And he backed away one foot, two feet, watching her, as if memorizing how she looked standing there in the shadows beneath the moon and stars.
And then, because it wouldn’t do for the both of them to creep back into the house up the stairs, he vanished around the corner of the house.
Chapter 19
And thus her days and nights were divided neatly: the day was for a torment of anticipation regarding whether Harry was finally going to propose to Millicent alleviated by the wicked, delicious, staggering memory of what she’d been getting up to at night, and the nights seemed to be for a torment of anticipation regarding . . . what she’d be getting up to at night.
Truly, there was no rest for the wicked.
But if anyone noticed anything was amiss with her, they said naught. Apart from her mother, who noticed the faint shadows beneath her eyes and promptly ordered her to drink another of Harriet’s simples. Harriet’s simples were probably effective in that the mere threat of them frightened one away from allowing illness to take hold.
But if Harry had issued a proposal—and the opportunities to do it were legion for a resourceful man—he hadn’t announced it. Millicent wasn’t glowing unduly. There were no hushed reverent whispers between them. Harry didn’t have that clubbed-in-the-head-by-happiness look her brothers walked about wearing when they’d married. Genevieve concluded no proposal had taken place.
Then again, he’d nearly expired from the effort it had taken to break her heart with the news that he intended to propose to Millicent. She could only imagine how difficult issuing an actual proposal would prove for him.
Perhaps she ought to order him one of Harriet’s simples.
And so that evening, because Mrs. Eversea informed Jacob Eversea that she longed for his company and the company of her sons, which was really her way of interrupting the blatant gambling for a night, they were sitting about in the parlor. And the men were clearly restless.
It was Millicent—spontaneous, cheerful Millicent, who wasn’t the least sensible—who introduced the notion of playing blindman’s buff after dinner.
It was greeted with wariness.
“We’re to put on blindfolds and crash about the parlor?” Genevieve had never wanted to do anything less. If she put on a blindfold, Harry might seize the opportunity to propose to Millicent while she wasn’t watching.
“The objective is not to crash, silly. But to seize upon and identify each other. We’ll move the breakable things out of the way,” Millicent explained.
“I can hardly move my bones out of the way and all of them are breakable as far as I know.” Olivia was being obstreperous.
“We shan’t knock you to the floor, Olivia. I’ll seize you carefully,” Ian assured her.
The men thought this was hilarious.
“With blindfolds on?” Genevieve was nervous about the notion. The crashing about was one thing; the blindfolds were quite another. She’d never been enthusiastic about relinquishing control.
“And we seize . . . each other?” Harry said, as though he almost didn’t dare to hope. Because the girls were eligible for this, too.
All of the men were snickering into their fists.
And Genevieve had a sudden image of him seizing Millicent and Millicent seizing him.
“I think we ought to play cards,” she suggested firmly.
“We can go one entire evening without playing cards,” her mother countermanded immediately.
The duke was sitting silently in the corner, long legs casually outstretched, arms loosely crossed over him, surveying the room with ironic eyes.
They lingered on her; he gave her the faintest of smiles.
It was almost impossible to believe that this was the man who had said to her I want you naked beneath me.
Apart from the rush of blood to various places in her body when she thought it, she could almost imagine it hadn’t happened at all.
He seemed so cool, so elegantly removed, distantly amused, a monarch for which the world conducted its amusements. He seemed entertained by the very notion of blindman’s buff.
She could not for an instant imagine him consenting to totter about in a blindfold.
It was clear the rest of the men thought this was a marvelous idea.
Almost too good to be true, in fact.
“Silly!” Millicent corrected patiently. “One person at a time wears the blindfold. And then he or she tries to tag the rest of us whilst we scatter out of the way and even tease and taunt the blindfolded person. And if we happen to be seized upon, the blindfolded person has to identify us.”
“I think you can pay for something like this at the Velvet Glove,” Colin volunteered. “You wear a blindfold while one of the girls there seizes your mmmmph!”
His wife, Madeline, also present, had reached over to pinch him hard.
It was the most peculiar sensation to be surrounded by people she’d known her entire life, knowing not one of them—certainly not her brothers or her parents, and she was certain not Harry, not Millicent, would ever have dreamed for an instant that Genevieve Eversea had sat astride the duke in the garden last night, and that she’d helped him unlace her gown so he could take her nipple into his mouth.
She ducked her head to hide her face. Perhaps a blindfold would help disguise the flushing, if she were in fact coerced into playing blindman’s buff and she continued to have such thoughts.
She studiously avoided looking at him. She would not be sitting astride him again. Or beneath him. Or in any other place other than opposite him, preferably surrounded by other people as witnesses and deterrents.
She knew he had no such compunctions about avoiding looking at her, and he was doing it now.
Even as all the while the men, being men, were negotiating changes to the game amongst themselves to make it less tedious and more of a man’s game, and suggestions flew thickly.
“This is the sort of game that would be vastly improved if we were all very, very drunk.”
“Or if a wager is involved.”
“Or if one of us volunteered to place an apple on his head and invited others to shoot it off.”
