This Duchess of Mine (17 page)

The word sounded as if it came from behind clenched teeth, but: “Yes.”

“I need at least a week,” Elijah said. “God, but we haven't slept together yet, Leopold. And I want it to be joyful. I couldn't bear if she was afraid I would topple over, a corpse from the very act.”

“You are far more fit than your father was. He was quite robust, if you remember.”

“Plump,” Elijah corrected.

“I expect that made exercise more of a danger.” Villiers leaned his head back against the velvet seat and closed his eyes.

“You finally look tired,” Elijah observed.

“You could always do as I do,” Villiers said with his coldly amused smile.

“And that is?”

“I see no point in sleeping if my partner is willing and energetic.”

“She must be
very
energetic,” Elijah said, raising an eyebrow.

“Her name is Marguerite. She is a widow still in
the throes of mourning her elderly husband, or so her family thinks. They expect her to pray at his grave at least two hours a day.”

“Goodness.”

“She tells me that the graveside is much more bearable after one of my visits,” Villiers said.

“Be careful. She'll want to marry you.”

“Nay.”

“They all want you,” Elijah said, amused. “The great Duke of Villiers…one of the richest men in the kingdom, and one of the most successful at evading the parson's noose. You pose a challenge, Leopold, and that is the most dangerous of all positions to be in.”

Villiers shrugged.

“You don't mourn your fiancée, do you?” Elijah asked. “The one who ran off with Jemma's brother?”

“I want what you have.”

There was the stark truth of it, in the open between them. “I know,” Elijah said heavily.

“
Not
Jemma,” Villiers stated. “But a woman of her intelligence and beauty, who looks at me the way she looks at you. If I had what you have, even for one day, I believe I might die happy.”

“Christ,” Elijah said. “I—”

“Then don't let your jealousy make you into a fool.” Villiers's voice grated.

“Christ,” Elijah said again.

They didn't say anything else until the carriage drew up before Beaumont House. Then Leopold opened his heavy lidded eyes and met Elijah's. “You asked me once to keep wooing Jemma so that I could be there when you died. I would ask you to release me from that promise. I love her. But not in the way you supposed.”

His words were sure and steady, and fell on Elijah's soul like a healing balm. “Have you forgiven me, then?”

“For which of your multitudinous sins?” Villiers asked, the sardonic bite back in his voice.

“For stealing your Bess those years ago…for turning my back on you.”

“Oh no,” Villiers said. “I'll mourn the loss of my barmaid until death.”

Elijah blinked.

“You always were a fool,” Villiers murmured, closing his eyes again.

“Be careful,” Elijah warned.

“Or what?”

“I'll leave you a note as well.” He laughed aloud at Villiers's revolted expression.

That afternoon

“W
here are we going?” Elijah asked, handing his wife into the carriage. It couldn't be a fashionable destination because as far as he could tell, Jemma was wearing small side panniers if any, and she certainly wore no wig.

She must have forgiven him for the tempest of the previous night because she smiled teasingly. “It's a secret. I've already instructed Muffet as to our destination.”

For the last nine years he had punished himself for having no wife—or rather for having a wife in France. He had ignored the pleasantries of women who sought his company, avoided the eyes of women who sought money…satisfied himself alone, in his room. Infrequently and unhappily.

Now he felt like tinder about to flare. The curve of
Jemma's lower lip, the faint scent of roses that clung to her skin…

“You never used to like perfume,” he commented, climbing into the coach after her. He thought of sitting beside her, but even without large panniers, her skirts still filled most of the carriage seat.

“I rarely wear scent. I did today only because when I'm naked, I feel more protected with perfume.”

Her words seared Elijah's body and he heard his own hoarse voice as if it were another man's. “We're going to be
naked
?”

She smiled, the eternal smile of the Sphinx. Obviously, she had said all she intended. He spent the rest of the journey tormenting himself by imagining her soft and smooth, creamy white and delicate…

“Don't look at me like that!” she said crossly just as the carriage stopped.

“I can't look at you any other way,” he said to her back as she descended from the carriage.

Elijah descended onto a cobblestone street in a part of London he didn't recognize. It wasn't even a part of London whose smell he recognized. He knew the smell of coal that hung around the Inns of Court, and the smell of cloth dyes down by the Thames. Hyde Park's sooty poplars had no odor, and so the park smelled mostly of dust and sweaty horses. He knew when he was in Smithfield from the odor of dung that spread from it like a fetid gift. Limehouse, where the riots didn't take place…Limehouse smelled like the sea and the cheerful poor, like baking bread and buckets of urine thrown into the street at night.

But this street smelled like lilacs in a country garden. They were standing before a wall with a small door. An old wall, made of round stones and sand that
looked old enough to date to the days of Henry IV, or even earlier than that.

