*
Phineas was a surprisingly companionable escort, once Jane got him away from his treatises and tomes. He set a sauntering pace through Hyde Park, which was reaching its full summer glory, and he’d spared Jane any exhortations regarding his infernal Duke.
Jane hated that Duke, which was very bad of her. “Does any part of you look forward to retirement, Phineas?”
He tipped his hat to a pair of schoolgirls out with their governess. “Yes and no. Being able to settle here in Town, rather than haring up to Oxford or Cambridge, will be welcome. The best collections are here. Many of my colleagues are here.”
“But?”
They came to a divergence of the footpath, which ran parallel to Park Lane, though beneath the towering maples of the park itself.
“But Lord Amesbury is here.”
“What has his lordship to do with…?”
Phineas had spoken literally. Amesbury was driving a high-perch phaeton down the nearest carriageway, his daughter at his side. His lordship either did not see or chose not to acknowledge his brother-in-law.
Lady Maude was chattering at a great rate, exuding the forced gaiety of a young woman who had only her papa to drive out with.
“Every time,” Phineas said quietly, “I see that strutting dunderwhelp with his pretty little barmy-froth of a daughter, I grow angry. The marquess might have done something for Philomena, might have eased her way. Now she’s to be a spinster, no household of her own, no children. All of the scholars and lecturers I’ve paraded before her haven’t gained her notice, nor she theirs. Amesbury hasn’t lifted so much as a gloved finger.”
The words vibrated with indignation, also with veiled bewilderment.
“You have written countless letters of recommendation for your former students,” Jane said. “You’ve invited younger professors to serve as guest lecturers. You will read a draft treatise for any colleague. Your nature is kind and generous. Amesbury wasn’t given your charitable spirit or your intellect. I suspect he’s been waiting for you to ask for his help, Phin.”
The phaeton disappeared around a bend in the path.
“Waiting for me to ask? Waiting for me to ask Philomena’s only titled, wealthy relation to toss her a crumb of recognition? To invite her to a family gathering at the holidays? A house party or a musicale?”
Jane drew him gently along the walkway. “Does Philomena have a wardrobe that would allow her to attend those entertainments in style, or would she be shamed by comparison to her cousin?”
“Philomena has frocks.”
“So does that nursemaid,” Jane said, nodding in the direction of a young woman in brown twill leading a small boy by the hand. “If you don’t know the state of Philomena’s wardrobe, how can her uncle know? If she was asked to play a tune on the pianoforte, could she oblige without stumbling over the keys when earls and baronets were in the room rather than schoolboys and scholars?”
Phineas remained silent as they crossed from the park into Kensington. That he was annoyed on his daughter’s behalf was a pleasant surprise. That he hadn’t done anything to address the problem was to be expected. Amesbury was a marquess, and his neglect of his niece shameful.
“The Eagan Brothers’ Emporium makes a good impression,” Phineas said as they approached a sparkling shop window. Dried bouquets, groupings of patent remedies in colorful bottles, and artfully displayed herbals and sachets all enticed passersby to drop in.
“And what on earth are they advertising?” Jane asked.
For in the middle of the window sat a placard lettered in an extravagant hand: Secrets of the Ages! Your Heart’s Desire, from the Long Lost Duke’s Book of Science! Found by Wisdom’s Handmaiden Right Here in London!”
“The flat-catching, bat-fowling scandaroons,” Phineas spluttered. “They lied to me!”
“They’re lying to every customer they can fleece,” Jane replied. “But if we’re to learn anything beyond the obvious about their swindling, then you will wait right here until I come back.”
Before Phineas could gainsay her, she marched up to the shop and swept through the door.
*
The time had come for Philomena to take her first lover—very likely her only lover, ever, for Ramsdale engaged not only her curiosity and her desire, but also her esteem. He’d said he did not embark on this interlude lightly, and neither did Philomena.
However much regard Ramsdale brought to this lovemaking, Philomena brought more.
