“You’ve now dismissed half a dozen perfectly acceptable young ladies without even talking to them,” she pointed out. “Don’t you think you’re being just a little too picky?”
He shrugged, unperturbed. “I’m a duke. I’m allowed to be picky.”
“For all you know, one of those six young ladies could be the perfect duchess for you. Don’t you want to at least become better acquainted with them before you dismiss them?”
“Not particularly.”
“You might regret it later,” she said. “Other men will sweep them up, and you’ll meet one of them years later and regret that you didn’t take the chance when you had it.”
He looked steadily at her. “Yes,” he agreed with emphasis. “That’s quite possible.”
Julia’s heart slammed against her ribs. “Meeting them takes just a few minutes of your time,” she murmured as she looked away. He couldn’t mean it. He couldn’t mean he felt regret over not pursuing her that day on the footbridge. That was a lifetime ago. She swallowed hard, striving to gather her scattered wits. “A few minutes seems a small price to pay,” she said, sliding a sidelong look at him, “for the chance to fall in love.”
“Perhaps, but as we’ve discussed before, Julia, love is not my most important concern at present.” He paused, looking steadily at her. “Lovemaking, on the other hand, is always important.”
“Ah, but you have a mistress for that,” she said, striving for blasé sophistication, chagrined when her voice came out in a breathless rush.
Her words caused him to laugh under his breath. “Ah, yes, my mistress,” he murmured. “I’d forgotten all about her.”
“Forgotten her?” Julia sniffed, trying to recover her poise. “A fine thing indeed. Poor woman. She must be plain, then, or not very accomplished at her profession, if you forget her so easily.” She paused, but her curiosity was too much to bear. “Who is she? Do I know her?”
“I doubt it. And,” he added giving her a reproving look, “I hardly think my mistress is an appropriate topic while you are telling me about women I might wish to marry.”
“No need to worry about that,” she said with a sigh. “You’ve eliminated all the viable candidates in the room.”
He smiled at her. “What a shame.”
“There will be others at the ball on Friday. Would you like me to tell you about them now?” she added wryly. “That way, you’ll have five full days to come up with your excuses not to meet them.”
His smile widened into a grin. “I’ll wait.”
She gave a huff of exasperation and turned away, studying the young women in the crowd that milled about the room, although she knew it was a waste of time, and she wondered if perhaps she should bow out of working for him altogether. “I know love isn’t your primary concern, but given these excuses you keep offering, I’m wondering if I’m wasting my time. I am beginning to suspect that I could line up a thousand suitable women, and you’d find something wrong with every single one of them. Why?”
“You know why.” He glanced around, then leaned closer to her. “These days I’m far too preoccupied with one particular woman to work up an interest in any others.”
Her lips parted, but for the life of her, she couldn’t think of anything to say. “I—” She stopped, cleared her throat, and it was a full five seconds before she tried again. “Really?” she finally managed. “Do tell. Which woman do you mean?”
He laughed, and she knew her pose of dry sophistication wasn’t fooling him for a second. “I think you know,” he said, his gaze sliding down to her mouth. “I think you’ve always known.”
“Oh no,” she denied, shaking her head, laughing in disbelief, even though panic flooded through her, though she couldn’t say what, precisely, was causing it. All she knew was that her heart was racing and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. “Oh no, no. You can’t possibly mean me.”
His gaze met hers, steady, purposeful, utterly sincere. “I do mean you, Julia. Why do you think I hired you?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice was so low, she barely heard it herself.
“I wanted to be near you,” he said simply. “Is it so astonishing?” he added, watching her face. “Given what happened between us last summer?”
She licked her dry lips, took a frantic glance around. “But that was different!” she whispered, although no one was within earshot. “That was . . .” She stared at him helplessly. “That was an anomaly, a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t remember most of it.” He looked at her mouth again. “But I’d like to.”
