A Lascivious Lady (2 page)

To be on the safe side she gave her arm a little pinch. When nothing happened she pinched harder, her brow furrowing from the effort. From the corner of the room Traverson gave a low chuckle.

“If you are hoping this has all been but a bad dream, I am sorry to disappoint you.”

Josephine lifted her chin to stare at him. As always, her stomach gave a little lurch when she met his cool gray eyes. It was not a pleasant lurch. Certainly not the kind one was supposed to feel when they gazed upon their husband. It was more akin to a stomach pain, or a side stitch.

His hair had grown longer yet again, she noted absently. The last time she had seen him those dark curls had been at his collar.

Now they reached with their typical unruliness all the way to his shoulders.

Her fingers itched to tidy those mahogany locks. To comb them back from his face and collect them in a velvet ribbon, one gray as the sky before a summer storm to match his eyes.

Josephine blinked. Now where had that thought come from? She abhorred the way Traverson presented himself. She always had. The buttons on his shirt were mismatched. His cravat and vest were missing all together. Mud stained his fawn colored breeches and dark brown boots. For a woman who cared for her appearance as fastidiously as Josephine did, being married to a man who cared not a whit for his own was irritating beyond all measure.

Of course now, wearing nothing more than a sheet with her pale hair in wild disarray around her face and her lips swollen from another man’s kisses, Josephine hardly had room to complain. The guilt weighed heavily on her shoulders, as it always did, and she pushed it ruthlessly to the back of her mind, as she always did. I did not ask for this, she thought for the millionth time. I never wanted to be married, especially not to Traverson. We are as ill suited as any arranged couple I have ever come across.

Squaring her shoulders, Josephine stared boldly at her husband, her gaze unflinching. He looked away first, his eyes dropping to study his hands. Rough on the inside and tanned on the out, they were not the hands of a gentleman lord, but rather those of a common laborer, born from hours spent outside conducting his research.

“I see I have come at a bad time,” Traverson said quietly, not looking up.

“Yes,” said Josephine, tossing back her hair. She took a deep breath, relief filling her as she felt her composure sliding back into place. It always seemed to leave her when Traverson was about, reducing her to nothing more than the babbling, idiotic young girl she had once been. The young girl who had dreamed of princes and fairytales, and had known nothing of the real world or the dangers it presented. She despised that young girl with every fiber of her being, and knew she could dispose of her entirely, if only for her husband.

Josephine did not know why her carefully constructed layers of control slipped away when Traverson was near, nor did she care to. She knew only that they did, and she hated him all the more for it. “You know we have an arrangement. You must inform me of your intention to call before you simply show up on my doorstep like an uninvited pest.”

A faint smile touched Traverson’s lips. He was never put out by her insults, as other men were. Instead he merely seemed to find them amusing, as if he knew something she did not.

“Did you hear me?” Josephine asked, incensed by the smile that curved his mouth. She did not like it when he smiled. It showed off the slightest hint of a dimple in his left cheek, a dimple she could pretend did not exist as long as his expression remained stern, which of course it never did. Traverson was forever smiling at the most trivial of things. A clear blue sky. A bright sunset. A hawk circling low overhead. Once he had tried to point those things out to her, but had long ago given up when she did nothing but scoff.

Honestly, what did he expect her to do? Cheer and clap at the sight of a silly bird? It was ridiculous.

Traverson sat up a little straighter and uncrossed his ankles. “Of course I heard you,” he said mildly. “I am daft, not deaf. And I apologize for arriving while you were, er, entertaining other guests.” His eyebrow shot up, letting her know he had not been fooled for a minute as to the real reason Lord Penny had been in attendance. “However I wished to deliver your present with all post haste.”

“My present?” Josephine asked suspiciously. Traverson never brought her presents. Other than the embarrassingly simple gold wedding band she kept locked away in her jewelry box, he had never gifted her with anything.

“Yes, your present.” Standing, he reached in his pocket and procured a small brown leather box that fit easily in the palm of his hand. “Here,” he said, holding it out. “For you.”

