“Oh, what a nice snow globe,” said Lord Vere.
She could have picked up something else, anything else. The malachite candlestick, for example. The plain Chinese urn that held the spills for starting a fire in the grate. But she hadn’t picked up anything else; she’d picked up the snow globe with a miniature village inside: church, high street, snow-covered cottages—the last Christmas present Aunt Rachel had given her, eight years ago.
It had snowed that Christmas Day. Her uncle, in one of his moods, had disappeared somewhere by himself. Elissande had persuaded Aunt Rachel, whose health had improved steadily under Elissande’s care, to come outside for a walk in the snow. They’d made a topsy-turvy snowman. And then, somehow, they’d begun a snowball fight.
It had been a spirited battle. Aunt Rachel had good aim—who would have guessed? Elissande’s overcoat had been full of the splattered remains of snowballs that had hit her straight and true. But she hadn’t been so bad herself either. How Aunt Rachel had run screaming from her, and then laughed hysterically as she was hit squarely in the bottom.
She could see her aunt, her not-yet-graying hair escaping her bun, her face pink from exertion, bending down to form another snowball. Only to suddenly freeze, still crouched low, as she realized that her husband had returned.
Elissande never forgot her uncle’s expression: anger, followed by a frightful flash of pleasure, of anticipation. By her laughter, her rosy cheeks, by the mere fact that she was at play, Aunt Rachel had betrayed herself. She had not been completely broken. There was still youth and vitality left in her. Her uncle, of course, could not allow this grave offense to pass unpunished.
Aunt Rachel had not left the house since.
Elissande glanced at Lord Vere, who seemed fascinated by the snow globe, which she herself could not bear to look at. He stood very close to her. She took in his broad shoulders, his strong neck, and the rather unbelievably perfect sweep of his brows. He did not smell of cigar smoke tonight, but only of foliage—belatedly she noticed his boutonniere, a sprig of hard green berries pinned to a leaf of fir.
Could she bring herself to marry him, knowing there was nothing else to him, a pure void behind those already vacant eyes? Could she tolerate a lifetime of his prattling and bosom staring? Could she smile at him for the rest of her days?
Her grip tightened on the snow globe. I thought it would be a little grander, her aunt had said as Elissande shook the globe for the first time. I wanted something beautiful for you.
Desperation. She thought she’d known it all her life. She’d never truly known it until this moment.
Distant footsteps. Lady Avery was coming.
She set down both her hand-candle and the snow globe, and smiled at Lord Vere. She was trembling again. Good. Trembling went well with the words that tumbled from her lips.
“Oh, dear sir, forgive me. I shouldn’t. But ever since we met, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you,” she said, undoing the sash at her waist and casting the dressing gown behind her.
Lord Vere’s eyes widened. She wasted no time in stepping hard on the hem of her nightdress. The threads at her shoulder snapped. The nightdress whispered as it slid down her naked body.
Chapter Eight
For once in his life, Vere didn’t need to act flabbergasted. He was struck dumb, his limbs turned to stone, his brain a pulped turnip.
His eyes, however, remained quite functional. She was ripe perfection, like a Degas nude, all curves and softness and shadowed mysteries. And then she came toward him, her lips parted, her skin smooth and lovely, her nipples the very points at which the darkness kissed the illumination of the candle flame.
Her arms raised and intertwined behind his neck. She smelled, as she always did, of honey and roses. Her mouth, cool and quivering, touched his.
Reaction jolted through him. Lust, an astonishing quantity of it, but not lust alone: He was finally shocked out of his paralysis.
How could he have missed it so badly? Her aunt was a broken woman who no longer knew how to scream even when terrified. Miss Edgerton herself could and did smile under almost all circumstances. Everything pointed to her uncle being a monster. She didn’t just want a husband. She wanted a way out of this house.
And she was desperate enough that even he would do.
He disengaged her arms and backed away from her. She followed him. Without thinking, he yanked the curtain next to him from its mooring and tossed ten yards of double muslin at her. She flailed inside the tent of fabric, a pornographer’s idea of a girl mummy.
He ran. But encumbered as she was, she tackled him. Hard. Her weight crashing into him unbalanced him just enough to tumble them both over the curved, padded arm of a chaise longue, knocking down a stand in the process.
Something made of glass broke loudly—one of the ships in bottles. Something else crashed too—the hand-candle. The room plunged into darkness. He tried to heave her off him, but she was as demonically strong as one of Jules Verne’s giant octopuses, her arms welded to him. He set one foot down on the ground, turned so that she was against the back of the chaise, and pushed.
Yes, her hold on him was loosening. He pushed harder. She emitted a muffled scream of frustration. Or was it pain? He didn’t care. He had to be rid of her. She struggled with renewed vigor. Dear God, she almost kneed him in the groin.
He wasn’t sure what happened, but suddenly the chaise longue overturned along its length, dumping the two of them onto the carpet. They rolled a turn and a half before coming to a stop, she again on top of him, but this time without the curtain.
Her hair had come entirely loose during the struggle. She panted. Her beautiful breasts rose and fell. And just visible behind the cascade of her hair, small, tightly budded nipples—
How could he see anything? Hadn’t the candle gone out earlier? His eyes followed the source of illumination up and up, his gut already comprehending what his mind did not want to acknowledge.
There was someone else in the room.
“Oh, my. Oh, my, my, my,” Lady Avery murmured. Then she giggled. “I must say, I did not expect the two of you.”
Now Miss Edgerton leaped off him. Now she wrapped herself in the muslin curtain. Now she stammered, “It’s…it’s not what you think.”
“No? What do you think this is, Lady Kingsley?”
Bloody hell, not Lady Kingsley too.
Their eyes met. “I…ah…” Lady Kingsley stammered, her shock almost as strong as Vere’s own. “It is certainly an inconvenient situation.”
“Inconvenient, Lady Kingsley? Inconvenient is when your footman breaks his leg and you’ve no one but your parlor maid to serve tea to your callers. This is scandalous. And to think, Lord Vere, that your father was a schoolmate of Sir Bernard Edgerton, Miss Edgerton’s uncle.”
Until this mention of his late father, it had not occurred to Vere that being caught in Miss Edgerton’s scheme would lead all the way to the altar. After all, he’d known her for only three days. He had not touched her in truth. And he was an idiot, for God’s sake; surely some consideration must be given to that fact.
But that was apparently not the way Lady Avery’s mind worked. He had compromised a young lady of good standing—never mind that the young lady had a loose-moraled mother; never mind that the young lady engineered the encounter herself—and therefore marriage must follow suit. And Vere, publicly at least, was a nice, docile idiot, not the sort to willingly stand by and watch a girl go to “ruin.”
He put on his most thickly bovine expression, rose to his feet with a stumble and a grunt, and looked around. “Sorry for the nice ship-in-a-bottle, Miss Edgerton.”