Her lips started to tingle, and she forced them into a blasé smile. “Why, Aidan, you’re still carrying a torch for me? I’m flattered. You want to pick up where we left off, I daresay, but really, it’s a bit late for that, isn’t it? We had our fling, darling,” she added with a laugh that she suspected didn’t fool him for a second. “And now it’s over.”
“Not for me.”
“But it is for me, despite all your arrogant assumptions to the contrary.”
“I don’t believe you. Being the arrogant fellow that I am,” he added, assuming an air of mock apology, “I think you’ll have to prove it.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do, you impossible man, but you are being singularly uncooperative with my efforts!”
He grinned. “Really, Julia, what would introducing me to other women, beautiful or otherwise, prove at this point? That you’re a hypocrite?”
She made a sound of outrage, but he ignored it. “Still, there is a way to prove you don’t want me.”
She turned toward the refreshment table, reaching for a crystal flute and the bottle reposing in a bucket of ice, feeling in need of a drink. “What way?”
“Meet me in the maze at midnight.”
“And what?” she scoffed, taking a gulp of champagne. But though the wine was ice-cold, it did nothing to cool her blood. “Allow you to make love to me in the moonlight while I valiantly attempt to resist your considerable charms?”
“Something like that.” He was still smiling, but in his eyes was unmistakable challenge. “If you can resist.”
“And if I do manage that monumental feat, what do I receive in return?”
“Crowing rights?”
She smiled sweetly. “Not good enough. You will agree to dance at least one waltz with each of the beautiful, charming, potential duchesses I’ve selected for you to meet. All six of them, including Lady Frances and Miss Heyer. And you’ll promise me, on your word of honor, to keep an open mind about them.”
He didn’t even hesitate. “Done.” He downed the last of his port and set the glass on the table. “Midnight,” he reminded, turning away. “Don’t be late.”
Aidan waited for her in the center of the maze, trying not to pace amid the ornamental pieces of Danbury’s medieval lawn chess set. It was a glorious night, warm for May, and the strains of piano music and the sound of laughter drifted through the open windows of the house and down to where he sat. The moon was full and bright, and the knee-high granite sculptures scattered around him cast distorted shadows of knights and castles across a chessboard of turf and flagstone squares. He studied the chess pieces as he waited, feeling rather at a loss regarding his own next move.
It was a strange thing, but though he was thirty years old, he’d never actually had to seduce a woman before, and he had absolutely no idea how he was going to set about it. Worse, challenging her to meet him for a midnight rendezvous had been a spur of the moment impulse, and he was not a man given to impulsive things. And just the thought of seducing her, of being able to relive at least some of those tantalizing moments last year, was sending renewed lust through his body that he wasn’t absolutely certain he could contain.
She would come. He knew that. It wasn’t the arrogance of which she had accused him that made him confident. Julia, he felt certain, would never run away from a challenge like the one he’d thrown down a few hours ago. She might laugh in
his face or act cold as a stone, but she’d come. He knew that as surely as he knew anything.
What he didn’t know, and what he should have had the wits to foresee, was that she would not come without reinforcements.
“Spike?” He stared in disbelief at the fat bulldog that trotted into the center of the maze with Julia several minutes past midnight. “You brought Spike with you?”
She laughed, flashing an impudent smile at him in the moonlight. “You didn’t say I couldn’t.”
“No,” he conceded wryly, “I didn’t. I should have, but I’m afraid I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. You’ve outwitted me there. I admit it.”
What he didn’t say was that he had no intention of allowing something as inconsequential as an overfed bulldog with delusions of grandeur to stop him now, but when he took a step toward her, the overfed bulldog in question growled in a very menacing fashion.
“This is hardly fair,” he said as he took another step and earned another warning from the animal by her side.
“If fairness were on your mind, you wouldn’t be trying to seduce your secretary,” she pointed out, her smile widening. “You’d have allowed her to perform the duties you hired her for and never suggested a midnight rendezvous in the maze.”
