Master of Love (17 page)

Lady Mildred chose that same moment to make her reappearance, after an absence of almost an hour during which Callista suspected her great-aunt had slipped out with Sir George. Mildred stormed over to the seated lady like a battleship with guns blazing. “That gel, Hortence, is my grandniece and great-granddaughter to the fourth Duke of Galbridge! I'll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head! She's no more a hussy than you were the first Season you came out and got caught in that unfortunate situation with young Halworth. I would have hoped,” she sniffed, “the episode taught you some enduring lesson about society's love of false gossip.”

Callista walked stiffly to the two older ladies, who were bristling and glowering at each other like bulldogs in a fight. She laid a calming hand on Lady Mildred's arm and tried to position herself between the two. “Please, Great-Aunt, you mustn't upset yourself.” She curtsied to the other lady, whom she recognized as Lady Worley, a dowager countess and renowned dragon. She suspected explaining herself would have no effect but felt compelled to make the attempt, if only to keep her great-aunt from the warpath.

“Lady Worley, contrary to any rumors you may have heard, I'm a simply a book dealer serving at the moment to organize Lord Rexton's library. My work supports our household now that my father has passed away.”

“Hardly a suitable occupation for a woman, and an unmarried gel at that,” the older lady said scathingly. “Couldn't you be a governess and look after someone's children, if you're not able to marry and have your own?”

“I work as I do, my lady, to continue the business my father started and because I love books,” Callista managed to say with quiet dignity. “Not everyone marries, and if I took up residence in a household as governess, I wouldn't be able to supervise my young sister and aid my great-aunt in our own household.”

“So instead you spend your days at Rexton's and allow him to flaunt you at his table and around town. I've heard about these goings-on, missy! I think you should be ashamed—and you too, Mildred, for allowing your great-niece to carry on so!” She thumped her cane on the polished wooden floor.

Lady Mildred shouldered Callista aside. “My great-niece is a baron's daughter and respectable gentlewoman!” She stomped her own cane even more loudly, drawing the attention, Callista saw, of everyone at their end of the salon. “It's perfectly reputable for her to accept Rexton's escort to scholarly lectures or events such as this. There is nothing untoward in the situation—why, he has even paid me a call at home!”

The dowager narrowed her eyes. “Either you're a gentlewoman or you're not, Mildred. If you're always prattling on about books like some radical bluestocking and working in trade unchaperoned around the likes of that pretty rogue”—she threw a nod toward Rexton, apparently blithely oblivious and holding court with another knot of ladies across the reception room—“then people are going to talk.”

“Small-minded people will talk, Hortence.” Her great-aunt raised her chin in the air, looking more formidable than Callista could ever recall. “Others will show their breeding by recognizing my great-niece as an intelligent and upstanding young woman, following in her father's footsteps and supporting her household.”

Beatrice, who'd been standing back, waded valiantly into the fray. “Miss Higginbotham is a founding participant and current board member of the Christian Ladies' Charitable and Reform Society of Love. She's providing me most invaluable assistance in organizing this year's charity ball. I vouch completely for her.”

Their hostess, Lady Yarborough, came over as well and, in a soothing tone, tried to smooth the waters. “No doubt you're correct about a gentlewoman's behavior, Lady Worley, in regard to when you yourself were a young lady, but times are changing. Our empire is most ably led by a female monarch. Young women are following Queen Victoria's noble example by taking more of an interest in intellectual training. Perhaps you've heard of Mrs. Reid's plans to open a Ladies College in Bedford Square? It is to be the first college in England for the education of women. I expect it might help women eventually enter the professions.”

“I think that's disgraceful,” harrumphed Lady Worley. “Everyone knows the sphere of womanhood is family and home. Filling a girl's head with books and professional matters will only weaken her constitution and ruin her morals. It's like creating a monster.”

“If that be the case, my lady,” Callista said through lips gone numb, “I'm sure you'd agree no man would be interested in such a monster as myself, for either wife or mistress. By your own logic, those rumors to which you referred must be mistaken.”

She stood tall and straight, gripping her hands together tightly to control the trembles racking her frame. At her back, she felt Lady Mildred, Lady Beatrice, and Lady Yarborough form a phalanx of support. It proved enough, finally, to wring a grudging grunt out of Lady Worley and force her to turn away.

The dragon had backed down.

For now.

After the entertainment of
that
little scene, the party soon broke up, ladies whispering behind fans and casting glances at Callista as they climbed into their carriages.

Dom didn't want to part company with his beleaguered librarian. By her tight mouth and stiff back, he could tell her nerves were badly frayed. Plotting quickly, he dragged Uncle George over for respectable cover—as if that lusty old devil had anything respectable on his mind—and insisted on the two of them escorting Lady Mildred and Callista back to their home in the Avery carriage, to spare them the hackney ride.

Upon arrival at Bloomsbury Square, Lady Mildred for her part insisted “dear Rexton” and Sir George come in for sherry, to thank them for their kindness. The lady was convinced the unpleasantness at the musicale had already blown over. She'd never before heard a word breathed against her sweet great-niece and couldn't imagine why Lady Worley would say such nasty things except that “Hortence had always been a horrid tittle-tattler.” In Callista's immediate “Of course, Great-Aunt, I'm sure you're right,” Dom read her wish to keep Lady Mildred in the dark about the gossip swirling around town.

