As the footman brought in the bottles of port and Madeira, the traditional cue for the ladies to withdraw, Lord Egremont remarked, “I hear your Titan ran undefeated at Doncaster, DeVere. I shall be running a full brother to last year’s champion, Assassin, on the morrow. Do you care to make a gentleman’s wager?”
“I fear you were misinformed about Donacaster, my lord,” Diana interjected before DeVere could reply. “Lord DeVere’s Titan only defeated the stallions and geldings, for my own mare, Boadicea, prevailed in her maiden race against all runners.”
“Is that so, baroness?” remarked Lord Egremont. “I was not aware you were also a follower of the turf.”
“I am, indeed. My late husband, Lord Reginald, kept a fine stable of runners at one time.” Diana directed a pointed stare at DeVere. “And I believe the horse, Titan, that you speak of is even the progeny of our former stallion, Centurion.”
“All too true,” DeVere confessed. “I had the good fortune to acquire a number of fine horses from Lord Reginald prior to his...unfortunate passing.”
It was a fact that needled Diana to no end, that DeVere should now be making his turf name at her expense. “Though little remains of our former glory, I still have a premium brood mare in Cartimandua.”
“I remember her well.” DeVere gave Diana a significant look. “I also recall having some small interest in her. She last ran here at Epsom, did she not?”
“She was, indeed, a fine runner,” Hew interjected. “I rode her myself and think she had a fair chance of beating your Prometheus, dear brother, but then the races ended rather abruptly...” He slanted a glance to Diana, who studied her napkin.
“Yes,” she admitted. “Due to the unforeseen circumstances, her racing career terminated early.” She turned to DeVere with a challenge in her eyes. “But now I have her daughter, a fine filly by Matchem that I intend to run in the Derby.”
“Then perhaps it is you and Lord DeVere who should make a small wager?” Lord Egremont suggested with a smile.
“That would entirely depend on what Lord DeVere would be willing to stake.” Diana taunted her nemesis.
“Ah ha, DeVere!” Lord Egremont laughed. “I wonder if perhaps the devil has finally met his match?”
“You must know by now that I like nothing better than a worthy challenge,” DeVere said, rising to his feet, as well as to her bait. “What do you propose, baroness?” His sardonic gaze swept Diana with renewed interest.
“I am unprepared to answer, my lord. I think I must sleep on it.”
He bowed over her hand. “Then I shall anticipate your answer on the morrow.” As she turned to depart, he added in an undertone, “It seems we may have unfinished business between us, after all.”
She met his gaze over her shoulder. “Perhaps we do at that.”
***
Ludovic caught up with Diana as she was going into the morning room for breakfast. “Good morning, ladies.” He inclined his head in polite greeting to Phoebe and Vesta. “Might I have a private word with you, baroness?” he asked, cornering Diana.
“Why certainly,” Vesta replied, giving Diana no chance to demur. “Come, Phoebe.” Vesta took her stepmother’s arm and compelled her through the morning room doors, glancing over her shoulder with a grin.
“Will you walk with me?” he asked.
“Why can’t we speak here?”
“Because this matter of the wager is between us alone.” He sensed her hesitation to be alone with him but offered his arm all the same.
“All right.” She sighed.
He took her down a long hallway to the north wing, toward his private apartments. He felt her tense, as if she remembered what lie in their direction. He then diverted them through a door into the family portrait gallery.
“I have not seen this room,” she said.
“It is a private place where we shall not be disturbed. I never come here myself. I only use the room to store portraits I’d otherwise be obligated to look upon.”
Diana strolled the periphery of the room, studying the faces of Ludovic’s multifarious ancestors with an ever-changing mein. “I recognize the styles of Sir Godfrey Kneller and Allan Ramsay,” she remarked. “Is this last one by Sir Joshua Reynolds?”
DeVere nodded with appreciation. “You know your English painters.”
“Is this your mother and father?” She halted before the aforementioned Reynolds. It was of a beautiful, young woman holding a child on her lap, both of whom shared cobalt-blue eyes that stared blankly out of the canvas. An elderly gentleman with dissipated features stood behind the pair, one hand possessively placed upon the lady’s shoulder.
“It is, indeed, my mother, Hermione, and her husband Richard, Fifth Viscount DeVere.”
“And the child is you?”
“Yes, and judging by the gown, I suppose I must have been about three years old.”
Diana turned to him with a puzzled expression. “I don’t understand. This is a family portrait. If she is your mother and he is the viscount, how can you not refer to him as your father?”
Ludovic laughed a long and bitter sound. “Of course, you know nothing of my family. Few people do, as I have taken great care, and much greater expense, to keep it so.”
“I am puzzled,” she said, a frown wrinkling her brow. “These portraits are your history, and some must be very valuable. I wish to understand why you keep all this”—she made a sweeping gesture—”hidden away.”
“Painters and poets have leave to lie, you know. Perhaps the subjects were not worthy of the artists’ efforts.”
“And what would these artists have lied about?” she continued to press.
“You wish me to air the dirty laundry?”
