The Luckiest Lady in London

by Sherry Thomas

  “Can I serve you something?” he murmured solicitously. “You’ve scarcely touched any food—and of course the grapes must have been terribly unsatisfying.”

  She flushed again. “No, thank you. I’m not hungry.”

  He drank from his wineglass. “I am. For you, that is.”

  She swallowed. “Then you must exercise your husbandly prerogative.”

  He held her gaze. “Do you want me to? And do not answer as an obliging wife—I already know I have an obliging wife. Do you wish it?”

  Yes. No. “I don’t know.”

  “Hmm,” he said. Then he beckoned her with one finger. “Come here.”

  She should remain exactly where she was, at a safe distance. But she was pulled in by the same undeniable force that had had her revolving around him from the very beginning, a once freewheeling asteroid caught in the gravitational pull of a ruthless planet.

  There was no such thing as a safe distance from him.

  She lay down next to him. He shifted his weight so he was on his side, his head in his palm. His other hand took hold of her chin, keeping her face turned toward him—as if she could look away.

  “You have such pretty eyes,” he murmured, “and such pretty skin.”

  His words invoked a black pain not unlike the one she’d experienced whenever she’d thought of his eventual wife. She was his wife now, but the anguish remained the same, that of being replaced and forgotten.

  “If you were trying to preserve your interest in me earlier, it must mean now you are trying to weary of me sooner,” she heard herself say.

  He kissed her on the lips. “Do you believe I could ever weary of you, my dear Louisa?”

  Of course she believed it—as much as she believed in the elliptical orbit of the Earth around the sun. It was the reason she could never trust him. The reason she would never tell him that she loved him.

  “As long as we weary of each other at the same rate, I’ll have no complaints.”

  His hand tightened on her jaw. A moment later he let go of her face altogether to trace a finger down the center of her bodice. “How you punish me, my dear.”

  He lifted aside her skirts and, still fully clothed, entered her, his eyes never leaving hers—a man who wanted to see his power over her reflected in her features.

  She let him see it. Because they were in the middle of lovemaking, and she could justify her hunger as that of the body, and not that of the soul. Her hunger, her need, even her fear.

  “Spread your thighs wider, darling,” he told her, his voice only a little unsteady. “I want to be all the way inside you.”

  The things he made her feel . . . even the sanctity of holy matrimony might not keep her out of the flames of hell. In desperation, because she did not want to be the only one so tremblingly affected, teetering so close to the edge despite the deliberate, leisurely pace he set, despite the peaks she had already experienced only minutes ago, she whispered, “I have wanted to spread my thighs for you ever since I first saw you.”

  He made an animal sound in the back of his throat, his gaze losing some of its focus.

  “All my nights lying awake, all my naked dreams—that’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? Wanting you inside me.”

  He grimaced, baring his teeth. His body slammed into hers, shoving her back a few inches, pushing her so close to the precipice she could already feel the involuntary contraction of her muscles.

  But she did not want to lose control alone—that path led directly back to the pit of despair. “Come in deeper. Are you in me as deep as you want to be?”

  Now they were tumbling off the edge together; now his control was as shattered as hers. And now she finally closed her eyes and let herself be swept away by the surge of pleasure.

  And by his harshly uttered words in her ear, as he gripped her close: “I can never be in you deep enough. Never.”

  • • •

  When she had on her drawers again, and her skirts were decorously in place, she allowed Felix to sit her between his legs, his arms wrapped around her.

  He was not sure what he had accomplished this day, or whether he had even truly resolved this lovers’ quarrel between them. But it didn’t seem to matter, not when he could bury his nose in her hair and inhale.

  “It smells just like yours, my lord,” she said, her tone arch, forestalling a compliment on his part, “since I’m fairly certain we have the same soap.”

  “Then my hair must smell divine. And you might as well call me Felix in private—we wouldn’t want Lady Tremaine to be the only one enjoying that privilege.”

  “Huh,” was her dismissive response.

  But then she followed that with an offer of the coffee cream she was eating, her person half turned, her spoon held out toward him. “Do you want some? It’s rather nice.”

  He ate from her spoon. The coffee cream was more than nice; it was delectable.

  “Just to let you know,” she continued, “I am still angry with you. I simply cannot express it very well when I am in direct physical contact with you.”

  “Then I must make sure we remain in constant direct physical contact. I like it when you cannot express your anger very well.”

  “Huh,” she said again.

  He leaned back against the tree behind him, so content he could melt. “Tell me about your childhood intrigue with the night sky.”

  “Must I?” She offered him another spoonful of the coffee cream.

  “You mentioned it last night, when you knew it was me standing behind you. So yes, now you must.”

  She gave the next spoonful of the coffee cream to herself, looking up at the day sky. “One night, when I was three, my father woke up all his daughters and took us outside, promising a special treat.”

  Given that she was born in 1864, she must have seen the Leonid shower of 1867, which was not as grand as the meteor storm the year before, but still impressive.