Hesitantly Josephine crossed the room. Her bare feet sank into the Persian rug, reminding her yet again of her nakedness.

Flushing slightly, she peeked at Traverson beneath her long lashes. Most men would have been licking their lips at the sight of a practically nude woman, but not her husband. Oh, no, not him.

He looked at her as he always did, his faint smile in place, his eyes wandering not over her body but rather trained firmly on her face. She might as well have been an eighty year old hag for all the interest he displayed in her, and not for the first time Josephine felt a twinge of hurt.

While other men made up sonnets and poems to describe her beauty, Traverson had never so much as snuck a glance at her décolletage. Was she so unappealing to him? Did he prefer brunettes to blondes? Women with slim figures as opposed to voluptuous ones? Self consciously Josephine’s hand strayed to her hip.

Once she had lamented over her curves, starving herself for weeks on end in a fruitless attempt to make herself slender as a willow. Now she had come to terms with the fact that God had intended her to possess a figure of the bustier variety, rather like an apple ripe for the plucking. Everyone else, male and female, held her renowned beauty in the highest regard… except for her husband, who had yet to pay compliment to a single hair on her head.

Her lips pinching at the thought, Josephine reached out and plucked the box from Traverson’s hand. It was lighter than she expected it would be, and her fingers fumbled clumsily with the latch before she drew back the top.

“It is an insect,” she said, her nose wrinkling. “Traverson, you have given me a bug.”

“A cardinal beetle, to be precise. Quite difficult to find. I preserved him in wax and glued an attachment to the back so you can wear it as a pin.”

Josephine closed the box with a sharp little click and did her best not to shudder. It really should come of no surprise that her husband’s first present to her would be one of the insects that he so loved to study. The man was positively fascinated with anything and everything that crawled in the dirt or lived under a rock.

Setting her new “jewelry ” aside on a table, she skimmed a hand through her loose curls and smiled tightly. “How very kind of you, dear. Now if you do not mind, I must get dressed. Thank you ever so much for paying me a morning call, however I fear my day is filled with appointments and I must bid you adieu.”

“You are doing it again,” Traverson said softly.

“Doing what?”

“Lying. You do it so well and so often that you can usually look straight into the eyes of the person you are lying to, but you cannot do it with me. You always look down at the last second, or to the side, like you did just now.”

Josephine’s jaw dropped. “I – I am not – I am not lying,” she said scornfully. “I do have a very busy day!”

“You just did it again.” Crossing his arms, Traverson regarded her steadily, his gray eyes cool and unflinching. “I wonder why you cannot lie to me without giving yourself away.”

Something Josephine would very much like the answer to herself. Drawing back her shoulders, she stared straight at him and tried to repeat that she did indeed have a very busy day, thank you very much, but at the last moment her gaze veered to the side.

Drats! “Oh, just go away Traverson! Even if I did not have a single scheduled outing for the next six months, I would still not have time for you .” Seething, she spun on her heel and fled back up the stairs, the edge of the sheet trailing in her wake.

“You forgot your cardinal beetle!” Traverson called.

She let the slamming of her bedroom door answer for her.

Traverson watched his wife run from him in silence, a smile dawning on his face when he heard the slam of her bedroom door.

Slowly but surely, he was wearing her down. It was taking longer than he thought it would – three and a half years longer, to be precise

– but he was getting there. Two months ago she would have flung her gift in his face. The fact that she hadn’t had him whistling under his breath as he picked up the small jewelry box that housed the cardinal beetle and tucked it back in his pocket.

The whistling stopped abruptly as his gaze fell upon the pistol that was still sitting on one of the parlor’s side tables. He had not intended to shoot Lord Penny, but when he had seen the pompous young buck descending the stairs a rage the likes of which he had rarely felt in all of his thirty three years had descended upon him and he had acted without thinking.

Traverson knew Josephine invited other men to her bed on a regular basis – hell, there was not a person alive today who did not

– but to actually see evidence of his wife’s not so secret liaisons had been the push to action that he needed.

