“Julia.” Ignoring the animal, Aidan turned to her with a bow.
“Did the second gong go?” she asked, coming in.
“It did.” He paused and glanced over her, frowning in pretended bewilderment. “But I fear Groves must be running late.”
“Groves? Never! I’m the one who’s always late.”
“Exactly.” He reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out his pocket watch. “But not tonight, for there are still three minutes until dinner.” He shook his head, looking at her again as he tucked the watch back into place. “Yet you are already downstairs. You are even dressed.”
Her lips twitched. “Well, I should hope so! I don’t mind being the last one to the table, but as much as I adore scandalizing people, even I haven’t the nerve to come down to dinner naked.”
“That would certainly make the meal more interesting.” He glanced down at the shadowy cleft of her low, heart-shaped neckline. “And more delicious.”
She blushed. He watched it happen, a soft wash of delicate pink that started beneath her gown and spread upward. He followed it with his eyes—over her clavicle and across her shoulders, along her throat, and into her cheeks. Her lips parted, but no words came out. Her enormous eyes stared back at him, and their violet-blue color seemed even more vivid now in the dusky twilight of evening than it had in the bright light of the afternoon. As Aidan looked at her, he saw something in her startled expression and wide, pretty eyes, something that took him utterly by surprise, something he realized, to his chagrin, that he’d never seen in her face before.
Desire.
His body responded at once—a tensing in his muscles, a quickening of his pulses, but then she was giving him a wink and a smile, and he thought perhaps he’d been mistaken.
“Why, Aidan,” she drawled, her voice light and teasing, “I do believe you are flirting with me.”
“No,” he denied gravely. “I don’t flirt, Julia. You know that. I always say what I honestly mean.”
She stirred, lifting a gloved hand to touch the side of her neck in a self-conscious gesture, and her blush deepened, but before she could reply, Phoebe Marlowe appeared behind her in the doorway, Geoff Danbury on her heels. “Are we late?” Phoebe asked, sounding a bit out of breath, pressing a hand to her ribs.
Aidan saw Julia smile, but as earlier today, there was an artificial quality about it—reminding him of a marionette whose strings had just been pulled.
“Not yet!” she answered her friend, turning her head with a laugh, “but we will be if you two keep dawdling.”
“This from the person who never arrives anywhere on time.” Phoebe looked past Julia and spied him standing by the bookshelves. “Oh!” she exclaimed, and dipped a curtsy. “Your Grace. I didn’t see you. My apologies.”
He bowed. “Miss Phoebe.”
“Aidan,” Julia said, nudging Spike aside with her foot and turning sideways as she gestured her friend into the library, “will you escort Phoebe into the hall?”
“Of course.” Reluctantly, knowing it was far better for both their reputations if he walked to the staircase hall with another woman on his arm, he turned to Phoebe. “Shall we?”
She moved to his side, and Geoff entered through the French doors, earning himself a growl from Spike as Julia pulled him to her side. “And Geoff can escort me,” she told him, hooking her arm through his.
“What?” Geoff scoffed, for at nineteen, he was somewhat inclined to be cavalier about social niceties. “That’s just silly. We’re only twenty feet away. You girls hardly need escorting that far, and it’s not as if we’ll be paired this way to go into dinner.”
“That doesn’t matter, Geoff,” Aidan told the younger man over his shoulder as he started with Phoebe toward the door. “A lady’s request is reason enough.”
They joined the other two dozen people gathered to go in to dinner, and he parted from Phoebe to join Eugenia, for as the gentleman of highest rank present, he was duty-bound to escort his hostess into the dining room. As he waited beside her at the table, he watched the other guests file in, and Julia passed him on the arm of Sir George Debenham. She took her place on the other side of the table, and though she was not directly across from him, he could see her face plainly. When she glanced in his direction, he saw none of the desire he thought he’d seen earlier, and he could only conclude that he’d imagined it.
That was probably just as well. He was here to stop wanting her, and if she started wanting him, that resolution would become far harder to keep.