  “They tell me that for a week afterward, I would wake my father up every day after midnight and make him take me to see more shooting stars.”

  “Did he?”

  “My mother said he did. She said that he would read until I came to fetch him and then stay out with me for as long as I wanted.”

  He kept his envy from his voice. “A doting father.”

  “He was. According to my mother, he was an expensive man to have around. But we all adored him. Too bad he didn’t live long enough to see me carrying on the family legacy of fortune hunting so successfully. He would have been tickled about the bust improvers.”

  “I am honored to be tickled on his behalf.”

  Her head tilted forward. He moved his to the side, to see a slight smile on her lips. Impulsively he kissed her on her cheek.

  “Don’t be so pleased with yourself,” she admonished. “I distrust you and will continue to do so.”

  “Your distrust is the spice that gives my life flavor,” he said grandly. “Long may your suspicions simmer.”

  Little did he know how much he would come to regret that sentiment.

  CHAPTER 14

  Louisa had never brushed her teeth or combed her hair at quarter to four in the morning. But her lover had said he would be coming to her room at four to see how she was getting on with her astronomical observation, so here she was, seeing to her toilette in the dead of the night for a man she couldn’t trust.

  It was always a problem when he put his hands on her. His touch diminished both her capacity to remember the past and her ability to plan for the future, so that she was liable to think only as far back as the previous time they had made love, and forward only to the next time they would make love.

  Her common sense was further decimated, given that she’d spent at least an hour sitting between his legs, with his arms around her.

  Had he never stopped coming to her bed, had h
e never shown her the kind of cruelty of which he was capable, she would have been deliriously happy by now.

  She was still too pleased for her own good, but it was a happiness with thorns.

  At exactly four o’clock, he walked in, kissed her on her hair, and led her out through her sitting room to the balcony where she’d stationed the telescope.

  “Let me show you something.”

  He removed the tarp from the telescope and pushed it, on its wheeled base, out to the edge of the balcony—he was a pleasure to behold, in his shirt with two buttons open.

  “Find Jupiter, will you?” he said.

  She wrested her gaze away from him. Telescopes, marvelous as they were, magnified only a tiny patch of the sky. She had better know at which coordinates she ought to point the thing before she looked into the eyepiece.

  Jupiter came into view, a slightly blurred cream-and-orange sphere. “It looks the same as usual.”

  “Let me see.” He took her place at the eyepiece. “Hmm. This telescope should be able to achieve a greater resolution than this.”

  He maneuvered various knobs, a rather adorable scowl of concentration on his face. And those strong, shapely forearms, bared by his rolled-up sleeves—she couldn’t stop looking at them.

  Remember this, she thought to herself. Remember this weakness in yourself. Remember that you do not know why he behaved abominably a fortnight ago, or why he is sweetness and sunshine now. It could all go away again in the blink of an eye, without warning, without explanations.

  “Aha!” He felt around the base of the telescope, opened a drawer she hadn’t even known was there, and swapped in a different eyepiece. “Now come see.”

  When she looked this time, Jupiter was much smaller, barely the size of a farthing. The image, however, had become razor sharp. Not only could she see two of Jupiter’s moons, but she could see the perfectly round shadow one of them cast on the giant planet’s surface.

  A solar eclipse on Jupiter. She sucked in a breath. “How did you know it was going to happen?”

  “I didn’t. I saw it myself only half an hour ago. So I thought I’d show it to you, too.”

  “Where is your telescope?” She knew he had to have one.

  “Somewhere on the estate,” he teased.

  She would not beg him to show it to her. Well, not yet. Putting her eye to the eyepiece again, she asked, “So how did you become interested in the stars?”

  “I used to have trouble sleeping as a child. So I would slip out, walk about, look at the sky, and, after a while, notice the wheeling of the stars.”

  “Was your health frail?” She couldn’t quite imagine him as a sickly child.

  “No, I was quite sturdy.”

  She glanced back at him. Perhaps it was his stillness, the darkness of the hour, or the soft light spilling out from the sitting room and limning his features, but she remembered the late marchioness’s portrait in the gallery, her dramatically beautiful face against a velvety black background.

  “You resemble your mother a great deal.”

  “I do.”

  “I wouldn’t have been able to tell that you were related to your father.”

  Instantly she regretted her statement. Before her London Season, Lady Balfour had given her an important piece of advice: Never comment on likeness or the lack thereof. With marriage what it was among the upper crust, there was no telling who might have fathered a lady’s third or fourth or fifth child.

  But he was the firstborn, the heir.

  “I am my predecessor’s son,” he said calmly.

  “Of course you are. I only meant to say that the resemblance is slight.”

  There was a beat of silence. He tilted his chin at the telescope. “It’s Io, by the way.”

  It took her a moment to understand that he was talking about the moon that cast a shadow on Jupiter. She examined the image in the telescope again. “Because it’s the closest to Jupiter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any formal training in astronomy?”

