A month-old newspaper contained a picture of Elizabeth standing behind a podium, only her head and shoulders visible. A dark hat with curled feathers concealed all but a glimpse of her hair, dark gray instead of auburn red. Women would consider her a modern woman who actively supported their good works and her husband’s politics; men would think her a useful but uninspiring wife.
A six-month-old newspaper contained a picture of Edward and Elizabeth together, seemingly the perfect couple, he smiling benignly, she blandly staring. And then there was the twenty-two-year-old newspaper that featured an artist’s sketch of Andrew Walters, elected prime minister, and wife, Rebecca, with eleven-year-old daughter, Elizabeth.
Andrew Walters had been very fortunate in politics. His first term of office as prime minister had lasted six years. After losing the support of his cabinet he had fought his way back. His second term, already four years in the running, showed no signs of dissolution.
Ramiel compared the two family portraits.
Elizabeth bore a striking resemblance to her father. Whereas Elizabeth’s children . . . bore a striking resemblance to their father.
Ela’na! Damn! It would be so much more simple if they resembled Elizabeth.
He scooped up a copy of The Times dated January 21, 1870. A photograph of Elizabeth accompanied a notice announcing her engagement to promising politician Edward Petre.
She looked so young. And naive. The photographer, either by accident or design, had captured the dreamy expectation of an untried girl poised on the threshold of womanhood.
Elizabeth had married at the age of seventeen; that made her thirty-three. And now her face bore no expression at all, not in life as she sat across from Ramiel discussing sexual intimacy, not in the various photographs taken after her husband’s appointment in her father’s cabinet.
The papers were full of her activities. She campaigned extensively for her husband, attending parties, organizing charity balls, kissing orphaned babies, and doling out baskets to the poor and the infirm.
By all accounts, Elizabeth was the perfect daughter, wife and mother. A woman who deserved to be praised.
He threw the newspaper onto his desk.
Disgust warred with anger, desire with compassion. They were chased by fear.
Fear that Elizabeth Petre did indeed know about her husband. Fear that she had deliberately sought Ramiel because of that knowledge.
She had to know about her husband!
But then again . . . there was no way that she could know . . . about Ramiel.
The age-yellowed newspaper fluttered; a soft rush of air filled the library.
“El Ibn.”
To the untutored ear Muhamed’s voice was politely expressionless. It was not. Muhamed silently asked that Ramiel repudiate Elizabeth Petre, as he already had in his heart.
Perhaps Muhamed was right.
Elizabeth had blackmailed the eunuch. She sought sexual instruction from Ramiel.
Neither act demonstrated innocence.
“Could this detective that you hired—” Ramiel paused, hating himself for asking but unable to stop the question. “Could he be mistaken?”
Black eyes locked with turquoise ones. “There is no mistake, El Ibn.”
Ramiel remembered the blaze of red in Elizabeth’s dark auburn hair . . . and how self-conscious she had been when he complimented her. Her actions had been those of a woman who rarely receives praise.
Raw rage, cold and hard, worked its way up into his chest. She deserved better than Edward Petre.
“What is Petre doing tonight?”
“He is attending a ball.”
“Who is giving it?”
“Baroness Whitfield.”
“The woman the Chancellor of the Exchequer was allegedly seen with . . . who is she, Muhamed?”
Muhamed’s dark face remained stoic. “I do not know, El Ibn.”
Ramiel regarded him with narrow-eyed intensity. “But you have an idea.”
“Yes.”
“Then get me the necessary proof.”
Night swirled outside the bay windows.
Was Elizabeth dancing in her husband’s arms at the Whitfield ball? Did she know?
That morning she had taken two sips of Turkish coffee even though she obviously disliked it. Or did she?
Given the opportunity, what would Elizabeth choose: respectability or passion?
He suddenly envisioned her reclining naked on a stack of silk cushions, smoking a hookah.