Nonetheless, she had no applicable experience.
“Do we resume kissing?” she asked. “Or is there something more?”
Ramsdale was braced above her, the sight of him shirtless making her itch to touch his arms and chest.
“There’s more of whatever brings you pleasure, Philomena.”
Certainly, there was more of him. He’d fit himself against the juncture of her thighs, and his weight felt good—and frustrating.
“When will you remove your breeches?”
Ramsdale closed his eyes, as if taking a moment for prayer. “Would you like me to tend to that detail now?”
Getting him naked was not a detail. “Yes.”
His weight was gone, and then his breeches were sailing across the office to join the pile of clothing on the sofa. He stood over Philomena, a dark version of the aroused masculine ideal viewed from an interesting perspective.
“Boni di.”
“You resort to Latin,” he said, resuming his crouch over her. “Was that a happy ‘good gods,’ or a dismayed—?”
Philomena lashed her arms and legs around him, wanting to envelop him bodily. She hushed his prattling with an openmouthed kiss, because the sight of him—fit, strong, and aroused—sent a wild boldness singing through her.
She—boring bluestocking, entirely unremarkable—was to have a lover, and such a lover.
Ramsdale laughed against her mouth and tried to hold himself away, but Philomena had locked her ankles at the small of his back, so he took her with him.
“Now, Ramsdale,” she said. “Immediately. You promised me pleasure, and I’m holding you to your word.”
“This instant? Where is the woman who will spend an hour noting every possible meaning for an obscure term? The woman who becomes so absorbed in the possibilities of the genitive case that she forgets to eat?”
“She’s here, and she’s absorbed with you.”
Ramsdale hitched delectably close—why did that feel so lovely?—then brushed Philomena’s hair back from her brow. “This is too important to rush. Please trust me, Philomena.”
Trust him. He was in complete earnest, almost grave, when he’d been laughing a moment ago.
And he was right. This moment was important, not in the sense of ridding Philomena of virginal ignorance, though she was happy to be free of it, but in the sense that the experience should be savored, and Ramsdale knew better than she how to go about that.
“In this, I trust you.”
He shifted so he was more over her, all around her, a blanket of warmth and wonder. As he pressed soft kisses to her lips, brow, and throat, she closed her eyes and explored him with her hands.
She learned textures—smooth, bristly, crinkly, velvety, silky—and tastes. A touch of salt, a hint of lavender. His palms where callused—Ramsdale was a noted equestrian—and his hair was thick and soft.
And she learned a new vocabulary. Ramsdale let her know that he liked her fingertips gliding over the slope of his back, liked her teeth scraping his earlobe. He sighed, he growled, he laughed, and when she glossed her hand down his belly, he drew in a swift breath, but made no move to deter her.
So she learned him, there, where he was most masculine and most vulnerable.
He bore her exploration silently, his head bowed, his mouth open against her shoulder, until Philomena positioned him against her sex.
“There’s more,” she said. “I know there’s more you would show me, but Ramsdale, I cannot be patient. Not in this. Not any longer.”
>
He shifted to meet her gaze. “My name”—he pushed forward the first inch, and the union was begun—“is Seton.”
Seton. My Seton. My lover Seton.
Philomena might have made up a whole glossary of singular possessive endearments, but sensations crowded her intellect into silence. The intimacy was strange and new, the pleasure complicated. To join this way was an exquisite relief. Ramsdale somehow knew the tempo, the touches, the everything to satisfy her bodily cravings.
When to slow down and kiss.
When to gather her close and sink deep.
When to go still for a moment, so Philomena could revel in the intimacy and swallow past the lump in her throat.
And then he turned his attention to her breasts, and simmering desire became a wildfire of need. His hands were diabolical, until Philomena began cursing in a low, steady stream of French—modern French, which was all she could manage.
He answered in the same language. “Hold on to me, Philomena. Stay with me.”
