“And where is Wycliffe?” she asked, her voice sounding shrill.
“He left to go fishing with his friends.”
Emma froze. “He left you alone?”
“No. The barouche and Miss Perchase and the servants are still there. He said that you were angry and that he didn’t want you to hit him, so he would continue our lessons tomorrow.” Jane took her hand, squeezing her fingers.
“I wouldn’t have hit him,” she returned. “I definitely would have scolded him, though, for trying to teach you such dreadful lies.”
Lady Jane smiled, though her eyes remained serious. “I thought it was helpful. For one thing, I think Freddie Mayburne might be a rake. I’m not sure, but I shall certainly pay more attention from now on.”
“Jane, you know I just want you all to do well in your lives, wherever they may take you.”
“I know that. You should tell Lizzy, though. You know how she gets upset when someone else is upset, especially if it’s you. She forgets that you’re not just Miss Emma.”
Emma slowed, looking at the dark-haired beauty. “I’m not just Miss Emma?”
“No. You’re also Emma Grenville, a woman who owns her own business, tries her best to make successes out of silly young girls, and cares for everyone else’s happiness above her own.” Jane smiled at her. “She even takes on wagers with dukes so she can afford to help even more young girls.”
“My goodness.” Emma squeezed Jane’s hand tightly, tears pricking her eyes again. “I sometimes forget that you’re not fourteen any longer. You’ve become a young lady—one I would be proud to call a friend.”
Jane kissed her on the cheek. “I just try to be like you.”
Chapter 11
“You aren’t going to catch anything, flinging your hook into the water like that,” Charles Blumton said.
Grey ignored him, launching his fishing line through the air and watching the splash as the weighted end thunked into the pond.
“Now I’m not going to catch anything, either.”
“You weren’t catching anything anyway, Blumton,” Tristan said from his seat on the rocks. “All the fish suffered apoplexies and died when those schoolgirls fell into the water last week. We’d be as successful if we shot into the water with pistols.”
Charles chuckled. “I have a friend, Francis Henning, who tried that once. He told me he spent all day trying to catch the titan of all trouts in a stream at his uncle’s estate, but it wouldn’t come out from under some boulder or other. So he got his pistol and tried to put a round into it.”
Tristan was biting the inside of his lip. “What happened?”
“The ball ricocheted off the boulder, back up out of the water, and went through his Grandmother Abigail’s hat. Said she walloped him in the head with her umbrella. Nearly killed him.”
“Seems only fair.”
Grey barely noted the conversation. Emma had run off crying, and it had been his fault. Women had certainly cried in his presence before, and it had merely annoyed him. They were all so damned good at it. But Emma’s tears had bothered him. They continued to bother him.
What she’d said bothered him even more. She’d been to London, and someone, some man, had hurt her. He wanted to know who it was. At the same time, he wanted to prove to her that not all men were like the damned puff-guts who had distressed her. Grey looked up as a phaeton bearing Alice and Lady Sylvia rolled up and stopped. He took a slow breath. Good God, this was getting confusing.
“Grey, you promised to teach me how to fish,” Alice said, hiking her skirts up as she trod through the grass and brush to his side.
He handed her the rod. “Here. Stick the line in the water until something tugs on it.”
She looked dismayed. “And then what?”
“And then we’ll all faint from surprise,” Tristan said, “since there obviously aren’t any fish in this pond.”
Sylvia sat on a rock, twitching her skirt out into a graceful fall around her ankles. “Why are you all standing here, then? Waiting for mermaids, I suppose? Or schoolgirls?”
Grey would have handed her a setdown to shut her up, but Sylvia rebounded much more quickly than Alice, and he wasn’t in the mood to spar. Instead he abandoned Alice to the fishing pole and took a seat on the boulder beside Tristan.
“How did your lesson go?” the viscount asked. “On second thought, don’t tell me. I shudder just imagining how much damage you’ve done to our gender.”