As Julia had predicted, he was groped beneath the dining table by Lady Esterhazy, who sat on his other side, but once she’d been allowed an appreciative feel of his thigh and knee, the elderly lady proved a surprisingly interesting dinner companion. Her late husband had been a diplomatic attaché in Ceylon, and their conversation centered on her life there with her husband. He was grateful for the distraction. If his dinner companion had been dull, he doubted he could have managed to keep up a pretense of disinterest in the violet-eyed woman across the table.
After dinner, however, when he and the other gentlemen joined the ladies in the music room for entertainments, Julia became harder to ignore.
She was standing by the open doorway onto the terrace when he came in, talking to Eugenia, Phoebe, and Phoebe’s older sister, Vivian, but when she caught sight of him entering the room, she murmured something to her aunt, and a moment later, he found himself at Eugenia’s mercy. She bustled over to his side, issued a fervent promise to make his stay at Danbury as enjoyable as possible, and ushered him at once to a tête-à-tête sofa and a blushing Miss McGill. “There, my dears,” Eugenia said, thrusting him toward Miss McGill with all the delicacy of a freight train. “Now, do enjoy yourselves.”
With that, she departed in a flutter of ecru lace, leaving Aidan and the girl facing each other on the S-shaped settee. They both stared for a moment, seeming equally disconcerted, and then they both laughed.
“That was deuced awkward, was it not, Miss McGill?” he murmured.
“I should say. I feel like a card forced at bridge!”
“An apt description. Lady Danbury is not the most subtle hostess, I fear.”
Again they looked at each other, and there was a long, rather awkward pause. She glanced around the room and so did he, but when his gaze came to rest on Julia, who still stood by the terrace door with her friends, Aidan knew this wouldn’t do. He took a deep breath and forced his attention back to his companion.
“Is your family near here, Miss McGill?” he asked.
“Yes, at South Brent. My father has an estate there.”
“He is a man of property, then?”
“Yes, he is a squire.” At his urging, she began to tell him about her family, much to his relief, but it wasn’t long before his relief began to evaporate into dismay, for within half an hour, he found himself on the receiving end of a dissertation that could have been titled, “The Pranks of the Family McGill.”
All of them, he learned, had an inordinate fondness for practical jokes, including Miss McGill herself. Her initial awkwardness having evaporated, she confessed with relish to turning drawers filled with clothes upside down, slipping garden snakes between bedsheets, and putting salt in the jam pot, and despite his best intentions, Aidan’s attention soon drifted, sliding eventually back to the terrace door. Julia was no longer there, but a quick glance around located her on the other side of the room beside Paul at the fireplace.
He bent his head as if looking down at the glass of port in his hand, trying to be subtle as his glance slid sideways to the woman by the fireplace, even as he tried to resist, even as he reminded himself she’d never really wanted him, not even when she’d stood in front of him in a soaking wet dress. But such reminders were useless, for what kept coming to the forefront of his mind was how she’d looked earlier in the dusky shadows of the library, her lips parted and her cheeks flushed with color, and he wanted to believe she wanted him as much as he wanted her. For t
hat, Aidan knew he ought to give himself a good swift kick in the head.
Once again he forced his attention to his companion. “Your family sounds quite mischievous,” he murmured.
“Oh yes, we’re all terrible, Your Grace, just too terrible for words! Particularly my niece.”
Desperate, Aidan grasped at that. “Ah, you have a niece. How old?”
“Ten. And when it comes to mischief, that child puts the rest of us to shame.”
Aidan did not point out just what a feat that truly was. His restraint, however, was rewarded with yet another story. “Let me tell you what Sally did only a few weeks ago,” Miss McGill offered, and, with the occasional murmured query from him, she proceeded to give him a detailed account of little Sally’s most recent prank, a long story that somehow involved the vicar of her village, a cuckoo clock, and a frog.
