“Beaumont doesn’t come to you with knotty matters of state?”
“Odd, isn’t it?”
“You can mock yourself, Jemma, but he couldn’t find a better mind to consider those affairs.”
Jemma could feel herself growing faintly pink—and she never blushed. Never.
Of course Villiers didn’t miss it. His mouth curled into a mocking smile. “I like blushing,” he said. “Women do entirely too little of it, to my mind.”
“It can be very useful.”
“Useful?”
“There’s nothing more disarming than a woman’s blush.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Most women wear so much face paint that blushing is not an option.”
“I often wear a great deal of face paint,” Jemma said. “Particularly if I think there is the slightest chance that I shall be shocked. If you are bent on reform, Villiers, I shall take to wearing it regularly.”
“Reform…” he said. “Or not.”
He had so much charm. He’d never wielded it on her like this before. When he smiled at her, it was almost like a caress.
Suddenly she remembered his drawling voice saying that he gave her fair warning that he meant to have her.
She almost shivered. Villiers was beautiful, depraved, tired…her husband’s enemy, though she never understood precisely why. She had offered herself to him last year and he had refused on the grounds of being Elijah’s oldest friend. And then he had changed his mind.
Now Villiers apparently meant to woo her, if that word was appropriate for a married woman.
She swallowed. She had promised Elijah that her scandals were over. She had come back from Paris to give her husband an heir. She felt dizzy.
Villiers didn’t seem to notice her silence. Instead he took out a piece of paper. “Read this, Jemma.”
She opened it. The letter was headed with the Duke of Cosway’s crest. “Isidore’s duke!”
“He’s back in the country.”
“I knew that. Isidore is staying with me at the moment. He left her at a hotel, if you can countenance it, Villiers. A hotel! He left his duchess at a hotel and proceeded to drive to the country to see his mother.”
“I find that story unsurprising, given my acquaintance with him. I actually played a game of chess with Cosway on the deck of some rapscallion prince’s boat,” Villiers said.
“On the Nile river?”
“The same hemisphere. If you can imagine, it was twilight and stiflingly hot, around seven years ago, I suppose. I had decided for a number of reasons that I wished to travel to Arabia—”
She shook her head. “No.”
“What?”
“You wanted to play chess, of course. You had no redeeming reason for your journey, such as a love of exploration.”
His smile was a wicked thing, the kind of smile that lured a woman. “You have me with a pawn, Jemma. I wanted to go to the Levant and play the chess masters there. But it was so damned uncomfortable!”
“Sand?”
“Heat.” He stretched out an arm and looked at his lace. “I am a duke. It has been my charge since I was a mere boy, and while it has undoubtedly spoiled me, it has also marked me. I like to be clean, and I like to dress. Even in my bedchamber, if you can believe it, Jemma, I choose my garments with great care.”
She had a sudden entertaining vision of Villiers wrapped in silk. Instinctively, she struck back. “You are so thin after your illness…I wonder that you do not need an entirely new wardrobe.”
“It is a cruel truth,” he sighed. “I seek to build myself up, of course. I am so hopelessly vain that I could never allow myself to visit a lady’s chamber until I am more fit.”
Perhaps that was why there would be no third game in bed. It was to be a long campaign, she thought. The Duke of Villiers was setting himself out to entice her, before he allowed that last game to be played.
Of all the men who had ever assayed that goal, he was the most dangerous.
“So what happened during the chess match with Cosway?” she said, wrenching her mind away from the question of Villiers’s allure.
“Oh, he beat me.”
“That must have been disconcerting.”
“Very. I played like an idiot, and I knew why. It was just too bloody hot for an Englishman, though Cosway showed no signs of discomfort.”
“What kind of man is he?”
“Imagine, if you will, a rather magnificent vessel, belonging to the Bey of Isfaheet. There we sat, with a table of tiger-striped wood between us, the chess pieces carved from the same board. The bishop rode on a rearing lion; the queen was an African princess; the rook was a camel.”
“And you were there, in embroidery and lace…”
“The picture of a proper English duke. No one else on board had a fifth of the clothes I did. And yet I had forsaken my waistcoat.” He opened his eyes very wide. “No waistcoat, Jemma.”
“I appreciate the seriousness of your sacrifice,” she said, laughing.
“It was twilight and the air lay on the river—for we were on a river wider than I’ve seen in England—the air lay on that river like a fat whore on a six-penny bed.”
Jemma snorted.
He looked at her innocently. “Did I say something amiss?”
He was potent…he was so potent in this mood. Wicked and sly and funny. “No,” she said. “Please continue.”
“Every time I reached out my hand to move one of the pieces, drops of sweat ran down my arm.”
“And yet Cosway was not discomforted in the least?”
“Have you met him?”
Jemma shook her head.
“I think it would be fair to say that he’s my opposite. No powder. His skin is brown from the sun, of course and he’s muscled to a degree that is vastly ungentlemanly. But I think it’s the great tumble of inky black hair, unpowdered and not even tied back, that truly marks him. One can easily imagine him fighting off four or five savages at once.”
“You could do that,” Jemma said loyally.
“I’m not such a fool as to ever put myself in that situation,” Villiers said. “As I recall, he wore short trousers that barely reached his knee along with a tunic-like affair, but at some point he removed that and had the boys dunk it in the river. They returned it to him wet. He appeared to be quite comfortable.”
“Unfair!” Jemma said.
“Did I mention that he was barefoot?”
“No. And you?”
“Boots. Sturdy English boots made for an exploring Englishman, out to gather useful knowledge of the world’s fauna and flora.”
“You came home,” Jemma guessed.
“I forsook all the chess games I might have won in the palaces of the great pashas…I succumbed to the heat.”
“Or perhaps,” Jemma said wickedly, “to your insistence on dressing like a duke.”
“It has occurred to me since. Vanity, thy name is Villiers. Do read his letter.”
Jemma had forgotten about it. There was no formal salutation.
Villiers,
I’m having a devil of a time since my return. Would you do me the honor of paying me a visit? There seems to be some disapproval of my ideas. You are, to my mind, the person best suited in the world to advise me on matters of precedence and respectability.