“Do you recall Emma ever being in London?” Grey asked, keeping his voice pitched low.
“No. Why?”
“She said she’d been there. From her choice of vocabulary, I get the impression that the experience wasn’t a pleasant one.”
“Did she say when she was in town?”
“No.”
Tristan remained silent for a moment. “I don’t know, Grey. She wouldn’t exactly have traveled in our circle. She’s got highborn friends, but she would still have been an instructor at a girls’ school.”
“That’s the same conclusion I came to.” Grey tossed a pebble into the pond. If she’d been anywhere in the vicinity of London, though, he felt as if he should have, would have, sensed it.
“I take it she doesn’t approve of rakes? I hope you didn’t tell her I was one.”
“I said you weren’t a very good one.”
“Oh. Splendid.”
“What are you two conspiring about?” Sylvia cooed, lifting a perfect eyebrow.
“Probably about how they intend to leave us moldering in solitude for the rest of the summer.” Alice stalked over and handed her fishing pole to Charles. “I am not impressed with fishing.”
Blumton looked from the pole in his right hand to the one in his left. “It’s a man’s sport, Alice.”
“Yes,” Sylvia agreed. “Standing about waving your pole in the air and waiting for some poor creature to get tangled on it.”
“Sounds as though you’ve been caught and thrown back in,” Tristan said.
She faced the viscount, her blue eyes wide and innocent. “One can’t help but notice, Dare, that you don’t even have a pole.”
“That’s in your honor, my dear. I don’t want to risk you getting tangled with me again.”
Grey only half-listened to the argument. Frank and straightforward as she was, Emma would have been appalled at the entire exchange. It was demeaning to both sides—and a few weeks ago, it could just as easily have been he as Tristan who was speaking.
“I’m going to have my students join us for dinner at Haverly on Thursday,” he announced. “We will also have dancing.”
“What? You want to set a school full of little girls loose on us?” Blumton straightened so quickly, he nearly fell face-first into the pond.
“Not a school full,” Grey corrected. “Five girls. Plus Miss Emma, I would imagine, and whichever other chaperones she feels are appropriate.”
“Gads,” Blumton said, looking horrified. “You can’t mean for us to—”
Grey stood. “You and Dare will both be in attendance. I need gentlemen for my students to practice with. I’ll have Freddie Mayburne over, as well.” It was possible that he’d misjudged the lad and that he truly did care for Jane. If Mayburne had merely been acting the rake for his benefit, then he still deserved a chance. Blumton continued to look contentious, so Grey strolled to his side. “Look at it as your contribution to helping the correct side win the wager.”
The dandy cleared his throat. “In that case, it’s our duty to our gender.”
“Well, I think it shall be a complete bore,” Alice said, pouting.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Sylvia countered. “I for one am looking forward to a chance to chat with our dear Miss Emma.”
Damnation. If there was one thing he didn’t want, it was Emma being subjected to Lady Sylvia Kincaid’s cat scratches. He would have to devise something to keep Sylvia occupied. Grey glanced speculatively at Tristan.
No, Dare mouthed, obviously readin
g his thoughts.
Hm. The idea had potential, anyway. There had to be something Tristan wanted. Anything but Emma, of course. Emma was his.
The strength of that thought startled him, and it kept him occupied for the rest of the day. Even while he sent off notes to Freddie and to a well-recommended string quartet located in Brighton, his mind was on Emma.
That certainly wasn’t unusual, because thoughts of her—mostly in her damp, transparent shift—already took up a great deal of his time. This, though, was different. It wasn’t just sex—a surprise of titanic proportions, considering sex was the only reason any woman had ever interested him. No, he wanted to talk with her. He liked the sound of her voice, and he liked trying to decipher the way her mind worked.
All evening he found himself halfway to conjuring some reason he needed to see her at once. All evening he kept himself rammed into his chair by the drawing room window, and pretended to read Byron’s latest offering. The dark, sensual poetry did nothing for his mood, and twice he nearly flung the book across the room.
