‘Perhaps I like this habit. Perhaps you err by insulting a lady’s dress.’
Merrick laughed out loud. ‘You forget I saw your evening gown a few nights back. At least one item in your wardrobe suggests you have some sense of fashion. As for your “liking” the habit, I do think you like that riding habit. I think you like being invisible. It gives you permission to sail through life without being noticed and that makes you unaccountable. People can only talk about things they see.’
That made her head swivel in his direction. ‘How dare you?’ Now she was angry. The earlier cool hauteur had melted under the rising heat of her temper.
‘How dare I do what?’ Merrick stoked the coals a little more. He liked her better this way—she was real when she was angry.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I do and I want to be sure you know what I mean. I want you to say it.’ The real Lady Alixe didn’t think about what she was going to say or do, she just did it, like kicking him under the table. Such a quality would make her unique, set her apart from the pattern-card women of the ton. Well, maybe not the kicking part, but there was a certain appeal in her freshness. The real Lady Alixe had a natural wit and a sharp understanding of human nature. The masked Lady Alixe was prim and invisible and quite the stick-in-the-mud. That Lady Alixe thought too much and acted upon too little, tried too hard to be something she wasn’t—a woman devoid of any feeling.
Merrick took in the smooth profile of her jaw, the firm set of her mouth. There was plenty of feeling in Lady Alixe. She’d simply chosen to stifle it. It would certainly help his cause if he could work out why. Then he could coax it back to life.
She wasn’t going to answer his question. ‘It’s not in your best interest to ignore me, Alixe,’ he prodded.
‘I know. Don’t remind me. If I ignore you now, I’ll spend the rest of my life ignoring you as my husband.’ She rolled her eyes in exasperation. If the road had allowed room for it, Merrick was sure she’d like to have trotted on ahead. But she couldn’t keep running from this; surely she knew it.
Just when he thought he’d made her squirm a bit mentally, forced her to face the reality of her situation, she startled him. ‘You are quite the hypocrite, St Magnus. How dare you accuse me of being invisible for the sake of unaccountability when you’ve made yourself flagrantly visible for the same reason. Don’t look so surprised, St Magnus. I warned you I knew men like yourself.’
‘I warned you I knew women like you.’
‘So you did. I suppose that gives us something in common.’
Merrick gave her the space of silence. He wasn’t impervious to her feelings. He understood she was angry and he was the only available outlet for that anger. He also understood he was the only one with a chance of truly emerging victorious from this snare. He could turn her into London’s Toast and walk away. He’d still be free to go about his usual ambling through society. But Lady Alixe’s days of freedom would be over whether he succeeded or not. He did feel sorry for her, but he could not say it or show it. She would not want pity, least of all his. Honestly, though, she had to help him a bit with this or they would end up leg-shackled and her chance to choose her fate would be sealed. She was too intelligent to be blind to that most obvious outcome.
Alixe kept her eyes fixed on the road ahead. St Magnus’s silence was far worse than the light humour of his conversation. His silence left her plenty of time to be embarrassed. She wanted to take back her hot words. They’d been mean and cruel and entirely presumptuous. She still could not believe they’d tumbled out of her mouth. She wasn’t even sure she truly thought them, believed them. She’d known St Magnus for a handful of hours, far too little time to make such a damning judgement. It might have been the unkindest thing she’d ever said.
She snuck a sideways look at him in the periphery of her vision. Thankfully, he did not look affected by her harsh words. Instead, he looked confident and at ease. He’d chosen to ride without a hat and now the sun played through his hair, turning it a lovely white-blonde shade aspiring debutantes would envy. Buttermilk. That was it. His hair reminded her of fresh buttermilk.
‘Yes?’
Oh, dear. He’d caught her staring—gawking, really—like a schoolroom miss. But his remarkable blue eyes were friendly, warm even. ‘I’m terribly sorry. I spoke out of turn. It wasn’t well done of me,’ Alixe managed to stammer. It wasn’t the most elegant of apologies; needless to say she had had very little practise apologising to extraordinarily handsome men with buttermilk hair and sharp blue eyes that could look right through her if they so chose.
