Dukes to the Left of Me, Princes to the Right (2 page)

Poppy yawned. “Yes, he rusticates somewhere far away.”

Eversly drew in his chin. “Never heard of him.”

“He’s quite wicked.”

“Wicked?” The earl raised his brow.

“Wickedly handsome, that is,” Poppy recovered. She thought again of Sergei. “We met three years ago. Remember the year I missed that impromptu boat race on the Thames?”

“Oh, yes. I do recall. My side won, actually. I had a prime spot at the front of the boat, and Miles Fosberry fell in the river. We couldn’t fish him out until we’d finished.”

“Right.” She gave him a sheepish smile. “Well, while you and your team were rowing past your less-favored acquaintances, I was on a walking tour of the Cotswolds. The duke was on one, too. We met at a village fair.”

“But your father—” The earl’s brow puckered. “Lord Derby never mentioned it. He said you were free to accept my offer.”

“Drummond hasn’t exactly
offered
for me yet,” she explained. “But he’s”—she paused—“on the verge.”

She’d been quite clever to have come up with that phrase—
on the verge
. Her previous suitors had found it suitably vague, so that when they saw her dancing for weeks and months—and some, for
years
after her rejection of them—they didn’t think to question her story.

“It’s simply a matter of time,” she said. “I’ve never told my father. It’s my secret”—she laid a hand on her heart—“my secret of the heart.” She allowed her voice to go a bit trembly. “And I’m not willing to reveal it yet, even to Papa.”

Lord Derby would be furious, of course, that she’d turned down the earl’s suit. But surely he’d recover. He was far too busy toiling away for England to waste time being angry at her for long, especially if she cried and told him she was waiting for a true love match, like his and Mama’s.

The earl looked down at his well-polished Hessian boots, and when he looked up again, his gaze was both besotted and disappointed.

“I still like you,” Poppy protested. “As a friend. This little … engagement thing between us—let’s forget it, shall we? I’ll see you throughout the Season, won’t I? We can share a waltz.” Although her dream was to share her next waltz with Sergei.

She dared to lean forward and give Eversly a small kiss on his cheek. She wasn’t one to dispense her kisses lightly, and the whole
ton
knew this of her.

“I shall hold you to that waltz,” the earl said, a little gruff. She could tell he genuinely cared for her. Nevertheless, his old good cheer sneaked back into his tone.

“I look forward to it.” She smiled. “Meanwhile, I know I can count on you to be discreet. Please don’t say a word to anyone about our … conversation.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” The earl bowed and left the drawing room without another word.

She waited a few seconds for Kettle to open the front door, then she ran to the window and looked out. Lord Eversly descended the front steps rather slowly. Poppy recognized that walk. It was the gait of a jilted bachelor. She’d induced it in many men.

But by the time he ascended the steps of his fine carriage waiting on the street, the earl’s pace had picked up to his regular jolly one. And why shouldn’t it? He was a wealthy, handsome peer of the realm with tremendous charm. Plenty of women would accept his suit. Why, she’d put a bug in several girls’ ears this very week.

She turned around to see Aunt Charlotte standing in the door, a loose curl from her wig hanging in her eye and making her look quite the scamp. “I heard every word,” she whispered loudly. “I’m
so
proud of you for following your heart. But—”

“But what?”

“We’re doomed. I hope your emergency suitcase is packed.”

“It is,” Poppy said in a thin voice.

“You know the procedure. Now that Waterloo is behind us, Spinsters in untenable situations no longer retreat to the north of Scotland. We’re forced to go to Paris!”

Aunt Charlotte appeared delighted at the prospect.

“Poppy?”
It was her father’s voice. She could hear him in his boots, clomping down the hall toward the drawing room. “That wasn’t the earl leaving, was it? I’ve brandy and cigars in the library to celebrate your betrothal.”

Outside, Lord Eversly’s coachman cracked his whip, and he was gone.

But Poppy’s problems had only begun.

CHAPTER 2

Nicholas Staunton had always been a light sleeper—growing up in a drafty castle that took the brunt of howling North Sea storms had seen to that—so when he felt someone shaking him, saying, “Wake up, Nicholas,” he knew, wherever he was in the ether of his mind, that something was wrong. No one should have to shake him to wake him up.

Especially when he knew he had something to do. He couldn’t remember
what,
but it was something rather urgent and distasteful.

He opened an eye. A shaft of morning sunlight pierced the edge of his vision, blinding him.

And then he smelled something.

Lilies.

God, he hated lilies. They reminded him of his parents’ funerals. But someone he knew—someone he’d bedded—wore a lily scent. And he seemed to recall that he endured the cloying odor because she was very good at—

Yes. At
that
. What she was doing now.

He closed his eye again and sank back into that hazy, sublime world, where he basked in hot, carnal sensation and forgot all about the distasteful, urgent thing.

But then the hot, carnal sensation suddenly stopped. He groaned and wished with all his might for it to come back.

“Nicky, wake up,” a feminine voice insisted.

He winced and ignored it.

“I don’t
do
things like this in the daylight,” the heavily accented voice went on, “and I have no intention of going further. I’m only trying to wake you up. So
wake up
.”

He felt a light slap on his right cheek, and with a great deal of will and a tremendous amount of reluctance, he managed to open his right eye and confront the pest jarring him awake.

Good God. Now he remembered who wore the lily scent. She lay a mere inch from his face, her hard brown eyes glinting with impatience and her ebony curls falling around her face.

The way a witch’s would,
he had the incongruous thought.

“Natasha,” he muttered.

The Russian princess.

