“Don’t try for a life on the stage,” Villiers said flatly.
“I think we should go back to discussing Astley,” Anne said. “That’s a far more fascinating subject than your marital mishaps.”
“There is no marriage yet,” he snapped.
“Then we can save the discussion of your unhappiness for the next time we meet,” she said brightly.
Eleanor rose. “If you’ll excuse me.”
“Do tell me that you’re going to succor some orphans,” Anne said, fluttering her eyelashes. “Or perhaps you plan to distribute food among the starving villagers?”
“I am retiring to my chamber,” Eleanor said, with what she considered a masterful control of her temper. “I plan a tedious night with a bath and my book.”
“Ah, Shakespeare’s sonnets,” Villiers said. “Love that lasts ages, into which category we must now place the Duke of Astley. A good choice.”
Eleanor managed to get herself out of the room without saying something she might later regret.
The two people remaining at the dining table stared at each other.
Then Villiers looked at Popper and jerked his head, so the butler and his footmen quickly left.
“A touch of the bourgeois,” Eleanor’s sister said mockingly. “I didn’t know you cared about servants’ talk, Duke.”
He ignored that. “I was under the impression that you were not in favor of my suit.”
“What suit?” Anne said. “You’re marrying Lisette. And, in case I haven’t said it already, congratulations. Your life is certainly going to be interesting.”
He narrowed his eyes.
“All those children,” she said innocently. “What a responsibility. It’d be one thing if you were planning to bundle them all off to the country with fifty pounds and a package of bread and cheese, but to bring them up as nobility? To pitch them onto the civilized world as if birth and illegitimacy didn’t matter?”
“I know they matter.”
“Well, of course, they don’t matter to Lisette.”
He didn’t know why he was defending himself to Anne, whom he hardly even knew. He had a flash of nostalgia for the old Villiers, the one who tolerated no insolence of any kind. The duke who was coolly uninterested in anyone’s opinion except his own.
What had happened to him? He had given Mrs. Bouchon a look that would have silenced anyone from the queen to a scullery maid, and she paid him no heed.
“That is precisely why Lisette will be a perfect mother for them,” he said, wading into the sort of explanations he never would have made a mere year ago. “She cares nothing for the formalities of the ton, for its strictures and rules.”
“She can’t afford to care for them,” Anne said. “She is considered mad.”
“She’s not mad,” Villiers said sharply. “She seems eminently sane to me.”
“I agree,” Anne said, rather surprisingly. “I’ve known Lisette for years, and I’ve never considered her to be cracked. Not in the way that Barnabe Reeve went mad. Did you ever know him? You must be about the same age.”
“Yes,” Villiers said, placing his fork and knife precisely on his plate. “Reeve told me when we were both at Eton that he thought he might be able to fly someday. At the time, I considered it a boyish ambition that I rather shared. His later conviction that he was growing wings was a surprise.”
“So, there’s madness like Reeve’s, and then there’s Lisette.”
“There is no comparison,” Villiers said. “None.”
“Reeve doesn’t listen to the people who tell him repeatedly that people rarely, if ever, grow wings. Lisette doesn’t listen to people who tell her anything that she doesn’t want to hear.”
“The difference between will and wings is the difference between madness and its opposite,” Villiers pointed out.
“Exactly.” She beamed at him. “Reeve thinks he can grow wings and he can’t. Lisette thinks she can spend her life doing exactly as she wishes, no matter the amount of human wreckage she leaves behind her—and she can. That is the difference, my dear Villiers.”
One had to say that Eleanor’s sister understood a good exit line. She hopped to her feet and dropped into a deep curtsy. “Your Grace.”
Villiers stood, but only because the rules of society were drilled into him. They were second nature at this point.
He remained standing even after she left the room.
Until it occurred to him that Eleanor was in her bedchamber. And she was likely taking a bath. That ridiculous excuse for a man, Astley, was returning for the treasure hunt, and that was—
That was very soon.
Chapter Twenty-five
Eleanor lay in the bath once again staring at her book of sonnets, but only because that’s what she had told everyone she was going to do. She hated Shakespeare. What did he know about real human relationships? About how complicated they were?
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks…Perhaps he was right about that, but it was all so much more complex than that simple sentence promised. Gideon still loved her. He did. Shakespeare said that love looked on tempests and was never shaken.
Yet hers was shaken. There was no other way to describe it. Her love had altered. All these years she’d been loving Gideon, and not allowing herself to be angry at him for his cowardice, for not loving her as deeply as she loved him.
But it came down to it, she was the one lacking in true depth of feeling.
After a while, tired of trying to sort it all out, she dropped the book to the floor by the bath. Then she realized it might get wet, and shoved it so hard that it spun under the bed and disappeared.
She wasn’t even surprised when the door to the balcony silently opened. It was a relief, really.
Villiers—Leopold—wasn’t in love with her, so she didn’t have to align her feelings for him with the claims made in a love sonnet. She could just enjoy being indecent. Shameful. Outrageous.
When she didn’t hear anything more after the soft click of the door, she pulled one leg slowly out of the water and pointed her toe. She had nice legs, if she said so herself. She was particularly fond of the roundness of her kneecap.
After discovering one had a shallow soul, it was very reassuring to be able to retreat to the solid reality of a kneecap.
Though she’d heard nothing, a pair of burning lips suddenly pressed the left side of her neck. She obligingly bent her head to the right to give him more access, and two hands slid around her from behind and cupped her breasts.
“Look what I found.” His voice was a low rumble at her ear. “A brassy baggage, waiting in her bath for a man to wander by so she can entice him with her skills.” The odd thing was that the sound of his voice sent heat to her legs even faster than the sight of his hands caressing her breasts, even faster than feeling him caress her.
“Villiers,” she said, dropping her head back against his shoulder and ignoring his foolish comment.
He bit her ear, and growled. “What did you call me?”
It was a command, a brand, a thrilling display of domination and authority. She felt her mouth curve. “Leslie.”
One hand slid over her stomach.
“Try again.”