He gave her a half-grin. ‘Don’t apologise, Lady Alixe. I know what I am.’ That only made her feel worse.
Now she’d really have to make it up to him—as if someone like her could ever make anything up to someone like him. But her conscience demanded she try.
She started by giving him a tour of the ruins. The ruins were in two parts. There was an old Roman fort and the villa. Since the fort was closer to the space the group had appropriated as the picnic grounds, she started with that. Afterwards, they joined the other guests on blankets strewn on the ground, where she promptly began a polite but boring conversation about the state of food being served.
‘Why is it, Lady Alixe, that people talk about food or the weather when they really want to talk about something else,’ St Magnus murmured when she stopped speaking long enough to take a bite of strawberry tart.
‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,’ Alixe said after she swallowed. She did know what he meant. People had the most ridiculous conversations about absolutely nothing because saying what one honestly felt was impolite. But she’d quickly discovered that when conversing with St Magnus, the conversation grew more interesting when he expounded.
St Magnus had finished eating and taken the opportunity to stretch his long form out on the blanket, propping himself up on one arm, a casual vision of indolence and sin in the early summer sun. He lowered his voice slightly above a whisper just loud enough for her to hear. ‘Do you truly believe everyone here wants to talk about the ham sandwiches and jugs of lemonade? Yet everyone’s conversations are the same if you listen.’
‘The ham is rather fine and the lemonade is especially cold,’ Alixe dared to tease.
St Magnus laughed. ‘I’d wager William Barrington over there with Miss Julianne Wood isn’t thinking about the ham and tarts.’
‘What is he thinking about?’ The words were entirely spontaneous and entirely too curious, hardly the right sort of conversational banter for a proper miss. A proper young lady would never encourage what was likely to be an improper avenue of discussion. But St Magnus had a way of encouraging precisely that. She was under the impression that no conversation with him would ever be completely proper.
St Magnus gave a wicked smile. ‘He’s probably thinking how he’d like to lick that smear of strawberry off her lips.’ He gave his eyebrows a meaningful arch. ‘Shocked? Don’t be. They’re all thinking roughly the same thing. Perhaps the place they want to lick varies.’
She was indeed shocked. No one had ever said anything quite so outrageous to her. Ever. But she would not retreat from it. She was fast discovering that being shocked did not have to be the same as being appalled. Since she’d met St Magnus, shock had only increased her curiosity. What else was out there to discover? She’d always thought there was more to life than the veneer society put on its surface. Now, she was starting to discover it, one shocking conversation at a time. Shocking, yes, but intoxicating, too. And, yes, even a little bit empowering, a boost of courage to be the woman in her mind who said witty things, who made challenging statements of her own.
She met his blue eyes squarely, a little smile hovering on her lips. ‘I don’t know what shocks me more: what you said or how you said it with such nonchalance as if you were indeed discussing something as mundane as the weather.’
‘Why not treat it with nonchalance?’ St Magnus gave an elegant lift of his shoulder and reached for a las
t berry. ‘It shouldn’t be a secret that all men really think about is sex.’
Had he just said ‘sex’? In the presence of an unmarried female?
‘Oh, yes, Lady Alixe. Males are not complex creatures when you get right down to it. Why not be honest about it? Consider this your first lesson in becoming London’s Toast. The sooner you embrace the fact as common knowledge, the sooner you can successfully cater to it.’
‘How ironic that you’ve used a food-related term. We’re right back to where we started. Food, the subject people talk about when they’re really thinking about licking people’s lips for them.’ Oh my, oh my. Now was the time to be appalled. She ought to be horrifically shocked by what had come out of her mouth, but she wasn’t. It seemed the natural response to St Magnus’s comment.
‘You can be a rare treat when you decide to employ that tongue of yours for good and not evil, Lady Alixe.’ St Magnus was laughing outright now.
‘People are starting to look,’ Alixe said through the gritted teeth of a forced smile. She was not so given over to the levity of their conversation that she was oblivious to the conditions of their surroundings.