For too long he had sat back and allowed Josephine to sow her wild oats, as the saying went. He knew full well how his fellow peers viewed him, what they whispered behind his back, and if he cared a bloody whit for what the Ton thought he no doubt would have been driven to distraction by the endless circling rumors. As it was, Traverson did not care what the Ton thought, nor did he hold any of his peer’s opinions in esteemed regard. He was an outcast, a fact he not only accepted, but relished.

At twenty years of age he had had his entire life planned out before him: attend the University of Oxford, apprentice beneath the great mind of Sir Charles Upton upon graduating with full marks, and commit his life to studying insects within the great walls of the London’s premiere scientific establishment, the House of Common Sciences.

All of that had changed in the blink of an eye when he caught a glimpse of a girl with hair like freshly harvested wheat and striking eyes the color of a dragonfly’s wing during the mating season. He had not known who she was then, of course (no one had), but he knew he was in love, and that one day she would be his.

Traverson could admit now that he had not handled the situation as well as he could have. Perhaps things would have gone over much more smoothly if he had thought to court Josephine before asking her father for her hand in marriage. As it was, he had spoken barely three words to her before their wedding day, too shy to do much more than introduce himself.

She had been a fiery tempered young woman of twenty, furious at being pushed into an arranged marriage. He had been a tongue tied besotted fool, ignorant in the ways of women and desperately in love. He still remembered the words she had spat at him as they stood before the altar as if she had spoken them yesterday.

“I hate you for doing this to me,” she had cried, her slender shoulders shaking with anger and despair. “I was supposed to marry William. We were going to be happy together. So happy…”

Unfortunately, it seemed that in his haste to marry Josephine he had neglected to discover her heart had already been taken by another, the young and carefree Marquess of Winchester, heir apparent to one of the greatest dukedoms in all of England.

Instead of marrying her love she had been forced to marry him, a mere Earl, and a rather poor one at that all things compared.

Traverson had often wondered why her father agreed to the match, especially if a future Duke had been in the mix, only to find out shortly after their wedding that the Marquess of Winchester had never intended to make Josephine his (at least not by legal means), a fact her father knew all too well.

She had sworn on the night of their wedding that she would never love him, that she would do her damndest to make him pay for everything he had taken away from her, and she had lived up to that promise in spades.

Traverson had never imagined that she would take her revenge so far, nor carry it for so long. Every month that passed of their marriage she had withdrawn from him further, until she was shell of her former vibrant, spirited self. Like a rare butterfly put under glass she had tucked in her wings and grown dormant, refusing to acknowledge him at every turn. Eventually he had given up trying, until he had seen her again at the second wedding of Margaret and Henry, the Duke and Duchess of Heathridge, and all of his old feelings, long suppressed, had come back in a rush.

He knew that to carry a torch for a woman who had spurned him at every opportunity was pure lunacy. But the heart wanted what the heart wanted, and try as he might Traverson had never felt the same swell of emotions gazing upon another woman as he did when Josephine was within his sights.

She was stubborn to a fault, dramatic, high strung, and unapologetically cruel when she wanted to be – yet she as his, and he was hers, in name if not body and soul.

Cupping the back of his neck, Traverson rocked on his heels and closed his eyes. Yes, the time for action had come. If only he knew what that action would be.

Upstairs, Josephine’s thoughts were running in a similar vein. She had never asked to be married, a fact she had made certain her husband was quite aware of before their nuptials, not that it mattered a whit to him. Traverson had stolen her away from the love of her life, and expected her to be happy about! Was it no wonder she had acted so recklessly and found herself in William’s bed three nights after her marriage vows? Yes, she blamed it on the wine… and William for taking advantage of her at her weakest moment, but she could blame only herself for the time after that… and the time after that… and the time after that.

I should have married William instead of Traverson, she thought fiercely. I should have been a Duchess, presiding over a grand estate. I would have been so very happy.