"Good evening, Monsieur le Duc," Daisy calmly replied to a man she knew only by notorious reputation. Whatever calculated reason Isme had for forcing this introduction—the Duc was obviously in her clutches—Daisy refused to rise to the bait. In fact, had Isme known Empress's sister-in-law, she would have realized Daisy rarely showed her feelings.
The heat of the spring evening was palpable despite the high ceilings in the ballroom and the opened terrace-doors, the choking density of guests intensifying its effect. When Isme turned away, distracted by a young officer whispering in her ear, the Duc and Daisy seemed the only silent people in the ballroom awash with music, dancers, and animated guests.
"Is it this warm in Montana?" the Duc inquired, the weather always a polite way of avoiding conversation. He was already half-looking away over the heads of the milling crowd, gauging the distance to the door.
"Do you really care?" Daisy said as Isme drifted off on the officer's arm, like a spoiled child, uninterested in Daisy and the Duc now that her vengeful stratagem had failed.
His gaze came back instantly, green-eyed and mildly inquisitive. In the utter boredom of Adelaide's party, a small spark of interest flared. His voice when he answered was as neutral as hers, but his glance took in the tall slender dark-haired woman for the first time with more than his normal polite disregard. "Of course not," he said with a smile. "Do you care whether I care?"
Daisy refused to respond to his enticing lazy smile. The man was obviously familiar with the potency of his charm. He would have to find some other woman to fawn over him. "Should I?"
She was intensely direct, he decided, looking at her now with genuine interest. "I don't see why," he replied, smiling that celebrated smile he'd learned to use so successfully. He'd been sixteen when he'd first employed it to advantage and the intervening years had proved its perfection. Women responded to it, and adored him.
She didn't smile back.
She was the half-blood's sister, he immediately thought, with some of the same inherent arrogance Empress Jordan's husband conveyed. "You're Trey Braddock-Black's sister," he said, as though methodically taking note of her aloud.
"Half sister," she abruptly replied, the distinction seemingly relevant to her. She hadn't moved, her stance one of infinite repose, her hands lightly clasped around her ivory-handled fan.
"Ah… you're Adelaide's houseguest." His tone was one of gratified revelation: the name with the face with the circumstances all suddenly coming together. Valentin had spoken of Daisy; she was in Paris as legal advisor for Empress.
"Apparently," Daisy bluntly said, her headache adding asperity to her voice, "you didn't listen to Isme's introduction."
My, she was bristly, he thought, and unbidden, a second more speculative thought surfaced, habitual in a man favored in boudoirs across the Continent. Would she be bristly in bed?—an interesting concept. "Forgive me," he blandly apologized, enchanted with the small touches of fire in her black eyes. "Isme tends to chatter on." He was perhaps baiting her slightly with the taint of chauvinism in his last phrase, but a certain amount of truth existed in his declaration. Isme's conversation was generally forgettable.
"As do all women?" she retorted, her tone adversarial.
"Are we in court?" His voice dropped a husky octave or so and turned silken. He never rose to the petulance in a woman's tone. She intrigued him curiously, despite her contentious manner. She was also strikingly beautiful, like the romantic heroine in Chateaubriand's Atala.
"We aren't anywhere, Monsieur le Duc," Daisy said, responding to the practiced suaveness of his reply with a distinctly icy inflection. "Now if you'll excuse me…"
He watched her thread her way through the crush of people and exit into the hallway, continuing his silent contemplation as she ascended the curved stairway to the living quarters on the floor above. Mademoiselle Black, it seemed, was deserting the party.
A good idea actually, he decided the next moment as the final swish of her creme satin gown disappeared around the corner. He'd outstayed his original intentions.
He found in the course of his evening gambling at the Jockey Club that while he may have consciously dismissed the coolly acerbic Mademoiselle Black when she disappeared from sight up the stairs, her aloof dark eyes were reappearing frequently in his memory, as did recurring images of her standing before him with her extraordinary poise and arrogance, so unusual in a woman. Maybe it was the aqua vitae from Scotland he was drinking, but he was strangely affected by his vivid memories despite his conscious dislike of her. He disliked her rudeness and her unfeminine ways. She spoke too directly, like a man. He regarded that as unpleasant in a woman. And she hadn't smiled once. He disliked that as well. Women normally exerted a certain genial charm, an intrinsic quality of their gender and social training.