The older couple finished their sherry in record time and excused themselves after Sir George expressed the most pressing desire to tour the back garden and see “dear Mildred's glorious hair lit up in the setting sun.” The compliment had Callista rolling her eyes, but Mildred blushed like a schoolgirl and headed out the terrace doors with something suspiciously like a giggle.

“I see now where you get your charm, my lord.” Callista's lips curled into a tired smile. She leaned forward on the threadbare sofa, sighing deeply and reaching up to rub her neck.

Dom's hands itched to take up the task. He'd watched her battle Lady Worley from across the room, his gut twisting with the knowledge that he had to stay away or risk making things worse. He allowed himself to move onto the sofa to sit beside her and take her hands into his. Playing with those long and elegant fingers of hers had recently become an obsession.

“My charm pales, apparently, beside that of such a notorious and torrid seductress as you.” He aimed for a teasing tone, threading his fingers through her own.

But she put a shaky hand against his chest. “Please, don't make fun. We both know I'm a plain and simple woman, Lord Rexton.” She held up the declaration and his title like a shield.

He barked his laughter, frustration clawing at his groin and at something that felt strangely like his heart. “I'm sorry to disappoint you, love, but there's nothing either plain or simple about you. You can hide all you want behind that prim exterior, but I see you.” He cocked his head at her, puzzling over the fact himself. “I
see
who you really are. You're smarter than most of these scholars you work with. You have a better business head than most of the booksellers. And if you weren't so afraid of your passion, you'd have a far more vibrant beauty than the pretty society matrons I waste my time with. You have a fire within you, bright as your flame-colored hair, if only you'd let it out.
That
is who you are, Callista.”

She pulled away from his gaze as if afraid of beguilement and hugged her arms around her chest. “You sound like Marie.”

“Yes, she sees you too, love—but not the way I do.” He tried a smile, but it only seemed to terrify her.

“Don't smile like that!” she ordered frantically, backing away on the sofa.

“Why not?” He slid toward her. “You make me happy.”

“That's not your happy smile. That's your
Master of Love
smile.” She spit it out like a curse. “It's the one you use on the ladies when you're being
him
and charming them until they melt into a puddle at your feet.” She pushed hard against his shoulders.

He refused to give ground and curled a hand around her face. “Are you afraid of what might happen if you melt into a puddle?” He stroked her flushed cheek and promised in his most wicked voice, “It can be quite a lovely sensation.”

“Dominick”—she used his name and rubbed against his hand, and he felt a shot of triumph that he'd pushed her so far from her propriety—“please, don't flirt and call me ‘love'! Not when it means nothing. I don't want you to be
him
with me. I like the other you.” She blurted it out and then stopped, as if hearing her own words, eyes wide.

It seemed a rejection more than a victory and pricked at his lifetime of shame.
I don't want you to be him.
The brainless golden boy. But it was all he'd ever been.

He stood and turned his back. “I am who I am, Callista,” he said. “I can't help how I look or how I smile. My apologies if it displeases you.”

God, what an irony, if the face that got him women he didn't want cost him the one woman he did desire.

She rose and laid a hand on his shoulder, pursuing him now. If humiliation weren't gnawing at him, he'd have taken advantage of her about-face and made her pay in full. “It's not that!” she said. “It's that you use your looks to hide who you are.”

“What do you know of such things, a prim spinster like you?” He loathed his sulky tone but seemed unable to stop it.

“I can see you as well,
my lord Adonis
. I'm not the only one hiding.” She dragged him around to face her, a growing anger snapping fire into her accusation. “You hide your intelligence and pretend to care for naught but society balls and seductions! Why is that?”

With a growl, he backed her up against the chamber's near-empty bookshelf and kissed her. He had to stop her from talking, from saying things he wasn't ready to hear. And he had to kiss her, damn it, because he wanted her more than he needed to breathe. He needed that mouth under his, and God, she felt so good. He crushed her body to his with one hand tight on her round derriere and the other palming her breast through her gown, rocking into that sweet V between her legs, knowing he was shocking her, pushing her too far too fast, but beyond stopping. Her scent filled his head like a long-forgotten memory of home. He felt her resistance and her response war with each other as he used every bit of his control and technique to force what he wanted out of her: surrender to the waves of pleasure he sent crashing over her.

“This. Is. Who. I. Am.” He ground out the words as he slanted his mouth across hers and lashed her with his tongue.

She broke away to twist her head to the side. “No, it's not! It's only part of what they've made you. You're more. I want the real you!”

Her words scared him so much he let her go. She swayed on her feet, panting loud against the quiet ticking of the mantel clock.

He drew on a lifetime of skill to master his raging lust and pretend calm indifference. “What did you say, my little librarian?” he managed to say in his best aristocratic drawl.

She blanched and took hold of the bookshelf, her mouth tightening.

“Does the Honorable Miss Higginbotham finally admit she wants me? Have you fallen so low as to dally with the likes of me?” He hated the scorn in his voice and the shame he watched it etch onto her lovely open face. His contempt was for himself—
not for her, never for her
.

But he felt himself upon a precipice. He wanted her so much, it was all he could do to resist taking her right here in her shabby morning room. He paced about and seized blindly upon the only tack to distract him from such madness. “That was an interesting move at my sister's—your trying to salvage your reputation by proclaiming your strange intellectual proclivities to all.”

She looked at him, frowning at his change of direction. He watched her work hard to master her breathing and gather her composure. “It did appear to work, at least for the moment,” she said. “And ‘strange'? Isn't that a bit harsh, coming from the patron of a group of philosophers?”