Aidan tried, he really did, to give her his full, undivided attention, but when Julia once more moved directly into his line of vision, sitting down at the piano, she was perfectly visible to him past Miss McGill’s right shoulder. Spike, never far from her heels, settled beneath the instrument, and Phoebe moved to her side to turn the pages for her.
“She vowed, most convincingly, that she’d put the frog back in the pond,” Miss McGill was saying as Julia ran her hands over the piano keys, “but one can’t ever believe a word out of that child’s mouth. She’d hidden it, the little imp.”
“Play ‘Maple Leaf Rag,’ Julie, do,” Geoff entreated from the card table, where he was playing bridge with three of his friends, but she shook her head. Beside her, Phoebe pointed to the sheet music on the stand and asked a question, but again she shook her head and Phoebe drifted away, obviously unneeded to turn the pages. She started to play, but then stopped, her gaze meeting his over the long, polished top of the grand piano. She glanced at Miss McGill, then back at him, and the corners of her mouth curved in an unmistakable smile, one he suspected was at his expense.
Recalling that Miss McGill had fallen silent, he jerked to attention again, striving to remember where their conversation about Sally’s frog had got to. “But where did she put it?” he asked, and feeling Julia’s amused gaze on him, he gave his companion his most charming smile. “You mustn’t keep me in suspense, Miss McGill.”
“Well, that’s where the vicar comes into it, Your Grace. You see, he was supposed to come to tea . . .”
Julia began to play, and the beautiful notes of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata poured from her instrument in a delicate stream. Aidan managed to last about fifteen seconds before looking up again, and when he did, he lost all hope of keeping track of where little Sally McGill might have put her frog.
Julia’s head was tilted slightly in a pensive pose, and the dreamy, faraway look on her face riveted him. He wondered if she was even reading the notes, or if she was playing the entire piece from memory. When she closed her eyes, he had his answer.
Her lips parted and her head fell back, exposing fully the bare, luscious column of her throat, and it was so enticing, so erotic, that the arousal he’d been trying to keep at bay all evening flared up inside him at once, as quick and hot as the flare of a match.
Some things were just too much for any man, and Aidan gave up the fight. That night at Covent Garden a few weeks ago, he’d striven to remember the details of what had happened in Cornwall, but now, he didn’t even try. Instead, he imagined it, recreating in the space of a few heartbeats what might have been, conjuring luscious images that spread the arousal through his body like wildfire.
He had to keep it contained lest what he felt became evident to the girl opposite him, who had done nothing to deserve his wayward thoughts and lack of attention. He jerked in his seat, took a hefty swallow of port, and forced his gaze back to his companion.
“And what,” Miss McGill was saying, “do you think happened next?”
“I can’t imagine,” he answered truthfully.
“The clock struck five!”
Aidan stared at her blankly, and she was forced to explain. “That’s where she’d hidden the frog! It popped out of the clock along with the cuckoo, and landed with a splat right on top of the vicar’s head!” Miss McGill laughed at the memory evoked by her own story, laughed so hard, in fact, that she began snorting through her nose.
Aidan laughed, too, forcing a polite chuckle, which was all he could manage in the circumstances. “Charming,” he said, and took another swallow of port. “Absolutely charming.”
With the snorting laughter of Miss McGill still echoing in his ears and lust for Julia flooding through his body, Aidan realized this house party was going to be a very long fortnight. If he managed to get through it with his honor intact, he wouldn’t just be cured of Julia. He’d be a candidate for sainthood.
Breakfast at large country house parties usually consisted of warming dishes on the sideboard from eight o’clock until eleven, and the Danbury household kept to this custom. Julia wasn’t in the dining room when Aidan came down at nine, and since he’d spent most of the night engaged in erotic dreams about her, he was rather glad of her absence from the table.
Miss McGill was there, however, and when she gave him a big, beaming smile, Aidan made short work of his bacon and kidneys, gulped down his tea, and beat a quick retreat to the outdoors, thinking a walk in the cool morning air would do him good.