‘We want them to look, don’t we? We want them to wonder what Lady Alixe has said that has St Magnus so captivated. They’re conversational voyeurs. They’re only looking because we’re having more fun than they are.’ He winked a blue eye. ‘And do you know why?’
‘Because we’re not talking about food,’ Alixe replied smartly, thoroughly enjoying herself.
‘Precisely, Lady Alixe. We’re talking about what we want to talk about.’
‘Are you always like this?’ she asked before she lost her courage, before ‘sophisticated woman with witty things to say’ retreated. She’d never let that part of her out to play before. She had no idea how long it would last before she stumbled or ran out of things to say.
Something like solemnity settled between them; a little of the hilarity of the previous conversation receded. His eyes were serious now. ‘I am always myself, Lady Alixe. It’s the one thing I can’t run away from.’
She sensed a reprimand in there somewhere, whether for himself or for her she could not tell. Perhaps she’d crossed an invisible line in her heady excitement. She seemed to be an expert at doing that today. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve been too forward. I don’t know what’s wrong with my mouth today.’
‘Nothing’s wrong with your mouth except maybe a smudge of strawberry tart, just here.’ He gestured to a corner on his own mouth. Alixe’s pulse ratcheted up a notch. He was going to do it. Merrick St Magnus was going to lick her lips. Perhaps the most irrational and wicked thought she’d ever had, but it was a day for all those types of firsts. She took a deep breath, her lips parting ever so slightly in anticipation, her stomach fluttering with curiosity.
He leaned forwards, closing the gap between them … and most disappointingly reached for a napkin.
He dabbed it against her lips, gently wiping away the stain. She knew it was bold. No man had ever touched her mouth before, not even with a napkin. Yet she couldn’t help but feel it wasn’t bold enough. After all their talk of mouths and food and what men were really thinking, a napkin seemed far too tame.
There could only be one awful truth. He hadn’t wanted to. She’d let herself get carried away. In the end, he was Merrick St Magnus, man about town who could have any woman he wanted any time he wanted her, and she was plain Alixe Burke, with an emphasis on the plain. He didn’t want to lick her lips any more than he wanted to marry her, which, of course, was why he was trying so hard so he wouldn’t have to.
Alixe let out a deep breath and stood up. ‘You should see the villa before we go. It’s a bit of a walk, so we’d best start now or there won’t be time before we leave.’
Chapter Seven
‘The villa probably housed military officers, although the larger Roman defences were built at Dover. The lack of a deep-water harbour made Folkestone an unlikely place of attack from the sea. Folkestone was used only as a look-out point.’
She was seeking refuge in her history again. Merrick didn’t think she’d stopped chattering since they’d left the blanket. She’d talked about the local fauna on the walk to the ruin and she’d been a veritable fountain of knowledge once they’d actually reached the ruin. It was undeniably interesting. She was well informed, but he was more interested in what had brought on the change, the reversion. She’d been a lively match for him on the blanket, one that he’d enjoyed far beyond his expectation.
‘This main room here was a banquet hall. We know this because shards of pottery have been found …’ Merrick moved away from her recitation, his eye caught by a short crumbling stair. He went up, thankful for the traction of his boots on the rubble of the remaining steps. But the short climb was worth it. The upper chamber afforded a spectacular view of the sea and of the current Folkestone harbour in the distance. Merrick let the breeze flow over him for a moment as he took in the panorama. He’d discovered that most things looked peaceful from a distance. Distance was useful that way.
‘St Magnus, you shouldn’t be up there,’ she called. But he ignored her. ‘Merrick, it’s dangerous. The steps aren’t stable and goodness knows how treacherous the ground up there is.’ She was looking up at him, shielding her eyes from the sun’s glare.
‘The view is spectacular and not to be missed,’ he called down. He moved towards the steps and offered her a hand. ‘Come up, Alixe. The ground is dry and firm. I don’t think we’re in any danger of sliding down the cliff side today.’
