“But I would have expected that fact might make your research on the subject more passionate. After all, you are no debutante, Lady Eleanor.”
Apparently he also shared Anne’s opinion of her advanced age. “I am two-and-twenty. I will be three-and-twenty in a matter of a month or so.”
“And you reached this age without investigating the limited group of men into which you had vowed to marry?”
“Yes.” She walked down the last few steps. Pulling back her skirts, she scooped up a few violets in her hand.
He followed her. “You’re not really interested in marrying a duke, are you, Lady Eleanor?”
“Not particularly.” She pretended to smell the wet blossoms in her hand.
“Why not?”
The words hung in the damp air. She instinctively looked about the baths to see if there was anyone who might be able to hear them.
Villiers descended another step and stopped beside her. “Are you already married?”
She smiled faintly. “No.” She met his eyes. “Quite the opposite.”
“The opposite?” He knit his brow. “Am I to understand that you have announced your intention to marry a duke so as to lower expectations regarding your availability for marriage?”
“Exactly.”
“And yet you are willing to consider matrimony with me? After all, you didn’t turn on your heel, not even after my alarming revelation.”
She let one of the flowers drift from her fingers, watching it rather than meeting his eyes. “I was young and impetuous when I announced my ambition to marry a duke.”
“Surely you knew that the chance of a nobleman of the correct rank declaring himself was slim.”
“Of course.”
“You declared that you would marry a duke or no one, knowing full well that no one was likely to propose, since there are so few of us. I see.”
“You do?”
“As you reminded me, I’m not young. I have seen a great deal and I certainly understand desire.”
“Oh.” Eleanor was a bit uncertain about what had happened to the subject of their conversation. “Are you saying that you understand my desire?”
“You should not throw your life away, Lady Eleanor, simply because you love elsewhere.”
“How did you know that?” She looked up at him.
“You just told me.”
“I did?” He had remarkably heavy-lidded eyes, lazy and seemingly uninterested, and yet apparently they saw everything.
“I am not a conventional man,” Villiers stated.
With a start, Eleanor realized that if she did decide to marry the duke, she’d have to discuss the question of virginity or, specifically, her lack thereof. “Given your promiscuous progeny, I agree that you have no claim to conventionality.”
One corner of his mouth quirked up. It had a remarkably beautiful shape, actually. “Oh, you’d be surprised. Men do the most interesting things in their private time and yet disparage women who commit even a tenth of the follies they enjoy.”
“That’s true.” Gideon was the only man she knew who was punctilious as a Puritan when it came to virtue, as passionate about his honor as he had been about her.
“My point is that I am not a prude when it comes to human desire. I know how inconvenient it can be.”
Inconvenient was an odd word for the way love for Gideon had shaped her life, but she saw his point.
Villiers tipped up her chin. “If you help me with my children, rear them, be kind to them, and fight society’s belief that they are unworthy of the huge settlements I intend to give them, I will be lenient with regard to your personal life.”
“You mean—”
“I would ask you to tolerate me only long enough to produce an heir.”
“In fact, I want children,” she said. She did want children. And for all Villiers’s tolerance, she had no intention of straying from her marital vows, once she made them. After all, Gideon showed no interest. He had barely met her eyes these last three years. She knew he was at the ball tonight only because Anne told her. He hadn’t searched her out, and of course she hadn’t looked for him.
And more to the point, if she took vows, she would keep to them. Just as she had tried to keep to the vows she and Gideon had said to each other, private though they were.
Villiers smiled and the shape of his mouth caught her eye again. “I appreciate your saying so.”
“You appreciate it?”
He nodded. “Like any other duke, I need an heir. But other than that, I must say that I have no deep desire for children.”
“And yet you have so many,” she observed.
“Carelessness,” he said.
“Stupidity,” she said, before she could bite her tongue.
“That too,” he agreed. “I need an heir, but I would be perfectly happy to live an amicable existence with a wife who had no interest in my charms, such as they are. Although I would ask that you be discreet.”
Without question this was the most shocking conversation she had ever had. Her mother would have fainted a good five minutes ago. “Will you do the same?”
“Will I add even more miscellaneous children to the household?” And, when she nodded, “Absolutely not. I am keenly aware of the idiocy of my imprudent attitude toward conception.” He paused. “You might not be aware of this, but there are ways to prevent conception; as a young man, I simply didn’t care to employ those methods.”
She nodded again. She knew them.
His eyes narrowed. “What an interesting young lady you are, Lady Eleanor.”
“Why have you decided to house your own children?”
“I nearly died last year of a wound sustained in a duel.” His voice was flat, uncommunicative. “I fought that duel for the honor of my fiancée, and lost.”
“Apparently, you lost the fiancée as well,” she put in dryly, trying to avoid any sort of melodramatic revelation.
Sure enough, his mouth eased. “True. The Duchess of Beaumont’s brother, the Earl of Gryffyn, won the girl and the duel, leaving me with a wound that nearly carried me off.”
“Whereupon you made a deathbed vow to marry?”
His eyelashes flickered. They were very long eyelashes.
“No,” she guessed. “You made a deathbed vow to rear your own children.”
“That was it,” he confirmed. “The damnable thing about it was that I turned out to be not entirely sure where those children were.”
“Beyond carelessness,” she said. “That’s disgraceful.”
“I had been paying for them.” He abruptly stooped down and snatched up a handful of flowers, sending a small wave across the pool. “When I demanded their addresses, my solicitor handed me a partial list and disappeared, along with many hundreds of pounds, I might add.”
“How very odd.”
“It seems that he had gradually removed the children from their lodgings and placed them elsewhere, pocketing the money I provided for their upkeep.” Villiers threw the blossoms back toward the pool. They rained down into the blanket of violets.
“Not the workhouse!”
“Less scrupulous places,” he said evenly. “A workhouse might have explored parentage, after all. To this point I have located my son Tobias, who was working as a mudlark, gathering valuables from the bottom of the River Thames.”