He skirted the edge of the long south lawn where some of the guests were playing croquet, passed the tennis courts where a footman was chalking the lines for later in the day, and strolled through the rose garden. When he reached the millpond at the edge of the woods, he started to turn around and go back, but then he saw Julia, and he stopped.
She was walking along the edge of the pond, Spike at her side, and when she circled the water, she saw him and also came to a halt.
He took a step toward her, and she turned as if she hadn’t seen him, veering off the main path, away from the pond. A moment later, she ducked into a thicket of rhododendrons, and disappeared.
She was avoiding him, he realized in surprise. But why?
Perhaps she’d spent a restless night, too. Perhaps she’d had some erotic dreams about him. Perhaps she’d tossed and turned and felt the same hot, desperate need he’d spent the night feeling. It was unlikely, he knew. Julia always seemed cool and polished, always ready with a witty remark, always in complete command of herself. He couldn’t imagine her hot and desperate.
Looking back, he realized it had always been that way. Unavailable to him from the very first, she had always been the forbidden fruit he craved, and though he had always tried to deny it or suppress it, it had always been there, ever since that day on the footbridge. She knew that, she’d always known. And even now, after she’d used that knowledge for her own purposes, he still burned for her, while she still remained aloof, cool, and polished. Even without a husband, she seemed curiously unobtainable and untouchable, almost as if there was a wall of glass around her. But what was beneath that polished surface?
He thought about that day in Cornwall, of how brazenly seductive she’d been. What had she felt that day? Had she wanted him at all? When he’d woken up and seen Yardley standing in the doorway, when he’d realized how thoroughly he’d been used, he’d concluded that all the seduction was an act by a woman with a cold heart and a ruthless purpose, but the woman in the library had not seemed cold and ruthless at all. She’d looked soft, and warm, and vulnerable. And then she’d shoved Phoebe Marlowe in his face. And then Eileen McGill. And now she was avoiding him.
Aidan stared at the break in the rhododendrons where she’d pushed through them to get away, and he took a step forward, but then he stopped.
He ought to let her go. He ought to go back to the house, join the others on the lawn, challenge Paul to a chess game—anything but go after her. And yet the idea that she might have spent the night feeling some of what he felt, that underneath her cool veneer she might want him as much as he wanted her, was too irresistible to ignore.
&nbs
p; He retreated back amid the trees and came around from another path, one that intersected with the one she was now walking. This was a chance to get closer to the truth, to see again the soft, vulnerable woman he’d seen in the library, and he wasn’t going to waste it.
Spike, however, appeared to have different ideas about the matter. As Aidan approached where they had stopped by a fountain, his footsteps on the gravel alerted the animal, who looked up from the clump of thyme he was sniffing and gave a low growl of warning.
Julia turned as well, and the moment she saw him, she gave a glance around as if seeking a means of escape or a diversion. Finding none, she returned her attention to him with a charming smile, but he saw the artificial quality of it. She did not seem glad to see him, but he was undeterred.
Spike growled again, and Julia’s hand tightened on the leash in her gloved fingers. “Spike,” she admonished, and the animal quieted.
“Good morning,” Aidan greeted her, coming closer, keeping a wary eye on the animal. “You really should do something about that dog,” he said, halting in front of her. “He’s a menace.”
“You only say that because you don’t like him,” she said, reaching down to pat Spike’s flank before turning to continue down the path.
“I’m not the one who growls every time we meet, Julia,” Aidan pointed out as he fell in step beside her. “Still, one of these days, I shall be forced to show your dog that I am not only bigger than he is, but also far more ferocious when I choose to be.”
“Are you?” She shot a sideways glance at him. “I’ve never seen your ferocious side.”
“If that animal growls at me again, you will.”
Today, however, Spike deigned to be gracious. He allowed this interloper to walk with them, although he did keep his short, stout body firmly planted between Aidan and his mistress.
“Have you been out walking long this morning?” she asked as they merged into the thickly planted grove of beech trees.
Scandal of the Year Page 15