The image should be ridiculous—she wore creaking corsets and heavy wool dresses perfumed by benzene. It wasn’t. He could all too vividly imagine her dark auburn hair spilling down her back and across her full breasts while she sucked on the bit.
“Have a carriage drawn around,” Ramiel abruptly ordered. “Tonight I will follow Petre.”
The ball was everything and worse than Elizabeth had expected. She chatted with young debutantes who had not quite taken and to men who were too shy to approach the opposite sex. Or she attended those men and women who were too elderly or too infirm to dance. And all the while she listened to the practiced scales of feminine titters and masculine guffaws as the gilded ton swirled and twirled on the dance floor, absorbed in their pursuit of pleasure.
The Bastard Sheikh had complimented her hair. How long had it been since Edward had given her a compliment . . . on anything?
How long can a wellborn woman comfortably go without coition?
“Mrs. Petre . . .”
It took a second for Elizabeth to realize that she was being addressed. Her companion, Lord Inchcape, an eighty-year-old peer whose distinct body odor necessitated that one keep one’s head turned upwind, did not need her conversation, only an ear.
“Mrs. Petre, I have someone here who begs an introduction.”
Elizabeth gratefully turned to Baroness Whitfield, her hostess.
The welcoming smile on her face froze.
The Bastard Sheikh, dressed in black evening clothes and white tie, towered over the baroness’s short, plump figure. On his other side, a tall woman claimed his arm—the top of her head reached well past his chin. She was slender, elegant in a turquoise gown that matched his eyes. Her face was a perfect oval. Golden blond hair was caught in a chignon; it was the same color as was the Bastard Sheikh’s.
Recognition was instantaneous: She must be the woman whom he had wallowed in until her perfume had become his scent.
A fleeting pain stabbed through her chest: jealousy, envy. The woman was everything that Elizabeth would never be, exactly the kind of woman she would choose for a man like him.
Baroness Whitfield’s plump cheeks were flushed with champagne and the heat radiating from over a hundred bodies and three chandeliers. “Catherine, may I present to you Mrs. Elizabeth Petre, the illustrious wife of our Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mrs. Petre, Countess Devington.”
Elizabeth’s first stunned thought was She’s not the Bastard Sheikh’s mistress, she’s his mother, and then, incongruously, She’s not old enough to be his mother, surely.
Smiling warmly, the countess extended a white-gloved hand. “How do you do, Mrs. Petre? I’ve heard so much about you.”
A cold frisson of fear raced down Elizabeth’s spine. Ignoring the friendly overture, she stiffly executed a curtsy. “How do you do, Countess Devington?”
“Catherine, you are acquainted with Lord Inchcape.”
“Indeed I am. How do you do, Lord Inchcape?”
Lord Inchcape nodded his liver-spotted head. “Not still galavan-tin’ off to those foreign countries and gettin’ yourself kidnapped, eh, what?”
The countess’s smile subtly altered. “Alack, not recently.”
Amusement lit up the baroness’s small, plump face. “Behave yourself, Catherine. Mrs. Petre, may I present to you Countess Devington’s son, Lord Safyre. Lord Safyre . . . Mrs. Petre.”
Turquoise eyes clashed with Elizabeth’s hazel ones. Everything she had read and discussed the last two mornings was in
his gaze.
What does it mean, that a man’s member has a head like a brazier?
It means that it is red with desire and hot for a woman.
Dear God, what was he doing here?
Had he told the countess about their lessons?
Elizabeth nodded stiffly. “Lord Safyre.”
Before she could divine his intentions, the Bastard Sheikh reached down and grasped Elizabeth’s hand. His dusky brown skin was covered by a white glove. The press of his fingers through the dual layers of his silk glove and hers was scorching. “Ahlan wa sahlan, Mrs. Petre.”
Elizabeth watched in horrified fascination as his golden head bowed over her hand. His lips, when he kissed it, were even hotter than his fingers.
The blood that had receded from her head upon first seeing him flooded her face in a tide of scalding crimson. She snatched her hand back.