She rested her cheek on her hands and smiled at him—a slow, heated smile. He’d a vague recollection of sipping brandy from her navel sometime after midnight, but he couldn’t remember anything after that.

His limbs were sore and he had a pounding head and he’d really like to go back to sleep, to tell the truth.

Back to a
deep
sleep.

“Nicky,” she hissed in his ear, “the Howells come back from Sussex this afternoon.” She placed the flat of her palm on his bare chest. “If they find you here, they’ll make me pack my bags and return to St. Petersburg. Don’t doze off again! It’s almost eleven.”

Eleven?

Eleven wasn’t good. Eleven was bad, in fact.

He felt confused. Why had he stayed?

He never stayed.

Morning sunlight, he’d come to discover, was like a splash of cold water on a man and an excuse for clinging in a woman. “You’re right,” he muttered as he rolled out of bed. “I’ve got to go.”

Natasha’s eyebrows lowered over her small, elegant nose. “You don’t have to agree so readily. Many men crave to wake up in my bed.”

Nicholas didn’t mind annoyed females—their pique gave him an opportunity to appease them with his special “I-know-you’re-angry-but-you’ll-forget-after-I-do-this-to-you” restorative (something he’d picked up from an Indian text), but today he didn’t have time.

Today—

Ah. Now he remembered. Today was the day he was to find Frank before the big cockfight to be held at noon in Cheapside, which he was sure his brother would attend, and remind him (last time it was by holding him upside down out a second-floor window) that he really mustn’t gamble away his allowance anymore, nor steal spoons from White’s.

Yes, that was Nicholas’s plan, to reform his recalcitrant brother.

And snow would fall in London in July—

But it was still his plan. He wasn’t allowed to give up hope on Frank. It was one of the self-imposed rules he’d established for himself after their father had died.

“Nicholas.” The princess slapped the coverlet. “Are you even listening to me?”

He found his dove-colored breeches and pulled them on. “Yes, and it’s a good thing you woke me,” he soothed her. “I’ve got a meeting with my lead attorney. He tells me it’s important.”

It was his standard line, but come to think of it, Groop
had
called him into his office last week. Nicholas had been too involved, however, to bother showing up. Young widowed Russian princesses with voluptuous figures, bewitching accents, and superior connections made for quite a good reason for ignoring obligations. He’d go see Groop straight after he’d rattled Frank’s teeth.

That is—he amended, and pulled his shirt over his head—after he’d calmly talked sense into his brother.

He strode to a small mirror above Natasha’s bureau, willed his own dissolute reflection to be noble, and made quick work of his cravat, ignoring the fact that he needed to shave. Then ran his fingers through his hair once, and gave his head a shake, like a dog.

There. The look served him well enough, judging by the number of women who batted their lashes at him in the street and the number of men who crossed to the other side to avoid him.

“Prinny was right.” Natasha compressed her lips. “You
are
an Impossible Bachelor, and I’m a fool to share my bed with you.”

He wouldn’t deny it. Being selected an Impossible Bachelor last year with his good friends Harry, Lumley, and Arrow had only given him
more
reason to kick up his heels while he could. While the weeklong wager had been vastly amusing—who wouldn’t love entering one’s mistress in the Most Delectable Companion contest?—he’d come
this
close to legshackles. One of the losing mistresses’ consorts had been forced to marry. Luckily, that sad fate hadn’t fallen to him or any of his friends but to a weasel who’d been seducing young virgins for years and getting away with it—until Prinny’s scandalous bet, that is.

Which reminded Nicholas—he
was
a Bachelor, known for his skill at evading the parson’s mousetrap—so what was he still doing here? And where was his damned coat?

He bent low, sending a crashing pain through his head. But there the rumpled garment lay, under the bed, a comfortable nest for two snoozing corgis.

Natasha lifted her feet, and he nudged the dogs awake long enough to pull the coat from under them with the least amount of disturbance to their slumber.

When he stood, a slant of that dreaded morning sunlight hit him square in the eye.

As if on cue, Natasha bounded from the bed and took his arm. “Imagine the children we could have if we married.” Her expression was more determined than dreamy. “
My
hair.
Your
blue eyes. And the boys with that sweet cleft in their chins, like you.”

She pulled him closer, and he paused in his dressing, one arm inside his coat sleeve. “I’m sure I mentioned I’ve no intention of marrying and having children of whom I’m aware for at least another decade, possibly two.”

He was an expert at seduction and was damned sure she wasn’t in danger of producing any ebony-haired, blue-eyed children any time soon—ones fathered by him, that is. The women he bedded never seemed to notice how disciplined he was, how carefully he kept a wall up between them, even in the throes of passion—

Especially
in the throes of passion.

He looked around the room for his hat and found it next to another corgi—Boris, the one with the missing eye—and a small, empty bottle of brandy on the floor by the bed. Of the two glasses nearby, one had a golden puddle in the bottom. The other—he picked it up and sniffed it—had never been used.

Natasha laughed, but he caught an uneasiness in her tone. “Men and their brandy. It turns them into—” She gave him a smoldering look then, and he knew she was thinking of their sensual play of the evening before. Or attempting to get
him
to think of it.

She bit her lip.

He sat down on the bed next to her and shackled her slender wrists with his fingers. “Tell me truthfully what happened,” he said. His voice was firm. But fairly gentle, for a man with a sore head, a growing suspicion, and an unfulfilled, hot carnal need.

She lowered her eyes.

“Natasha?”

“All right.” She looked up, her tone defiant. “I took liberties last night. I added something to the brandy because I wanted you to
stay.
Is that too much to ask?”