She was too mannish, he decided, as though some choices were being offered him and he was declining. Tossing down his winning hand, he silently reiterated, definitely too mannish.
But the classic perfection of her face insistently reappeared in his thoughts only a moment later as he scooped the gold markers into a pile. Brusque mannerisms aside, he thought, one couldn't deny her beauty. She was darkly exotic like some lush bird of paradise set amidst the frivolous female vanity displayed at Adelaide's tonight. The kind of woman who drew eyes. She'd worn egret feathers in the heavy black coils of her hair, enormous sapphires in her ears, the famed Braddock-Black sapphires no doubt, and a Worth gown suitable for a queen. On a lesser woman the resplendent adornment would have been overwhelming, but Daisy Black's beauty was splendid with an untamed quality that gleamed like shimmering flame. And she was also obviously intelligent. He'd never met a female attorney.
She piqued his interest, he admitted, a logical man at base.
Or perhaps more accurately, what piqued him was her immunity to his charm. Anyone with less assurance would have sensibly forsworn any further contact with Daisy Black and her immunity. Anyone having had less to drink might not even have contemplated her coolness as a challenge. Most men regarded Hazard Black's daughter as a female version of him and wisely withdrew from the field.
Etienne Mattel, Duc de Vec and bearer of a dozen lesser titles, was not most men, had from the cradle been disabused of that notion, and over the years had come to view himself, without conceit, as capable of accomplishing most anything he wished. He wished, he suddenly decided, to bring the cool Mademoiselle Black to bed. It would be like taming a wild creature or perhaps leashing a small storm, he thought, a faint wolfish smile appearing on his aquiline face.
A fascinating challenge.
"Are you ready, de Vec?" The voice of one of his fellow players interrupted his thoughts.
His smile widened. "I'm ready," he said and picked up his new hand.
Daisy had watched Isme's eyes as she'd introduced the Duc, heard the malice in her voice, and wondered what her motives were. It was apparent the minute Isme spoke that the Duc and she had been lovers. That special kind of intimacy between people is forever evident in gesture and mien, although surely with de Vec's reputation that nuance of friendship beyond friendship must be very common. He was reportedly the most sought-after man in Paris.
Definitely of no interest to her.
The absolute antithesis of what she sought in a man, the Duc de Vec was too handsome, too charming, too facilely competent—too idle. Men of his rank did nothing but pursue pleasure and sport. She found the aristocratic ideal disgraceful and reprehensible, a frittering waste of one's life.
Which made her unusual reaction to the Duc so disconcerting.
The thought brought her motionless, her hand suspended over the antique silver hairbrush on the bureautop. Her initial impulse to reach out and touch him when they'd been introduced had been overwhelming. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the Duc de Vec exuded an intemperate virility, as though he were offering luxurious pleasure with his lazy smile and tall lean body and starkly handsome looks.
It was his eyes perhaps which
most enhanced that seductive magnetism. They were heavy-lidded, sensationally lashed, intense somehow despite his insouciance—a deep glittering jungle-green, she remembered with a tiny shiver, like some great stalking cat's. And when he'd bowed over her hand, his gaze automatically holding hers for a long moment with a whisper of invitation habitual and unconscious, only steely willpower had restrained her from touching the dark silk of his bowed head. She'd also wondered in the next flashing moment before he stood upright once more how the powerful muscles of his shoulders, visible beneath his impeccable black evening jacket when he moved—how they would feel. Or how he would look with his jacket off.
With anyone else, perhaps, she might have given into those singular sensations. She wasn't prudish, she thought, grasping the brush with a steady hand and sweeping it through her hair as though she could as easily sweep the Duc from her thoughts. She understood emotion and feeling. Anyone raised an Absarokee on the windswept, open-skied northern plains understood profound emotion.