To hear that silky, sinuous tongue rendered in Ramsdale’s night-sky voice destroyed the last filament anchoring Philomena to reason. She became pleasure, an incandescent spirit where a quiet, bookish woman used to be.
The physical experience was beyond words and ebbed barely short of too much. Philomena sensed Ramsdale’s consideration in that intimate mercy, for the emotions flowed on unchecked even as he withdrew and spent on her belly.
Joy and tenderness swamped her, as did an inexorable undertow of sadness. She would have these moments with Ramsdale, but that’s all she could have—moments.
Precious, wild, unimaginably intimate moments. The inspiration for poetry that endured for millennia, but still, for her there could be only moments. She could give Ramsdale her whole heart, and likely already had. She could love him without limit, but eventually—he was a peer, he needed legitimate heirs—she would have to let him go.
“I can feel that great, elegant brain of yours pulling you back to the damned library,” Ramsdale growled. “I account myself proud that for all of twenty minutes, I could tempt you away from your quest.”
Twenty minutes that would change the rest of Philomena’s life, and she was not sorry.
She ruffled his hair. “Our quest. I feel as if an idea lurks in the shadows of those codicils, an insight that refuses to come into the light.”
He rested his cheek against her temple. “A pattern that won’t emerge. I know what you mean. Hephaestus is laughing at us. Don’t move.”
He was on his feet and rifling the pile of clothing in the next instant. Philomena lay on her back amid pillows and blankets, her shift undone and bunched beneath her ribs.
“What a glorious picture you make,” he said, using a handkerchief to swab at himself. He was matter-of-fact about the whole shockingly personal business, handling his own flesh with brisk familiarity.
While Philomena felt as if she’d been reborn in another woman’s skin. I know so many languages and so little that matters.
Without putting on so much as a shirt, Ramsdale knelt beside her and used the handkerchief on her belly, then tugged the shift down over her thighs and gave her a pat between her legs.
“Lest the sight of you tempt me to excesses my conscience forbids. Take a soaking bath when you get home tonight, please. I was not as restrained as I’d hoped to be. Next time…”
His gaze traveled over her, and a world of passionate possibilities blossomed in the silence. Philomena stretched up and kissed him.
He kissed her back, gently cupping her right breast, and a few of those possibilities crept nearer.
A soft scraping sound at the door intruded.
“I will make the damned beast into a pair of gloves,” Ramsdale said, going to the door and opening it an entire six inches.
Genesis strolled in, tail held high, nose wrinkling.
“‘A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast,’” Philomena quoted, “‘but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.’ I doubt Proverbs contemplated such a creature as Genesis.”
Ramsdale pulled a shirt over his head as the cat stropped itself against his bare legs. They’d clearly done this often—the man donning clothing with the cat in casual attendance—and Philomena was jealous of that cat.
“I’m sure my breeches are somewhere…”
Philomena rose and passed Ramsdale his breeches. “Why did Hephaestus name his cat Genesis?”
Ramsdale took the breeches, shook them once, and stepped into them. “Because that cat is the originator of all mischief, perhaps? Perhaps he’s the runt of a litter of seven, all of whom were named in alphabetical order. I don’t suppose you could locate—”
She passed him his waistcoat, and with each piece of clothing, Philomena yielded a little more to the pull of the library. Her heart wanted to linger here, where she and Ramsdale had become lovers. Her mind sought the safety of the linguistic challenge Hephaestus had bequeathed her, because she needed a refuge from her emotions.
“Your hair,” Ramsdale said when the pillows and blankets were all put to rights and he was dressed but for his coat. “Your coiffure has been disarranged.”
Philomena looked over at him between lacing up her left boot and the right. “By the wind, perhaps?”
Ramsdale slung his cravat about his neck and blew her a kiss. “By a mighty tempest.”
Hephaestus had prosed on in several places about tempests. With the flame of a devouring fire, with scattering, and tempest, and hailstones, was his favorite quote.