Alixe gave him a look as if to say ‘oh, very well’ and took her skirt in both hands for the climb. She tripped on the third step, giving him another look. This one saying ‘It’s dangerous, I told you so’.
‘Don’t be stubborn, Alixe. Take my hand.’ He came down a few steps to meet her, forcing her to acknowledge his offer. Her hand slid into his, warm and firm, and he tightened his grip, ready to haul her up if necessary. But there were no further mishaps.
At the top, Alixe was transformed. ‘Oh, look at this!’ she gasped. ‘This would have been a splendid look-out. They could see all the way down the coast. Perhaps they could even have sent signals from here. A tower in Dover or Hythe would be able to pick them up.’ She turned to him, her enjoyment evident on her face. ‘I’ve never been up here, you know. In all the years I’ve lived here, I’ve been to the ruins several times, but I’ve never come up the stair.’
She turned back to the view spread before them. ‘To think it’s been here all the time and I’ve missed it.’ The last was said more to herself than to him. The breeze took that moment to be slightly more forceful, toying with her hat. She reached up, hesitated for an instant, then took it off. ‘That’s better,’ she said to no one in particular. Then she closed her eyes and gave her face over to the wind and the sun.
Realisation hit him all at once.
Alixe Burke was a beautiful woman. It was objectively true. He could see it in the fine line of her jaw, the elegant column of her neck, visible only because her head was tilted upwards to the sun. She had a perfect nose, narrow and faintly sloped at the end to give it character. It fit the delicate boning of her face, the slightly raised cheekbones one could only fully appreciate in profile, the generous mouth. Cosmetics could not manufacture a bone structure like that. The grey habit she wore might distract from those finer points of beauty, but a discerning man would see the narrow waist and long legs beneath the bulky skirt. A man wouldn’t have to be that discerning at all to note the high thrust of her breasts beneath the jacket, tempting a man to wonder whether or not that was the doing of nature’s bounty or the assistance of a corset.
It would be simple work to see her gowned according to her attributes, her beauty fully displayed to the gentlemen of the ton. He doubted her earlier debutante wardrobes had done her beauty complete justice. No whites or pale pastels for this lovely creature. She belonged in rich earthy tones, deep russets and golds to show off the walnut sheen of her hair.
Merrick moved behind her, his hands finding a comfortable place at her shoulders. He was used to touching women. He hardly thought anything of the gesture. It was casual and easy. But she tensed at the contact. They would have to work on that. She would want to be comfortable with a casual touch now and then, perhaps even doling out a few touches herself, light gestures on a gentleman’s arm. Men liked to be touched as much as women. Touch had enormous effects to the positive; it made a person memorable, it created a sense of closeness and trust even when a relationship was new.
Well, now he might be going too far. She wasn’t going to seduce anyone. She didn’t need to know all of the tricks he could teach her, just enough to be pleasant, to draw London’s attention and thus the eye of the right kind of gentleman.
‘The view is intoxicating,’ Merrick murmured at her ear and was rewarded with a small sigh of wistfulness.
‘The sea goes on and on. It makes me realise how little of the world I know. I wonder if the Roman who sat here watching wondered the same thing—what’s out there? How much more of the world is there beyond what we’ve already discovered?’
With one of his experienced lovers he’d have drawn her back against him at this moment and wrapped his arms about her, but he knew better than to dare such a thing with Alixe. ‘I wasn’t talking about that view,’ he whispered. ‘I was talking about this one.’ He tucked an errant curl behind her ear. ‘You’re a beautiful woman, Alixe Burke.’
She stiffened. ‘You shouldn’t say things you don’t mean.’
‘Do you doubt me? Or do you doubt yourself? Don’t you think you’re beautiful? Surely you’re not naïve enough to overlook your natural charms.’
She turned to face him, forcing him to relinquish his hold. ‘I’m not naïve. I’m a realist.’
Merrick shrugged a shoulder as if to say he didn’t think much of realism. ‘What has realism taught you, Alixe?’ He folded his arms, waiting to see what she would say next.
How to Disgrace a Lady Page 7