“I don’t seek diversion, but comprehension,” she said.
Ludovic’s first impulse was to wave away the subject and move on to his purpose, but something in her gaze compelled him to say more, to voice the things he had paid dearly to keep secret.
“Very well, Diana.” He sauntered across the room to stand beneath a portrait of a haughty, young man in the full-bottomed wig favored half a century earlier. The painting was done in the classical Italianate style favored by those on their Grand Tour. “Behold Lord Richard DeVere before his complete corruption by dissolution and vice.”
Diana cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, seeming to study the arrogant features of Lord Richard. “I daresay you do favor your mother. But tell me of him.”
“Lord Richard was born into a great fortune, traveled widely, and wed late in life, when fear of his own mortality struck with a certain scurrilous disease that his physician said no amount of mercury would cure. Desperate that his seed should not die out, what does the poxy bastard do but take a wife! Ironically, I later learned that his disease was already so advanced by that time as to make it impossible for him to sire any progeny.”
Ludovic advanced to a second portrait of the same beautiful woman sitting alone and posed under a flowering tree. “Behold my mother. She was twenty-five years his junior, and the marriage was, as to be expected, an utter travesty. Lord DeVere was the biggest whoremonger in all Christendom, and my mother complemented him well as the greatest whore. Together, they were the most notoriously faithless couple in England. I was raised with all the privilege of my noble station to include a personal servant to wipe my arse for as long as I can remember, yet to this day, I cannot say with any certainty if that same servant might have been my true father.”
Diana’s jaw dropped.
He laughed again. “I’m not sure Lady DeVere would have known either, for she exercised no discretion. She may have consorted with a footman, a gardener, or even my father’s valet, but of a certainty, I am not the spawn of Lord DeVere. Nor do I believe Hew and I are more than half siblings, though I would never tell him so. Our mother showed only enough maternal feeling to remain with us until Hew was out of leading strings and then eloped with her lover.”
“You never heard from her again?”
“Surely you refused her?”
“I did not. I have provided her a generous allowance these past dozen years, though I learned in my recent travels that she really had little need of it, for she has managed to provide a lucrative living for herself.”
“With another lover?”
“With many, you might say. She is the keeper of a high-end Parisian brothel.”
“Your mother?” She gaped again.
“Yes. It was a most unsettling revelation.”
“I suppose so! And your father...er...Lord Richard...what of him?”
“The blighter still manages to live, despite the fact that his mind and half his face have rotted away.”
“Good God,” Diana murmured.
“Sometimes I wonder how good,” Ludovic replied cynically. “So you see? My very birth defies all that is right and true. Perhaps you better understand now my aversion to wed? To reproduce? For I carry in my blood an entire legacy of corruption and sin. My entire existence is one great lie, Diana. My blood is tainted and my life a fraud.”
“That’s ridiculous!” she exclaimed. “You only use your history as a convenient excuse to do as you please.”
“That’s right, my dear. I live for pleasure because it’s my legacy to do so for I am damned either way. ‘Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.’”
“If you wish to elicit sympathy from me, I am sorry to disappoint you.”
Ludovic shrugged and dropped his mask comfortably back into place. “The only thing I wish to elicit from you, my dear, are screams of rapture.”
“Back to that again, are we? You waste your breath. Now why did you bring me here?” Diana demanded.
“You challenged me last night, Diana, taunted even, when you know damn well I never take such a thing lightly. So I wish to know what you propose by way of a wager.”
“Perhaps I haven’t had sufficient time to think on it,” she hedged.
“Don’t dissemble when we both know you had already something in mind before you even spoke.”
“All right, my lord. I will tell you. I would very much like to rebuild my former racing stables, but I have not the means to do so without a quality breeding stallion.”
“A woman has no business with a racing stud.”
“Perhaps that is my concern and not for you to judge, my lord.”
DeVere quirked a brow. “Very well. Then what are you asking? You wish me to wager one of my stallions?”
“Not just any stallion. I wish to you wager Centurion.”
“The sire of my best prospect for the Derby?”
“I thought it would be more than you would be willing to chance.” She turned for the door.
“I have not yet decided,” he retorted. “I would first know what I might stand to gain from this wager.”
“You once expressed interest in Cartimandua,” she suggested.
“An unequal bargain,” he replied. “A brood mare may produce a single foal per year at best, while a proven stallion can sire a hundred offspring at a considerable profit. No, my dear, you must offer a much greater incentive than that.”
“But I am not a wealthy woman, and you know as well as I that you acquired that stallion through dubious circumstances. You owe me the opportunity to win him back!”
“I owe you? I seem to recall only recently your great affront at just how much I have already paid you.”
“That is not what I mean! You owe me the opportunity to redeem my honor, my lord. Were I a man, we would have settled this long ago on a dueling field.”
“You still have a taste for my blood, madam? On second thought, you need not answer.” He touched his lip with a bemused smile. “So it is now your honor that’s at stake?”
“Yes.” Diana faced him with her hands braced on her hips.