The duke happened to address this directly to Ian.
It quelled momentarily the spirited negotiation.
“I’m not wearing the blindfold,” Ian said very quickly.
Genevieve stifled a smile. She wondered if her brother’s nerves would ever be the same after this week.
After a discussion as heated and orderly as a parliamentary debate, it was agreed that every time someone was tagged and incorrectly identified by the blind man he or she would be allowed to take a drink. The blindfolded person would also have to take a drink, because it was unanimously agreed that a drunken person staggering about blindfolded would be amusing. But the successfully identified people would be removed from the game, and therefore not allowed to drink at all, thereby solving the problem of cheating, and every identified person would need to give the blind man a shilling.
The clutching of clothing was to be permitted as a means of guessing identity; after a brief heated discussion, so was the feeling of faces. The feeling of anything else was deemed not cricket, after a giggled discussion.
And now that the game had been modified to the men’s satisfaction, the first “blind man” was chosen: Millicent, by default.
Within an hour, the parlor was a giggling drunken melee.
Millicent was hopeless at guessing, but everyone enjoyed putting themselves in her way to be grabbed and released. So she won no shillings, but she failed at the guessing so many times that she was rapidly woozy from sherry and staggered into the corner and found herself unable to back out of it again, and had to be rescued and comforted and fed hot coffee by Mrs. Eversea.
Colin was next, and he cracked his knuckles, submitted to being blindfolded, and promptly proved to be an excellent and ruthless player. He knew the lay of the land (the parlor) well, he had long legs and a long reach, and an excellent sense of smell.
/> He caught hold of Ian’s coat just as he tried to flee and gripped hard.
He leaned in for a sniff. “Smells like a horse’s arse! I’ve got Ian!”
“No sniffing aloud! We never discussed sniffing! I cry foul!” Ian was outraged. “I’m not giving you a shilling!”
“Give him a shilling! It’s not his fault you smell like a horse’s arse!” Olivia leaped into the fray, loving a debate, any sort of debate.
“Are you confusing the word smells with the word behaves?” the duke asked from the sidelines, in all seriousness.
“Smells!” everyone chorused.
A heated vote later it was decided that whether or not Ian actually smelled like a horse’s arse, Colin had indeed guessed correctly, so Ian handed over a shilling and shook hands with his brother.
It seemed Moncrieffe was simply biding his time, watching the proceedings with Mr. and Mrs. Eversea, who refereed from the sidelines.
“I can hardly avoid smelling you. You’re right in my face!” Colin explained by way of pacifying Ian.
When Colin was done, Harry took a turn being the blind man.
The blindfold, really a cravat, was wound ’round his eyes and he was spun ’round a half dozen times by an overzealous Ian and set free amongst the players. Genevieve reached out to touch him, realizing she had never done quite that before: held onto his arm outside of a waltz. Touched, let alone tasted, his skin. Clung to his coat, or slid a hand inside his shirt to touch his chest.
But he’d kissed her hand.
But before she knew it, Harry seized hold of Genevieve’s arm.
“He’s got one!” The enthusiastic cry went up.
She went silent.
Harry’s face was flushed and merry beneath the blindfold. And for one breathless moment she held very still as Harry’s fingers fumbled at the silk of her skirt, then glanced across her elbow, and decorously ventured no farther, though the rules, as such, would have allowed him to touch her face. Doubtless he knew he had a female in his clutches. It felt odd to feel his hand gripping her, the heat of it impersonal, questioning. She ought to feel breathless to be touched by him.
She looked down at his hand and wondered whether he’d touched a woman the way Moncrieffe had touched her.
She glanced over at Moncrieffe then.
But Moncrieffe’s eyes were fixed to Harry’s hand with a cold, riveted fascination. As though it were a poisonous snake. He was so still he called to mind a big animal about to spring.
And so she stared at the duke, while Harry fumbled at her wrist.
“It’s Olivia!” Harry guessed at last.
“Aww, Harry, you’ve gone and botched it, and now you have to give Genevieve a shilling. And she has to drink, and she’s a raucous drunk!” Colin winked at her.
“I am nothing of the sort!” she denied as she laughed, pretending to be appalled.
“She can’t even finish a dark at the Pig & Thistle,” Harry defended proprietarily, with a swift glance at the duke. Abashed, perhaps, that he’d gotten it wrong.
“You should have sniffed her, Osborne!” Ian suggested.
Harry went scarlet. Thrust his hands into his coat pockets.
“I never thought you’d be slow enough to be caught by me,” Harry explained to her, almost by way of apology.
You ought to have known me, she couldn’t help but think. By the very temperature of my skin. By the texture of it. By my mere presence. You ought to have known.
“I’ll give you a shilling later,” he added, glumly.
“I forfeit my shilling,” she forgave him gallantly. “And you can have my drink.”
And then everyone turned when it was clear the duke had risen slowly to his feet portentously.
“I’ll take the blindfold, Harry.”
The amazement lasted a full second.
A second later, everyone was foxed enough to tease him, and a chorus went up. “Oooooooooh, Your Grace, catch me if you can!”