Even Alice seemed to sense how tightly he was drawn, for after her first attempt at thinly veiled flirtation met with only a glare, she subsided. When he finally shot to his feet and announced that he was going to bed, everyone else in the room looked relieved.
Halfway out of his coat, the answer came to him. He snatched the gray superfine out of his valet’s startled fingers and shrugged it on again. “I’m going riding.”
“But Your Grace, now? It’s past midnight.”
“I can tell time, Bundle. Don’t wait up for me.”
“Y—yes, Your Grace.”
It was simple, really, and he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it earlier. He needed to invite Emma and his students to the Haverly soirée.
Emma was half asleep when she heard her office door open. Frowning, she pulled the blanket over her head and pretended not to hear. The books strewn around her on the bed shifted, and either her foot was asleep or a pencil was jabbing her in one toe, but she was too tired to care. Students did come to see her at odd hours from time to time, but it had to be nearly one o’clock in the morning, for heaven’s sake.
Something hit the floor in her office. “Blast,” she mumbled, sitting upright. She rubbed her eyes, yawning and then stretching. Oh, well. Peaceful sleep was fairly rare these days, anyway. When she did doze off, she always dreamed about the same thing: the Duke of Wycliffe.
Staggering into her robe, she shuffled to her bed chamber door and pushed it open the rest of the way. “Is everything all right?” she asked. Midnight visits only seemed to happen when something was amiss.
“I dropped your damned History of Farm Animals on my foot,” a low, masculine voice drawled.
Thankfully she recognized the voice even as she drew in a startled breath to scream. The sound caught in her throat, which was a good thing, or she would have roused the entire Academy with her shriek. “What—what in heaven’s name are you doing here?” she gasped.
The Duke of Wycliffe bent to pick up the fallen book. “Does it tell whether the chicken or the egg came first?” he asked, setting it back on her desk.
“I don’t know. I’m only…to goats.” It occurred to Emma that she might be dreaming, after all. Surreptitiously she pinched her thigh. “Ouch.”
He strode over to her. “Are you all right?”
Somehow he seemed even larger up this close and in the dark. “Yes, I’m fine. But you should go. Now.”
“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?” He reached out and straightened the collar of her robe, tugging her a step closer to him in the process.
“Why…why are you here, then?”
“I came to invite you to a soirée at Haverly,” he said matter-of-factly. “On Thursday evening. I thought my class might benefit from an evening of dining and dancing with actual members of the ton.”
She fleetingly wondered whether he was drunk, but quickly dismissed the thought. He didn’t smell like liquor, and he spoke with his usual clarity. “Oh. You might have sent over a note to tell me that.”
For a long moment the duke looked down at her, though she didn’t know what he could see in the murky darkness of her office. “And I’m sorry if I upset you this afternoon,” he said finally. “I didn’t mean to.”
“We can discuss this tomorrow, Your Grace.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Which is no reason for you to break into the Academy and frighten me half to death.”
His teeth gleamed in the darkness as he smiled. “Then I owe you a second apology.”
“Will you please leave? I need to put in at least an hour of research in the morning, before breakfast.”
“I could help, you know. I submitted my final plans to your Sir John this afternoon.”
“And how would that look, if you helped me to beat you? As if you would. No thank you. I have all the information I need right here.” She gestured at her cluttered office and the stacks upon stacks of research books.
“A book, no matter how diverting, is no substitute for actual experience.” His fingers, still wrapped into her collar, pulled her another step closer, until they were practically touching.
Having a logical conversation in the dark with a tall, handsome rake was extremely difficult. Her mind wanted to wander off in all sorts of tantalizing directions. But he was probably counting on the fact that he turned females’ minds to mush merely by his virile presence. “I am sure you believe that, Your Grace. I find that books serve me quite well, thank you very much.”
“I don’t believe you.”