He laughed, a low rumble. “Ironic indeed, when your person is the only thing that remotely interests me.”
Her gaze narrowed. “You wish me to wager myself?”
He shot one brow up. “How badly do you want the stallion?”
“What are your terms?” she asked.
“If I win, you will be mine for a week...to take whenever and however I please. No conditions. No constraints.” Ludovic was prepared for a reaction of shock, outrage, or at least righteous indignation. Instead, to his amazement, she appeared calm, pensive, even calculating.
“A very tall order,” she remarked. “If I were to agree, do I have your assurance that afterward you will never harass me again?”
He inclined his head with a half smile. “If that is your wish.”
“I know my own mind.”
“Then let it be my object to change it.”
“So be it then,” Diana said. “It’s inconsequential anyway, for I don’t intend to lose. Let us meet, just you and I, on the down at dawn tomorrow.”
Chapter Eleven
They met early in the morning, while the dewy swirls of mist of still danced over the down, the mounted riders facing one another with a duelist’s salute.
“Where is your jockey?” DeVere asked with a puzzled frown.
“Did I not say? I intend to ride.”
“You? A woman in a sidesaddle?” He scoffed.
She met his mocking gaze with defiance. “It is how I am accustomed to going. Perhaps you’re not up to the challenge, my lord?”
“Oh, I’m always up, my lady...for any challenge. I only exercise care for your neck.”
His condescension and innuendo made Diana’s hackles rise. “You would do better to look after your own. If I can take a four-foot stone wall while chasing a fox, I daresay I can gallop over a gently sloping down.
DeVere threw his head back with a laugh. “You are in earnest?”
She gave him a tight smile. “Yes.” Diana had to suppress the urge to grind her teeth until his fit of mirth subsided.
“Fair enough, then,” he replied with a lingering smirk. “I have brought Pratt to be our lone official, if that is agreeable to you?”
The grizzled jockey who had followed his master tugged a forelock in her direction.
“I trust Pratt’s impartiality,” she said.
DeVere inclined his head to the starting post. “Shall we?”
“For the signal, I’ll drop me handkerchief.” Pratt turned to Diana.
“That is also acceptable,” she replied, her fingers nervously clenching the reins.
Preceding DeVere, Diana tried to quiet a heart that already seemed to be galloping across the down. They would run a single lap around the racecourse, a distance of one mile that would be completed in two potentially life-altering minutes. It was as if this moment were a culmination of fate, for Diana knew with a certainty that she would be forever changed if she lost.
She swallowed the lump in her throat, forcing her gaze ahead, avoiding all eye contact with her nemesis, yet couldn’t help slanting a reluctant glance of admiration to the rider at her side, to the strong, handsome profile, his proud and solid seat on the horse. He was in every way formidable and would give no quarter.
The hour they had spent together in the gallery had been profoundly revealing, not just in the family skeletons but in the glimpse into his soul. He had shown a paradoxical protectiveness of his family and of his good name. He had protected his brother from the worst of the dirty secrets, and although he outwardly despised both of his parents, he had ensured their care and security. Although DeVere emulated much of their bad behavior in his own life, he refused to wed for his lack of faith in marital fidelity, whereas most other noblemen would just wed for the heir and then take a mistress for pleasure. She also knew he exercised sufficient responsibility and self-control not to sire bastards upon his mistresses. DeVere continued t
o be a conundrum that both fascinated and repulsed her.
Diana wondered now what devil had possessed her to undertake this wager. The loss of the horses to DeVere had surely been a point of contention, and her pride had played no small part. She desperately desired to take back a portion of what had been lost, surely a just and legitimate cause, but it reached much deeper than that. She wanted to take something from him, just as he had taken from her, but that something she couldn’t even define, and wouldn’t confess it even if she could. Perhaps it was sheer caprice on her part? For surely her experience had already taught her that any involvement with DeVere was playing with fire, but like a helpless moth, she was mortally attracted to his flame.
The little mare shifted impatiently beneath her. Diana reached down to stroke the sleek neck. “Soon, my girl,” she murmured.
Pratt retrieved his handkerchief. He raised his arm, and the nervous tension roiled within her. With bated breath she watched as the handkerchief descended. Plying whip and spur, horses and riders bolted from the starting post like a violent clash of thunder and lightning.
***
Refusing to cast a sidelong glance, Diana was still ever aware of DeVere’s presence. She crouched low over her mare, that sleek and supple snorting mass of muscle and sinew. Boadicea was well matched against her foe, ironically the son of Centurion. Diana was confident in the mare’s ability. Boadicea was bred of the finest racing blood; Diana knew the fiery, little horse would run until she burst.
The horse’s ears flickered forward and back in response to her rider’s cues. Diana crooned words of encouragement as her fingers played on the reins. It was no magnanimous gesture that DeVere had given her the lead, for she knew he intended to play a cat and mouse game with her. He was visible out of the corner of her eye now, gaining, but only by fractions. She held back, refusing to push the horse too soon. He would surely try to taunt her into burning her up early. She wouldn’t make that mistake.
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