But the Duc de Vec was too familiar with the power of his charm, too confident of his attraction, a casual predator of female affection. She hadn't cared to be another casual conquest. Her dark hair gleamed in the lamp-lit room as she counted the ritual one hundred strokes before replacing the brush on the mirror-topped bureau. There. Finished. Like her brief meeting with the Duc. She'd been right to deal with him curtly, she told herself, tying the peach-colored ribbon at the neck of her lawn nightgown into a neat bow. There was no point in any degree of friendship with a man who viewed women as transient entertainments, she reflected, slipping between the silk sheets.
Sleep eluded her, however, with the music from Adelaide's ball drifting up the stairs and through the open bedroom windows. How would it feel, she inexplicably mused—a Viennese waltz silvery sweet in her ears, the scent of lilac from the gardens fragrant on the night air—to be held in his arms as they danced? Not only the fantastic thought, but the sudden vivid image of the Duc de Vec holding her close, shocked her for a moment like a numbing blow. The music and the scented air must be affecting her, she decided with swift relentless logic. With reality restored once again, she drew in a small calming breath—a strange necessity if she'd allowed herself leave to notice. Priding herself on her sensible-ness, aware of both her personal assets and liabilities, she'd always credited herself most for her practical assessment of a situation. Overlooking her need for a forced calmness, she reminded herself that both her instinct and logic had judged the Duc and found him unsuitable.
For her particular interest, she quickly qualified. The Duc de Vec, of course, was highly suitable in his aristocratic world. Closely related to the royal family, his pedigree perhaps purer in some respects, his wealth princely by all accounts, his personal attributes—looks and charm, his expertise on the playing field and hunting field, his manner of success with women—were all the inimitable standard for his class.
How could she be even remotely attracted to him? Why was he even in her thoughts?
He was the archetypal bored aristocrat interested only in his pleasure; her roots were in the boundless freedom and simplicity of her ancestors' way of life, where pleasure was a part of life, not its purpose, and common interests supported the clan existence.
Even her training as a lawyer was predicated on the ultimate goal of helping her tribe. She'd learned well from her father about reality and her anchors to the past. Being tied to two cultures wasn't new, but a dilemma that had existed from the moment of first contact with the white man centuries ago. She understood assimilation. You used what you needed, you learned to compromise and negotiate, but beneath the incorporation and discipline, intransmutable and renegade was a deep and abiding knowledge of who she truly was.
She was the daughter of a chief who was himself the descendent of chiefs going back to a time beyond remembrance. Despite the veneer of couturier gowns, continental languages, and college instruction, she was her father's daughter.
And the seductively magnetic Duc de Vec was anathema.
* * *
The following morning with his own plans of an opposite nature, the Duc arranged to have himself invited to an intimate dinner party at Adelaide's.
"You surprise me, Etienne," Adelaide said, intent on the reason de Vec and Valentin were at breakfast with her. "I didn't know you rose so early."
She obviously wasn't aware her husband rose early either, Etienne thought, since he and Valentin made a practice of riding most mornings at dawn when the day was fresh and cool. "A habit from childhood," he pleasantly replied. "I blame it on my nanny. She liked sunrises."
"How sentimental." Adelaide wasn't being condescending or coy. She was in fact genuinely astonished, her opinion of the Duc quite altered.
"I loved old Rennie most as a child," Etienne honestly declared. "She was my family, my friend, my playmate." Essentially without subterfuge, he was secure in his own self-esteem. That too he attributed to his Scottish nanny. Certainly neither of his parents were competent models of maturity. His father had had two obsessions: gambling and mountain climbing. Luckily, he was successful at both, so the family wealth wasn't diminished nor was his presence often felt at home. Regrettably, his luck ran out one day on the rockface of Dag Namur at sixteen thousand feet, and Etienne became the next Duc de Vec at the young age of twelve.
His mother found the role of widow as uninteresting as she'd found marriage and motherhood. Fascinated primarily by society's pleasures, after having done her wifely duty of providing an heir for her husband, she'd entertained herself discreetly with a variety of lovers while her husband was away. At his death, the freedom and independence she'd always craved became a reality and a way of life. From his mother, no doubt, he'd inherited his propensity for sexual adventuring. They'd become friends in his adolescence, when he'd begun to better understand the nature of her interests; she was his confidante now and favorite lunch companion.