“Was Hephaestus particularly religious?” Philomena asked as she tied Ramsdale’s cravat.
“Hardly. Uncle had contempt for what he called the pious hypocrites of proper society. I want you again already, Philomena. I thought if we indulged our passions, I might have a prayer of—”
She kissed him and ran her fingers through his hair, which the tempest had also left sticking up on one side. “We have work to do, your lordship. Why so many biblical references from a man who disdained religion?”
Ramsdale caught her hand and kissed her palm. “Am I already back to being a lordship, Philomena?”
That one small kiss caused inconvenient, lovely stirrings. “When we leave this office, you will most definitely be a lordship, and I will be a Miss Peebles, sir. On that topic, I will brook no discussion.”
He kept hold of her hand, leaned back against the desk, and drew Philomena between his legs.
“‘She is more precious than rubies,’” he said, kissing her knuckles this time, “‘and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her.’”
Some of the most beautiful words in the Bible, and Ramsdale looked like he was about to offer her more lovely quotes.
Philomena wanted to hear them, but later, because her imagination chose then to leap upon a potential connection.
“That’s it,” Philomena said. “The biblical allusions. Hephaestus uses them frequently, more than any other reference, almost to the exclusion of any other reference. For a learned man to limit himself to a single source of literary comparisons makes no sense.”
“Philomena, might we discuss dear Uncle and his daft—?”
“Come along, Ramsdale. We must list every biblical reference in the will, because if I’m right, this could be a clue to the Duke’s whereabouts.”
The cat resumed his place on the hassock, and Ramsdale pushed away from the desk. “To the library, then, but let me see to your hair first.”
Her—Philomena put a hand to her head—hair. Her thoroughly mussed hair. “Of course. I’m as bad as my father.”
A gallant lover would have argued with her. Ramsdale smiled, tidied up her braid, and escorted her to the library.
Chapter Seven
‡
Three days remained until Peebles’s retirement banquet, and little remained of Ramsdale’s sanity.
Philomena had hastened through the remaining codicils for the sole purpose of listing biblical quotes or allusions, while Ramsdale
had done his paltry best to aid her. The family Bible—an enormous tome of ancient pedigree—probably hadn’t seen this much consultation in all its decades of gathering dust.
Nor had the library been the scene of so many kisses.
Only kisses, alas. Ramsdale had ordered a ring for his intended, though he’d yet to settle on an inscription.
The front door banged and Genesis, who’d taken to supervising his owner, was startled from his napping place to the left of the desk blotter.
“My sister is apparently going out,” Ramsdale said. Meaning the person most likely to intrude had considerately left the premises.
Philomena sat at the desk, petting the cat and staring out the window. She stared out the window often, and looked lovely doing it too.
“Her ladyship isn’t off to pay calls,” she said. “She must have a visitor. A coach and four have pulled up out front, very fine. Matched grays in harness.”
Ramsdale went to the window, which had been cracked to let in the fresh air. Amesbury’s crest adorned the coach door, though Philomena likely hadn’t noticed that. She went back to scrawling quotations from the will, intent as ever on finding any trace of her Duke.
Ramsdale had found his countess and wished the dratted Duke were not still such a matter of urgency for her.
“If Melissa is entertaining, I’d best put in an appearance,” he said, because he was nothing if not a dutiful brother. “Will you manage without me?”
Philomena waved a hand, not even looking up. “There’s a pattern here, Ramsdale. I know there’s a pattern. I can feel it.”
The pattern was he longed to visit the office with her again, and she longed to find the Duke. Gentlemanly scruples weighed in favor of offering the lady a formal proposal—or at least chatting up the professor—before another such interlude.
If Philomena had to choose between spending one of the next seventy-two hours in her intended’s bed or pursuing her Duke, he suspected she’d choose the Duke.
Ramsdale paused, his hand on the door latch. “You want to find the Liber Ducis for yourself, don’t you? Not only for the professor.”
How to Find a Duke in Ten Days Page 9