The low murmur started a warm, tingling sensation that traveled slowly up her legs. “And why is that?” she managed.
“I see all these books around you, covering every topic known to mankind, but how much do you know about actual life, Emma?”
“Just because I have chosen to devote myself to teaching and the gathering of knowledge doesn’t mean I’m some sort of hermit, closed off from the world.”
“It means exactly that you’re some sort of hermit, pretending you’re above feeling warmth and desire.”
She was feeling quite warm, at the moment. “I prefer to use my mind rather than my…” she gestured down the lean length of him,”…my mentula, like men do.” Even saying the word in Latin, she blushed profusely, and hoped he couldn’t see her discomfiture in the dark.
Grey lifted an eyebrow. “‘Nihil est in intellectu quod non feurit in sensu.’ John Locke.”
She should have known he would speak Latin—which meant he knew precisely which part of his anatomy she’d referred to. Her own Latin was quite rusty, now that she had Miss Perchase teaching the class. “‘There is nothing in the mind…which exists apart’—no—‘separate from, the senses.’ Goodness. How long have you been saving that up?”
“Probably for as long as you’ve had mentula memorized.” His fingers caressed her cheek. “What’s a schoolgirl doing learning words like mentula, anyway? You didn’t learn it here—not where male anatomy is referred to as ‘man parts.’”
She couldn’t possibly blush more than she was doing now. “None of your business, Your Grace.”
He leaned against the bookshelf behind him, tugging her up against him in the process. She had to put her hands up against his chest to keep from pressing her body along his. “I’ll wager it was curiosity. You’re probably the brightest woman I’ve ever met. Why should you stop your learning at a certain point just because the books stop teaching?”
She was curious, and growing more so by the moment. The play of his muscles beneath her hands fascinated her, and the low rumble of his voice shivered down her spine. She wanted to explore every inch of him, and wrapped her fingers into his waistcoat to keep them securely in place. Just being alone with him made her feel hot and light-headed and very, very wicked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she stammered, her voice shaking.
“You mean there aren’t other words yo
u’ve memorized? Other words you want to know the true meanings of? Machaera, perhaps? Or follis?”
If he continued, she was going to faint. “Stop that at once.”
“Too vulgar?” he murmured. “Do you prefer capulus, or temo?”
If she hadn’t been thinking about sword hilts or poles, she was now. Involuntarily her gaze strayed down past his hard chest, and then whipped back to his face again as his hands shifted, tugging her long hair forward over her shoulders. His fingers tangled into her curls, twining and gently twisting until she could barely breathe. “You’re only trying to shock me,” she said, swallowing.
“No, I’m not. I’m trying to show you there’s a difference between knowing a word and knowing what it means. Take interfeminium, for example—the place between a woman’s thighs. It’s more than just a word, Emma.”
Before he’d crashed into her life, she thought she knew the word “kiss.” Until he’d kissed her, though, she hadn’t known—really known—what it meant. Until tonight she’d never thought of Latin as arousing.
Even the anatomical vulgarisms she’d memorized had seemed clinical, which was the only reason she’d been able to utter them. When the Duke of Wycliffe said them, though, fire seared through her.
Grey leaned down and gently touched his lips to hers. “Let me teach you, Emma,” he whispered.
Why me? If she asked aloud, he might remember that she was just a headmistress; that he already knew countless women who didn’t need his lessons and could provide him infinitely more pleasure than she could. “You’ll stop if I ask you to?” she breathed.
“Yes. But you won’t ask.”
“You’re very sure—”
He captured her mouth in a deep, slow kiss. Inexperienced as she was, she felt the difference this time; his touch was more focused, and more leisurely, as though he knew they wouldn’t be interrupted tonight.
The logical part of her realized that this could be the best, last, and only chance for her to discover what it was like to be in a man’s embrace. Her heart and her nerves and her flesh all came to tingling, burning awareness at his touch, like time had stopped and accelerated all in the same moment.
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