“Why the surprise?”
“Oh, the dukeness of you,” she said with a wave of her hand, wondering if she might have drunk a bit too much. Just to prove to herself that she hadn’t, she finished her glass.
“My dukeness,” Villiers repeated.
“Swathed in velvet, from the moment you left the crib.” She looked away because the very sight of his lips made her feel like squirming, as if her soft parts became softer at the sight of him.
“I was in love with a woman named Bess. She was a barmaid.”
Eleanor giggled. “Buxom and beautiful?”
“I actually don’t remember whether she was buxom,” Villiers said. “Certainly she wasn’t as fortunate in that regard as you.” His eyes didn’t drop below her face. “I would remember that.”
“My bodice is a bit small,” Eleanor confessed. “This gown belongs to my sister. My preference is for less revealing clothing.”
He nodded.
“Did Bess return your affection?”
“How could she not?” he asked. There was something hard in his voice. “I was already a duke.”
“That needn’t have—”
He interrupted. “Believe me, the barmaid who turns down a duke should be cast in bronze.”
“Nonsense,” Eleanor said tartly. “You have a distorted idea of your own consequence.” A thought occurred to her. “Is Bess the mother of one of your children?”
The edge of his mouth quirked, sending a blaze of heat down Eleanor’s legs.
“My children really don’t bother you, do they?”
She considered that. “Should they, on moral grounds? Religious? Ethical?”
“Any of the above.”
“I myself would prefer to have tidier domestic relations,” she said. “But I don’t see that it’s any of my business if you don’t agree with me.”
“Well, you are marrying me,” he pointed out. “Or so you said.”
Eleanor reached out and took his glass of anisette. He had barely tasted it, after all. “Perhaps. An announcement before my mother is hardly a commitment. Either of us may decide that we would rather marry another.”
“You would consider our betrothal a tentative one?”
She glanced deliberately at Roland. He looked like the embodiment of a medieval troubadour, dark and dreamy, singing of love. She listened for a moment. He was actually singing about a widow marrying her sixth husband, but the principle was the same. He sang. “I don’t suppose you sing?” she suggested.
“Never.”
“I don’t either,” she sighed.
“Bess is not the mother of any of my children,” Villiers said.
“All right,” Eleanor said agreeably.
“She fell in love with a much prettier fellow.”
She considered his face. He was not pretty, not by any stretch of the imagination. Everything about him was just slightly rough-hewn, aggressive, male. Too male. He made embarrassing ideas float through her head. As if the Duke of Villiers would suddenly swoop on her, push her down on the settee, and throw himself on top of her. “I thought a duke’s precedence was all-important,” she said hastily.
“The Duke of Beaumont stole her from me.”
“Goodness,” Eleanor said, smiling. “Lucky Bess! Chased by two dukes. Do tell me that you fought a romantic duel?”
“There’s nothing romantic about duels,” Villiers said. “But no. I had no claim over her, you see. I had completely lost my head. But a young man’s adoration was no match for Beaumont’s Adonis-like profile.”
“I suppose Beaumont is handsome,” she agreed. Not as handsome as Gideon, in her opinion, but good-looking enough. Still, he always looked so tired that it was hard to imagine him young.
“You are practically the first woman I’ve spoken to who doesn’t rhapsodize over Beaumont’s face,” Villiers said.
She glanced at his nose and looked away again. She could hardly admit that Gideon had soured her interest in beautiful men. To the point to which she felt far more attracted to Villiers’s sort of rough-hewn looks.
“And yet I suppose that Astley is even more beautiful than Beaumont, to your eyes?” Villiers asked, uncannily echoing her thoughts.
She nodded.
“More golden, more sleek, more attractive in every way?”
“Yes,” Eleanor agreed. She took another drink of Villiers’s anisette.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and the sharp edge dropped from his voice. He actually sounded sympathetic.
“It was years ago,” she said.
“If you still think of him while kissing another man, then it hasn’t been long enough.”
She couldn’t think how to refute that, but at that moment she looked up to see Lisette sling her lute at Roland’s head. Roland threw himself sideways and at the same time managed to put up a hand and catch the lute.
“You wretched little—” he hollered.
Lisette opened her mouth to scream back, cast a look toward Eleanor and Villiers, and ran into the library.
It all happened so quickly that she was gone by the time Villiers looked around.
“I apologize,” Roland said, walking toward them. “When two musicians come together, we lose sense of time. Even worse, we sometimes lose our heads.”
Eleanor felt her cheeks growing pink. She certainly had forgotten their presence during Villiers’s kiss.
“Your music played so sweetly on the night air that we all lost track of time,” Villiers said at her shoulder.
Roland glanced at him. “Shakespeare on music. I gather that’s part of If music be the food of love, play on, etcetera? Is that from A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”
“Actually no,” Villiers said. “The beginning of Twelfth Night.”
“I hate those old plays,” Roland said to Eleanor with a comical grin. “So stuffy and antiquated. You have no idea how hard it can be to make older people realize that fresh material can be so much better.”
He didn’t glance at Villiers, but she felt an irresistible urge to smile. Obviously he had seen them kiss.
“We old people generally go to bed with the chickens,” Villiers said, without a trace of resentment in his voice.
“Ah well, I certainly didn’t mean that comparison,” Roland said, leaving in doubt exactly what comparison he had meant. “Lady Eleanor, may I call for you tomorrow? I would love to show you the countryside.”
“Of course,” Villiers said genially, taking on the demeanor of a kindly uncle. “You young people ought to trot about on horses while the rest of us are taking our morning constitutional.”
“I would be happy to see you again, Sir Roland,” Eleanor said, holding out her hand.
He fell back into a flourishing bow, raising her hand to his lips and holding it there for a long moment. “Tomorrow,” he said, meeting her eyes.
“Don’t leave those lutes,” Villiers said.
Roland’s bow to the duke was extremely brief, barely more than the kind of bob Eleanor had seen irate footmen give to a butler.
Villiers leaned back on the settee as if there was no question about the fact that they would stay there, unchaperoned. “I didn’t see what happened to Lisette, did you?”