He looked at Jemma but she wasn't going to tell him anything, obviously. So they stood there in the street and smelled lilacs drifting from somewhere, while a footman rang the bell hanging by the door.

A little monk in a rough-woven white robe opened the door.
That
was interesting, and not what Elijah expected. He hadn't thought clearly, but the question of nakedness jostled in his mind into a pleasant anticipation of sin, skin, pleasure…

A witch's brew of sensual experience that monks had no part of.

“As you requested, Your Grace,” the man said, bowing. “The baths are ready.”

Jemma stepped forward. “We are most grateful,
Frater.
” His grizzled head quickly disappeared back through the door.

Elijah grabbed Jemma's arm. “There are no monks in England,” he hissed. “I'm quite sure that Henry VIII did away with them.”

She smiled. “That wasn't a monk. He just looked like one.”

“Then what is he?”

She drew him forward. Inside the old walls there was a great muddy courtyard made of ill-kept pavement though which poked blades of grass and stunted weeds. Lilacs grew in a tangled mess against the wall, pale flowers opening in the first signs of spring. Wild garlic had sprung up around the lilac, adding a touch of pungency to the air.

The door closed behind them. Across the courtyard, square-cut pillars rose to the level of a second floor. Most of the roof was still there, but to the right there
was nothing but rubble. Ahead of them the “monk” vanished into the maze of pillars. For an old man, he was remarkably nimble.

“Come on,” Jemma said, taking Elijah's hand.

“Where are we?” Something was nagging at Elijah's memory but he couldn't bring it to the surface. Swallows were diving and reeling in the open courtyard, flying around the standing pillars, under the roof, and out the other side.

“A Roman
balineum
,” Jemma said.

“Baths,” Elijah said, puzzling it out. “I thought they'd been torn down. Or fallen down, years ago.”

“Just forgotten.”

“What do we do next?”

“The baths are this way.” She led him among the pillars, curved to the right, and a floor paved with half-cracked and dingy blue tiles appeared. There had been mosaics there once. A single blue eye stared up at Elijah from a fractured tile, the curve of a lion's tail from another.

Jemma descended broad shallow steps and the air turned hazy. She walked ahead of him through a warm mist that clung to her hair and turned her pelisse from a rich ruby to a dimmer mauve.

Then they came out into the bath. It was very large, filled with clear water from which rose tendrils of steam. The room had walls of varying heights on three sides, and was sheltered on the fourth by a great bank of overgrown lilacs. There was no sign of the small monk. Without hesitation, Jemma walked around the bath and stood on the other side. He began to follow her, but she shook her head.

“It's divided into men's and women's baths, don't you see?” She pointed down into the clear water. The
tiles on the bath's floor were intact, and clearly divided in two. He could see there must have once been a separating wall, but it had either disintegrated or been torn down.

The men's side, where he stood, depicted a battle scene, a confusion of rearing horses and spears. The women's side, where Jemma stood, depicted women bent over spindles, listening to a harp player.

Jemma smiled at him and took off her pelisse, dropping it on a bench. Underneath, she was wearing a much simpler garment than usual, one that laced in front. She began unlacing it as Elijah tried to pull himself together.

“We're—We're bathing.”

She inclined her head, raising one finger. “Separately. As befits a holy place.”

He looked around. “Holy?”

“Dedicated to Apollo. The Roman god of medicine.”

“How on earth do you know of this place, Jemma?” He was astounded. He wouldn't in a million years have pictured his sophisticated, urbane wife frequenting a run-down ruin of a bath house. Under the water, brilliantly colored tiles glinted like fish scales sliding against each other. The spring air was just cold enough that steam drifted between them occasionally, like a transparent curtain.

“How is it heated? When did you first come here? Who was that man? And—where is he now?”

“He's down below, tending the fires,” she said.

And the questions failed in his throat because she had finished unlacing and, with a simple gesture, slipped off her gown. She was wearing neither a corset nor panniers. Her petticoats must have been part of
her gown, because now she wore only a chemise, and Elijah could see the lines of her hips, round and lush, the slender curve of her waist, the beguiling weight of her breasts.

“Jemma,” he said hoarsely.

She raised her arms and began pulling pins from her hair. It fell around her shoulders and below, the shining sleek color of old gold. She was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen in his life. She would have made Apollo cry with desire.

Lust slammed into him along with an urgent, male, possessive claim. She was
his,
damn it. She was his wife, and he hadn't had her, hadn't been with her, hadn't taken her—

He tossed off his wig. He wrenched off his coat and threw it on the bench behind him, pulling his shirt over his head—

Caught sight of her fascinated eyes through his lifted arms. He stayed there for a moment, arms crossed over his head, one hand holding his shirt.