Genevieve watched in fascination as they bound his eyes, which remained fixed on her until they disappeared from view behind the cravat blindfold.
To his credit, he was surprisingly game. He taunted the others back when they taunted him. He made sweeping snatches and missed as the others dodged his grasp.
She, like the others, circled and wove about him.
And with an unerring instinct that surprised her not in the least, his hand whipped out and deftly closed over her arm.
“He’s got one of us!” Colin bellowed in mock-alarm.
She froze the moment his fingers landed on her.
His fingers traced the sleeve of her gown, to and fro, and he frowned as though genuinely puzzling out who might be wearing lutestring silk this evening.
And from the silk of her sleeves they skimmed the silk of her warm, bare arm. It was scarcely a touch, but it was as though he’d stroked her entire being awake. As though it were spring, for God’s sake, gooseflesh bloomed everywhere on her skin. She wondered that the whole room couldn’t see her nipples rise beneath the silk of her gown.
She was certain he already knew who it was and was merely prolonging it for the sheer devilish pleasure of it. She was half amused, half scandalized, and wholly aroused.
And casually, with every appearance of fumbling, he had the sleeve between his fingers, then let his hand wander. He frowned in concentration as his fingers skimmed, lightly, lightly along the edge of her bodice, tantalizingly just above the swell of her bosom, tracing the satiny skin of collarbone, up to her throat, where her heart beat.
Lingered there, where it thump, thump, thumped.
And then, quite gratuitously, slid beneath her jaw, across her lips, and hovered.
I want you naked beneath me.
And lest she should harbor any doubts about whether that was what she wanted, too, he was showing her, with the most casual of touches, that her body now only felt truly alive when he was touching her, and reminding her of the promise of pleasure that lived in every cell of her.
Dear God.
“Why, it’s Miss Genevieve Eversea,” the duke said softly.
It was only then that the two of them noticed that the entire room had gone utterly silent. All those foxed eyes watched the duke and Genevieve, puzzled over whether they were actually seeing something untoward, or whether the duke was just being particularly, solicitously careful of Miss Eversea’s person.
“Give him a shilling, Genny!” Millicent demanded cheerfully.
The duke untied his own blindfold and relinquished it to the next volunteer, which was Olivia.
He resumed his seat at the edge of the proceedings.
They both knew he’d won more than a game of blindman’s buff.
And when Genevieve went up to her bedchamber later, it wasn’t to sleep. It was to pace the carpet and to watch the clock. Out of spite, time slowed.
But it could not defy the turning of the earth, and midnight arrived.
And down the stairs she went.
She found him in the library this time. But he wasn’t standing at the window gazing out into the darkness. He was standing near the doorway, watching the foyer for her, which made him almost too easy to see.
“Were you looking for me, Miss Eversea?” he asked softly.
She found she was so nervous she couldn’t reply. She simply bit her lip.
He smiled at her. “Were you perhaps looking for scintillating conversation? A discussion about art? Of which I know a little more now than I did when I first arrived, I’ll have you know.”
“Do you?” She was too astonished to be irritated by his teasing.
“I spent an hour or so in here the other day. Quite a collection you have. I wanted to investigate it.”
“Why?”
“Why did I spend time in the library? My curiosity was . . . aroused.”
Something about the way he said “aroused” looped around her as surely as a warm arm around her waist. She was desperately nervous. But she was curiously thrilled to s
uspect he’d done it to learn more about her.
“Why was your curiosity aroused? What did you learn?”
“I read that Boticelli painted something called Venus and Mars in which Mars, poor devil, is nearly naked and flattened as though Venus has just thoroughly had her way with him, and that Veronese painted one in which, ironically, Venus is entirely naked and Mars is clothed. I prefer to imagine the latter.”
“But you knew that already. Do you even like art?”
A hesitation. “I like cricket.”
“And that’s all?” She was smiling now.
“I like dogs. I like horses and hunting and fine wines. I like traveling. I like books about the natural sciences. I like chess and fishing and I like making money hand over fist and I enjoy making love to beautiful women. I like speaking with you. And looking at you. And I read a book about art and I tried to become interested in light and form and the like. I think I prefer to imagine the firelight playing about your form.”
Genevieve had never heard a list she’d liked as much, though she could hardly say why. He was more of an artist in some ways than people who professed to enjoy it were, people like Harry—and even herself—who could not see without analyzing. It was in the things he saw and the words he chose to describe them and in how he touched . . . as he was touching her now.
Because almost before she realized it, the backs of his fingers were sliding against her throat. Where the skin was satiny smooth and pale.
“And so. Do you intend to have your way with me, Venus?” he murmured.
She still didn’t have the vocabulary for this sort of sensual encounter. Her entire being seemed to rush the surface of her skin, greedily savoring his touch.
“I’ve told you what I want. How much do you want to know, Genevieve?” It sounded like a serious question. Also a fairly fraught one.
“How can I answer that honestly when I don’t know how much there is to know?”
“You’re not entirely naïve about . . . the process.”
What I Did For a Duke Page 21