have me back in my rightful place as a gentle and benevolent ruler.”

He grinned. “You’ll tell me the moment that happens, won’t you?”

“Oh, certainly.”

Mountjoy put a hand on a smooth bit of the wall by the window. “I was fortunate in my aunt and uncle, too, that they took in a family of orphans. We might have been split up, you know, Eugenia, Nigel, and I.” He smiled, but his eyes stayed serious. She did not speak into the silence. The quiet went on too long. With his other hand, he touched a rabbit carved at his eye level. “My good fortune persists, Lily, for you came here. To Bitterward.”

“You flatter me, your grace.”

“Flattery?” He drew a finger along the stone back of a gargoyle having sexual relations with a nymph, and she, God help her, watched the slow movement of his finger. “Have you any notion, Lily, of the effect you have on men?”

“Some. I’m not a fool about that.”

“You walk into a room, and no one can think of anyone but you. Where before there was tedium, now there is life. We all want that warmth and joy for ourselves.”

“We?”

“Dr. Longfield. My brother. Every man to cross your path.”

“You?” she asked.

His eyes pierced her through. “Beautiful. Elegant. Never wearing anything that isn’t the height of fashion and exquisitely made.”

“I spent too many years deprived of elegant attire, forbidden anything pretty.” She licked her lower lip. “Now that I am free of that, I refuse to live my life without fashion or beauty. When I’m old and wrinkled and breathing my last, I won’t be sorry for having lived a life with beauty in it.”

“Your damned father. You shouldn’t go back to him.”

“I must. You know that. Besides, if I were to stay here, you’d soon reach a point where you wished me gone. Best to leave while your hosts still like you, that’s what I’ve always felt.” She breached the space between them to touch his cravat. “You could do with a little of my conceit. Don’t deny you aren’t aware of
your
appeal.”

“Tonight,” he said, “I deny nothing.” He stepped forward and put his hands on her shoulders. His thumbs brushed along her collarbones. “Not you. And not me.”

The world vanished from beneath her feet.

I
N THE BACK OF HIS MIND, MOUNTJOY KNEW HE STILL
had a chance to stop this from happening. He could step away from her and turn the conversation to her plans for treasure hunting or to bloody architecture. Lily, being the intelligent creature that she was, would know he’d lost his nerve.

To be honest, though, whatever guilt he might feel over involving himself with a woman besides the one he was supposed to marry, he could tuck away very far from this particular moment. He stayed where he was, his hands on her shoulders and his thumbs sweeping over her soft skin. Her eyes stayed on his face, and he could see she was deciding what she would allow to happen.