“I truly have to stay on my side of the baths?” he asked. Elijah looked down at himself. Taking vigorous exercise at the boxing salon made him feel better after long nights of useless talk. So he supposed that his chest was more muscled than those of many gentlemen.

And…it seemed she liked that. Jemma's mouth was a perfect ruby circle. He bent over, slowly, and pulled off his boots.

“I should take
everything
off?”

She nodded.

“Everything?”

She cleared her throat. Damn, but he was enjoying this. “Everything,” she said firmly.

“But you haven't.”

She looked down at herself as if she'd forgotten that her body existed. “I thought I'd wear my chemise,” she said, and then looked at him again.

“Then I suppose I could wear my breeches.”

He unbuttoned the top button of his waistband, watched her eyes. There were some wonderful things about having been married so long. One was that neither of them was a virgin.

“You've changed!” she blurted out.

He unbuttoned another button, lazily. “How so?”

She sketched a shape in the air. “I know the shape of your body. I know you, Elijah. I could—for years I could feel the shape of your shoulder, and your hip, in my fingertips.

His desire cooled for a moment, iced by regret. “God, I'm—”

But she overrode him. “But now you're so much—so much larger. Your shoulders…your height. You must be—”

The stab of guilt in his heart was gone and he was laughing, laughing at the surprise in her voice, at the potent thread of desire in her eyes, at the way she was staring at him.

He undid the fourth and last button. “Aren't you curious about the rest of me?”

“You may undress,” she said regally. A wave of steam rose from the pool and turned her into a nymph, glimmering in her white chemise.

He waited until the air was clear, until she could see every movement of his hands. Then he pulled off his stockings and turned his back.

She made a little muffled sound, and he turned around again, hands still on his breeches. “Did you say something?”

“No…” She was laughing too, but the laughter rode on a wrenching wave of desire. He turned his back again. “Yes! Don't do that!”

This time he turned with his pantaloons wrenched down just a bit. He knew the front was tented. And he knew that when it came to male equipment, his was larger than most.

“How long were we together, all those years ago?” he asked her.

She dragged her gaze from his front. “Two weeks? Three?” One shoulder rose.

“I think it was more. A month, perhaps.”

“I'm sure there's one part of your body that hasn't changed,” she said, one corner of her mouth quirking up in a wicked smile.

But he felt as if
he
had. As if the very sight of her turned him mad with lust. And he'd never been mad with lust. Not for his young wife whom he hardly knew. Not for Sarah Cobbett, his unimaginative, if reliable, mistress.

“Don't stop now,” Jemma called, and there was something in that throaty call that shook loose a different Elijah than the man he knew.

He let his eyes range over her, linger on her breasts. Then he hitched down his pantaloons again, pulling his smalls with them. He knew she was watching, so he put his hand down his front and gave himself a slow caress.

He heard a gasp of laughter from the other side of the pool and met the eyes of his wife, felt that roaring, purring rage of lust through his body again. He had waited a long time to feel that, and perhaps its strength was ten times greater for the wait. He kicked off his pantaloons and stood there, letting her see what his
side of the marriage brought her. Wondering, if the truth be told, about those famed
affaires
she had had while living in Paris. Two, he had heard, or perhaps three.

He thought, at the time, that it was her revenge, and her right. He had destroyed her dignity and her faith. She had the right to do the same. But she'd chosen puny fellows to have
affaires
with, men who would never challenge her on any front.

Jemma pulled her gaze away without saying anything and began testing the water with her foot, one slender toe poking into the warm water.

“Not in your chemise, I would hope?”

She didn't listen, of course. Jemma was unlikely ever to listen if the advice went against what she wanted to do. He waited while she walked down the steps into the bath, enjoying the curve of her hips, the pink glow of her skin, the way he could dimly see cloth clinging to her legs as she went deeper.

To his disappointment, she sat down on a middle step, the water swirling around her waist. The tips of her hair, thrown back over her shoulders, trailed in the water.

He moved down his flight of stairs. The water was as warm as a baby's bath. It was unfortunate that in his state of lust even the gentle lap of the water drove him into more of a fever.

“Jemma,” he said hoarsely.

“Yes?” She was leaning back against the steps now. Her white shift was turning transparent as the wavelets touched it. He could see her long slender legs sprawled on the steps, slightly askew. It was enough to make his blood pound in his chest.

Now the water was lapping at her breasts.

“So I stay on my side of the pool, and you stay on yours,” he said.

“Yes.”

“But I came here to know you better.”

She opened her eyes, and the look in them should have been outlawed, just for the better good of all mankind. “We can talk,” she suggested.

“Jesus,” he muttered.

“You go ahead,” she said.

“What?” He felt drugged, as if the air was disappearing from the pool.

“Teach me something about yourself,” she said. Her voice was soft but her gaze scorched him, lingering, admiring.