“Point taken, and you needn’t smirk, Julia. You haven’t won yet. In fact, with Spike here, how do you expect to prove anything? Best if you tie him.”
“Not a chance.” But she glanced at the dog, and seemed to decide on a compromise. “Sit,” she ordered.
Spike planted his bum on the turf at once, but his square head moved watchfully back and forth between her and the distrusted man nearby.
“Satisfied?” she asked, looking at him again.
“Not nearly.” Aidan resumed walking toward her, but he kept one eye on Spike, well aware that a protective dog was not a thing to take lightly. Still, as he came closer, he noted that Spike wasn’t baring teeth, and when faced with his direct stare, the animal looked away. Those, he knew, were very good indications that he could gain the upper hand.
He halted in front of her. He leaned closer, but once again, he was stopped by a growl of warning from Spike. “Are you going to do something about this animal of yours?” he murmured, his lips an inch from hers.
She smiled, seeming confident she was the one with the upper hand just now. “What would you suggest?”
“Shooting’s out of the question, I suppose?” His gaze slid down for another quick look at the bulldog as he leaned even closer to Julia, and when Spike growled again, he was ready.
With a savage sound that caused Julia to jump back in alarm, Aidan moved. Within the blink of an eye, he’d taken Spike by the muzzle and hip and pushed him down onto his side in the grass, and using his superior body weight, he kept the animal firmly pinned. “No,” he said in a calm, firm voice. “No, Spike.”
The dog whined in protest at this unexpected challenge and wriggled fiercely, trying to extricate himself from Aidan’s hold. Aidan, however, didn’t move and didn’t relax, and after several minutes of futile struggle, Spike’s whines lessened, and his efforts to get away became halfhearted. At last, he went completely quiet and still. Aidan waited a bit longer to be sure he’d established his dominance, and then he relented.
“Good boy,” Aidan said and stood up, letting go of the animal, but holding on to the leash and watching for any sign of aggression.
There was none. The dog stood there, quiet and calm, looking at him, then looking away. When Aidan gave the leash a gentle tug and started walking, the animal followed him. He glanced around at the chess pieces scattered about and looped the handle of the leash around one of the crenellations along the top edge of a rook. “Now,” he murmured, returning his attention to her, “where were we?”
Chapter Fourteen
Julia’s confidence that this midnight rendezvous was within her control went from reasonably high to dismally low in about three seconds, the exact amount of time it had taken Aidan to make a snarling sound meaner than any dog she’d ever heard and toss her beloved Spike down to the turf.
A few minutes later, the dog she’d bought because it hated men—her loathsome former husband in particular—was docile as a lamb and safely leashed, and she was beginning to fear she’d made a big mistake in coming here at all. When Aidan began walking back toward her, she had to fight the impulse to run away.
She’d been prepared to let him kiss her. She’d come expecting that, knowing the only way she could put an end to this idea he had in his head was to prove she didn’t want him by being unaffected by his attempts at seduction. Bringing Spike with her had been a whim, the sort of joke that appealed to her mischievous side, and the look on his face, a rather charming combination of humor and chagrin, had made the joke worthwhile. He did know how to make her laugh, she had to admit, usually when he wasn’t trying. But now, with Spike leashed to a granite sculpture and Aidan walking toward her, his expression much more serious and purposeful than before, she wasn’t laughing, and the closer he came, the more her confidence deteriorated.
She tried to remind herself that she was on familiar ground here. She’d kissed him before, quite a few times, in fact, that afternoon last August, so it wasn’t as if there were any surprises in store.
But she couldn’t deny that she’d developed a strange, most inconvenient nervousness around him during the past few days. As he halted in front of her, as she saw his thick brown lashes lower a fraction, as she realized he was thinking erotic things about her and what they had done that afternoon ten months ago, that nervousness flared up, and she forced herself to speak.
“Where did you learn to do that?” she asked. “What you did with Spike. I’ve never seen anyone do that to a dog before.”