  “No, but I did read mathematics and physics at university.”

  He had been at Cambridge; that she knew. But she drew a blank when she tried to come up with the name of the public school he must have attended. “And before university, you were at . . .”

  “Here. I was tutored at home.”

  He had so many friends, she’d assumed that they must have been accumulated from his days as a pupil. She couldn’t imagine someone who enjoyed the company of others as much as he being stuck home, with no other children nearby for playmates.

  “Why? I thought you said you did not suffer from any illnesses.”

  “My mother preferred to keep me at Huntington.”

  She almost asked, Was she very attached to you? But the measured, neutral tone with which he’d spoken of his parents did not convey any particular closeness.

  “I see,” she said instead, fiddling with the knobs. “By the way, are there any other eyepieces? And would you mind explaining to me the best ways of using them?”

  • • •

  This was the peril of being close to another person: One became seen for what one was.

  Felix preferred to view his biography as beginning with the day he inherited his title, when his sleek new persona was first forged.

  In this, he was greatly helped by the facade of devotion his mother presented in public—of course the son of a woman who so genuinely adored him would embody all the virtues of manhood. He was also greatly helped by the fact that most people preferred to take one another at face value—a well-turned-out chap of pedigree, manners, and hospitality must be just that, the epitome of gentlemanliness.

  He’d always known he was nothing of the sort. As did Louisa. But it was one thing to let her see the flaws that he in fact considered strengths—cunning, unscrupulousness, a willingness to break rules—quite another to expose his actual weaknesses, the old pains and yearnings that had never completely dissipated into the ether.

  To allow her access to the one soft spot on the dragon’s underbelly that no fire or adamantine scales could protect.

  • • •

  The eastern sky was turning paler when they stowed the telescope and came back inside.

  “Did you already know that I get up in the middle of the night to use the telescope?” she asked, as they passed into her bedroom.

  “I’ve seen you.”

  On those occasions Lady Tremaine had caught him coming back into the house at odd hours, he had been on the grounds, standing in the shadows, gazing up at his wife’s balcony, and her solitary figure at the telescope.

  She hopped onto the bed and sat at its edge, leaning forward slightly, her elbows on her knees, her interlinked fingers beneath her chin.

  It was the way a young girl would sit. Her face, of course, appeared open and sweet. Her dressing gown was cream colored, trimmed with bands of small, embroidered daisies. Taken altogether, the wholesome innocence she exuded would have been too much, if it weren’t for the devious gleam in her eyes.

  His breath caught. “You look expectant.”

  “I’ve never seen you naked,” she said, the way another wife might accuse a husband of offenses such as insobriety or spendthriftness.

  He raised a brow. “And you think you will now?”

  Her tone was imperious. “I had better.”

  That she was fiercely drawn to him was what made his sense of vulnerability bearable.

  He had thought so an aeon ago, when his only vulnerability was having made his interest known with his offer to buy her body. He was infinitely more unprotected these days, led about by his needs, master of neither his thoughts nor his actions—a condition made tolerable only because she was just as enslaved by the pleasures of their marriage bed.

  He kicked off his shoes. “Don’t I do well en
ough by you with my clothes on?”

  “Very well. I particularly liked the sensation of all that Harris tweed against my thighs. In fact, I demand that when we make love outside, you keep your clothes on—that’s how it was in my dreams, and I am nothing if not a stickler for erotic details.”

  He began unbuttoning his shirt. “But I should disrobe when we make love in safe, boring places?”

  “Sometimes a lady is in a mood for skin.”

  “Are you ever not in a mood for skin?”

  “Yes, sometimes I just want your head on a pike,” she answered without blinking an eye.

  Her words sent a shiver of fear through him—she did not even know the worst about him. Yet.

  He peeled off his shirt and approached the bed. “Then I wouldn’t be able to do this.”

  He kissed her below her ear.

  She let out a shaky breath. But the next moment, she was pointing at his trousers. “I’ll bet if you’d gone to school, you’d have been able to better remain on task.”

  “Well, next time I see my Old Etonian friends, I’ll ask whether they strip more efficiently than I do.”

  “I am convinced they do. I will advise my sisters not to accept anyone without a public school ed—”

  He let his trousers drop. She fell gratifyingly silent. Then she licked her lips and looked into his eyes. “Good. Now put it to use.”

  He did, making love to her with the devotion and fervor of a new convert, building ramparts of pleasure to keep out fears and consequences, and hoping that he was creating something more substantial and permanent than castles in the sky.

  • • •

  It was two nights later, as her husband tried to elucidate the Newtonian mechanics behind Urbain Le Verrier’s prediction of the position of Neptune, then still undiscovered, that Louisa’s ignorance revealed itself to be as high and thick as the Wall of Jericho.

  “I’m sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I didn’t understand a thing you just said.”

  He threw up his hands in mock exasperation. “That was probably the best explanation anyone has given on the subject in the past forty years. Do you mean to tell me that you failed to appreciate my brilliance?”