The baroness, as if nothing were amiss, smiled at Elizabeth’s companion. “Lord Inchcape . . . Lord Safyre.”
Lord Inchcape drew himself up as tall as his stooped shoulders would allow. “In my day we did not present our bastards.”
Elizabeth’s breath caught in her throat at the crude cut. She was vaguely aware of the baroness’s stifled exclamation of, “Oh, dear . . .”
The countess’s eyes shot gray pellets of ice. “In your day, Lord Inchcape, you had no title, therefore you would not be presented to anyone, whether they be a bastard or a grocer.”
Lord Inchcape’s sallow face turned a mottled puce.
“Ummee.” The Bastard Sheikh’s husky murmur filled the explosive silence. “Mrs. Petre will think us uncivilized.”
The countess’s frigid gaze did not waver. “I doubt very much if it is we who Mrs. Petre will think uncivilized.”
Elizabeth bit back a shock of laughter.
Lord Inchcape turned and stalked into the milling crowd of promenading men and women. The countess glared at his retreating back.
“The bad man is gone now, Ummee,” the Bastard Sheikh said dryly. “You can relax, your chick is safe.”
Lightning-quick dismay shone in the countess’s gray eyes. It was followed by rueful laughter. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Petre, but the provocation was great. Being a mother, I am sure you understand my upset.”
Countess Devington had been a whore to an Arab sheikh. She had given birth to a bastard son. A bastard she had sent to Arabia when he was twelve years old that she might escape the inconvenience of schooling an adolescent boy.
Elizabeth doubted if she had a maternal instinct in her entire body.
“Yes, of course,” she said coldly.
The Bastard Sheikh’s eyes flashed with angry turquoise fire.
The countess gripped his arm; her smile remained warm and friendly. “We came to fetch you for the next dance, Mrs. Petre. My son desires to waltz. Please don’t say no; if you do, I may never be able to convince him to attend another ball.”
Elizabeth cast a furtive glance at the teeming, seething mass of jewel-colored silks and white ties that encircled them, desperately searching for her husband, her mother, a reason to reject the offer. A respectable woman did not dance with a man of his reputation.
“My husband and I do not waltz—”
“Your husband is in the card room, Mrs. Petre,” the Bastard Sheikh smoothly interrupted. “I feel certain he would not mind my standing in his stead. Especially, as you say, if he does not waltz.”
The Bastard Sheikh was not discussing a waltz. He was discussing sex. Edward did not dance with her in public, he was telling her, any more than he slept with her in private.
Elizabeth could feel the curious stare of the baroness, the strangely sympathetic one of his mother. And heard herself say, “I would be pleased to waltz with Lord Safyre.”
Before she could retract her words, Elizabeth was propelled through the sea of brightly colored silk dresses and stark black evening coats. Hard, hot fingers curled around her elbow just where her glove ended and her bare skin began.
Elizabeth sidestepped, only to be catapulted into the Bastard Sheikh at the tuning shrill of a violin.
His body was as hot and hard as were his fingers. She could smell the heat of him underneath the silk of his clothes. It was not marred by the scent of a woman.
Blindly, she stepped back, but to no avail. She was penned in by the suffocating press of perfumed silk and the brush of solid flesh as women and men positioned themselves to dance.
The Bastard Sheikh captured her right hand and brought it up and away from her body so that her breasts lifted inside her corset and jutted forward. It was exciting; it was dangerous. It was not what they had agreed upon.
“You said you would not touch me.”
“As your tutor, Mrs. Petre. Not as your dance partner.”
“Why are you here?”
“Because I knew that you would be here.”
“I would not have come if I had known you would be here.”
A hard hand gripped her waist. “Now, why is that, I wonder?”
He was too close—Elizabeth couldn’t catch her breath. She skittered away from the intense heat that radiated from his body. Her bustle squarely impacted another bustle, springing her back into place.