“My father had mastiffs and Alsatians, and I learned as a boy how to deal with aggressive dogs. The best thing, of course, is to steer clear, since a dog bite can be quite serious. But in this case, I felt establishing my dominance was a better course of action.”
He took another step closer, and she reacted without thinking, stepping back, but when she hit the tall boxwood hedge behind her and she could retreat no further, panic rose up, panic that was vastly out of proportion to the circumstances. “Is that what this is about then?” she asked, giving him a challenging look. “Shall you be attempting to exert dominance over me?”
“Over you?” He laughed, seeming genuinely amused by the notion. “That would be like trying to hold on to a running stream of water.”
Something in her relaxed, and she let out a long, slow breath. “Oh.”
He caught that faint sigh of relief, and he tilted his head to one side, seeming puzzled by it. “I did what I did with Spike simply because I didn’t want him to sink his teeth into my leg at an inopportune moment.” He leaned down as if to take her hand, his puzzlement deepening when she stupidly jerked away. He straightened. “Are you nervous?”
“Me?” The question came out in a squeak—worthy of Felicia Vale, she thought in disgust. Her hands curled into fists, but she strove to speak in a natural way. “I’m not nervous at all. Why do you ask?”
He leaned down again, and this time, she let him clasp his hand round her wrist. “I only ask,” he said, as he lifted her hand in the air, “because you’re clenching your fists, and that’s usually a sign of either anger or nervousness. I hope it’s nervousness, because anger, I fear, would put a damper on our evening.”
“I’m not angry,” she said, and made a concerted effort to relax her hands. “And I’m not nervous. What do I have to be nervous about?”
He met her eyes. “Nothing,” he said, entwining their fingers, “unless you don’t know how to waltz.”
She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Waltz.” He nodded in the direction of the house. “Can’t you hear it? Strauss’s Blue Danube. I’m asking you to dance.”
“Oh.” She cocked her head and heard the sound of the piano. “It’s not very impressive without the violi
ns, is it?”
“A bit tinny, perhaps,” he agreed, “but good enough.” He put his right hand on her waist and began to sway. “And one and two and three.”
As they began to waltz, he said, “I want you to know that this is a very unusual situation for me. I don’t usually like to dance. Most of the time, I’d prefer to be stuffed with nails and rolled down a hill.”
She laughed at his wry tone, but she couldn’t help noticing that he guided her across the grass in perfect steps. “But you dance beautifully! Why don’t you like it?”
“Too many boyhood sessions of practice with my mother. Every step had to be perfect, you see, every move exactly proper, every figure executed just right. Over and over and over. Had she not been a duchess, my mother could have been an army general.”
“Your mother taught you to dance?”
“Well, my tutor couldn’t do it,” he answered with a touch of humor. “Herr Brunner was this old German fellow, very stout. He always trod on my feet.”
“You couldn’t take lessons with the other local children?”
“God, no! My mother and father would have been horrified by such a prospect. Future dukes,” he told her, “don’t associate with the lesser mortals unless and until absolutely necessary. No, until I was twelve and sent away to school, I was taught at home, in splendid, ducal isolation.”
She caught the bitter undertone of his voice. “That must have been lonely.”
His mouth tightened and he looked away. “It was hell.”
She studied his profile in the moonlight as he swirled her around the fountain, their footsteps swishing on the grass in time with the faint, tinny notes, his body leading hers with effortless ease. She imagined what life must have been like for him, a boy prevented from having either friends or amusements, for whom even dancing was turned into an exercise in discipline. “Going away to school must have been a godsend.”
He chuckled. “Not at first. I felt terribly awkward, and I was shy, to boot. I was teased without mercy that first year, and harassed, even beaten. Because I had no siblings, I never learned how to fight back, you see, and it was a miserable year. I came home for the summer holidays, and I knew I had to do something or my second year at Eton would be as horrific as the first. And there was no way I could avoid going back.”
Scandal of the Year Page 17