"And forgive us for waking you," he added with a smile, aware of Adelaide's struggle to suppress a yawn.
"I will if you tell me what weighty issue brings you to breakfast," Adelaide declared, more curious than tired. Since Valentin never woke her before eleven, this was obviously of some import.
"Etienne would like to be included in our dinner party tonight," her husband casually replied, stirring another spoonful of sugar into his coffee. "I said you'd be delighted."
"You won't be bored?" Adelaide said to the Duc. "We're only having a few people in to dine."
"If Mademoiselle Black is seated beside me I won't be bored," the Duc quietly said.
One couldn't accuse him of subterfuge. He was being exceedingly plain as was the reason now for her early morning call to breakfast. "She's not your type, Etienne." Adelaide gazed at him as a mother might a child asking for some curiosity.
"Let me be the judge of that, Adelaide." The Duc's voice was soft, his expression unreadable.
Her brows rose and she shrugged slightly, a Parisian withdrawal. "Don't say I didn't warn you," she said, her tone cheerful as she considered the interesting possibilities in the Duc's endeavor. "Daisy's even more opinionated than Empress, and stubbornly independent. It must be the air in Montana. She won't be tractable."
"So I discovered when I met her last night," the Duc said with a faint smile. "Despite that, I find her fascinating." Maybe the fascination had to do with the piquant challenge of a woman walking away from him. He couldn't remember that having happened before.
Familiar with the Duc's expression, Valentin gave warning of his own. "Daisy's our guest, Etienne. I won't have her hurt."
The Duc was comfortably lounging in a chair by the window as if he shared breakfast with the Prince and Princess de Chantel often. "Rest easy, Valentin," he reassured his friend, with whom he did breakfast frequently—normally at his home. "I don't intend to force the lady." His voice had the easy confidence of a man more often the recipient of seductive advances than supplicant.
Adelaide laughed, a bright trilling sound
, light as the sun streaming through the windows. "You men are…" She smiled knowingly over the rim of her teacup, her gaze surveying both men looking very boyish in their shirt sleeves and riding pants. "… very naive about Daisy."
Daisy almost turned around and left the drawing room that evening when she saw the Duc de Vec sprawled in one of the embroidered chairs flanking the fireplace, cradling a small tumbler of liquor between his large hands.
But his eyes caught hers when she entered the room as if he'd been watching for her arrival and she begrudged giving him the satisfaction of knowing his presence affected her.
Although he didn't approach her in the half hour before dinner was announced, she caught his gaze on her several times… and he'd smiled then, his promise-of-pleasure smile that managed somehow to be amiable and sweet in addition to its obvious sensual allure.
Tiny flutters of heat stirred her senses when he smiled. While pretending not to notice, she consciously tamped down her strange flutters, not sure if they were anger or anticipation, not wishing to acknowledge she was experiencing any sensations related to the darkly handsome man seated with the animated group of men discussing polo.
He appeared not to participate in the conversation except when asked a direct question, she noted, then chastised herself a moment later for monitoring his activities so closely. The impossibility of any relationship with the infamous Duc de Vec had been thoroughly dealt with last night before she fell asleep, she reminded herself, turning back to the women seated near Adelaide. Forcefully turning her full attention on the merits of pink diamonds as the newest fashion statement in accessories, she concentrated on the discussion of jewelers and styles. She was relieved to hear dinner announced just as the Duchesse Montaine asked her opinion on combining yellow and pink diamonds in a parure.
Her relief was short-lived, however, since the Duc de Vec presented himself as her dinner partner, bowing slightly, offering his arm to escort her into the dining room. He seemed, perhaps because of her surprise, to loom extremely large above her, his closeness penetrating, vividly distracting to her sense of aloof-ness. She wanted to say: Why are you doing this? But too many people were near and expressing those sentiments would suggest he was doing something perhaps he wasn't, and would also indicate the extent of her flustered agitation. So she bit back the words when the Duc pleasantly said, "Good evening, Mademoiselle Black. Are you as hungry as I?"
Forbidden Page 5