“You will create more gossip if you do not touch me than you will if you do, Mrs. Petre.”
He was right.
Gritting her teeth, she reluctantly reached up, up, up—and rested the fingers of her left hand on his shoulder. Her left breast almost lifted free of the corset.
The music started, a cry of violins and the crashing chords of a piano. Warm air tunneled around Elizabeth, and suddenly, she was a part of the gilded ton, of the soft swish of brightly colored silk and banners of black coattails, men stepping, women swirling.
She concentrated on the stark white of her glove, the shiny black satin that comprised his lapels, anything but the uncomfortable pounding of her heart and the painful hardening of her nipples underneath the slick friction of silk on silk.
She desperately searched for a safe topic of conversation. She was not supposed to respond to a man who was not her husband. “I did not know that you danced.”
“You mean that you did not know I was accepted in polite society.”
The was no sense in lying. “Yes.”
“There is a lot about me that you do not know, Mrs. Petre.”
“Do you sleep with the baroness?”
Elizabeth missed a step at the words that came unbidden from her mouth. His fingers dug into her waist; a whalebone jabbed into her rib.
“You seem to be current on the prevailing gossip. Why don’t you tell me?”
She stared hard at a diamond stud in his shirt. It winked in the bright light from the overhead chandelier.
“How else could you know that my husband and I had accepted an invite to the ball?”
“My mother,” he said lightly, twirling her. “She and the baroness are bridge partners.”
“Does your mother know about our . . . lessons?” she asked breathlessly.
“Siba, Mrs. Petre. I have told you I will not speak of what goes on between me and a lady behind closed doors.
“You do not need to wear a corset.” His leg stepped between hers as he twirled her again; solid heat pressed into the jointure of her thighs. “You are suffering from lung collapse for nothing.”
Elizabeth’s fingers dug into his shoulder—no padding there, just hard muscle. “We are not in your home, Lord Safyre. Whether I wear a corset or do not wear a corset is of interest only to me and my abigail.”
“What about your husband, Mrs. Petre? Doesn’t he have anything to say about what underclothes you wear?”
The sharp retort did not make it past her lips.
Her husband had never seen her underclothes, let alone expressed an interest in them. Whereas she had no doubt that the Bastard Sheikh had seen a lot of women’s underclothing.
“How do you come to dance so well if you do not often attend social events?”
“I did not say that he does not waltz,” she retorted stiffly.
Edward waltzed; he merely did not waltz with her. He saved the social amenities for his constituents.
“Tell me about your two sons.”
“I told you I do not discuss my children.”
“But I am not your tutor now. I am a man who is making small talk to pass the time while we dance.”
Elizabeth’s head jerked back, her mouth opening to tell him that if dancing with her was such a boring chore, he need not bother.
It was a mistake.
The only thing that separated their faces was ten inches. The span of his two hands.
“My sons are both at Eton,” she blurted out.
“Richard and Phillip, those are their names, aren’t they?”
“Yes. But how—”
“I do open an occasional newspaper. What do they like—politics?”
A smile rimmed Elizabeth’s mouth, remembering Phillip’s fight because Master Bernard, a “Whig,” was supposedly an outrage to his “Tory” beliefs.
“No, my sons are not interested in politics. Richard is studying to be an engineer—he says technology is the way of the world and will help people far more than government. Phillip wants to be a sailor”—her smile widened—“preferably a pirate.”
An answering smile softened the Bastard Sheikh’s face. “Richard sounds like a clever boy.”
Elizabeth searched his eyes for mockery but found none. A rush of maternal pride overcame her caution.
“He is. He takes his exams for Oxford next fall. It will be hard on Phillip when Richard leaves Eton though. They have always been very close—despite their age difference and perhaps because their personalities are so opposite. Richard is more quiet and studious; Phillip is a rascal. It would not surprise me if they raided the school kitchen for midnight snacks—they always do when they’re home.”
“You love your sons.”
They were all that she had.
Robin Schone Page 8