Satyr’s Son: A Georgian Historical Romance (Roxton Family Saga Book 5)

by Brant, Lucinda

  She lay back down and shivered, realizing she was now cold, and that it was her fault for leaving the window ajar. She went to get up to close it, when her movement woke him.

  “Get under the covers,” he said drowsily. “Keep us both warm.” When she hesitated that little bit too long, he woke enough to turn his head and say, “I am in no fit state to seduce you. I am weak… and… when we do make love, I want—I want to be at my best—for you… I should warn you… I’m only wearing a shirt… And you’ll find this out soon enough: I have bony knees and hard, hairy legs.”

  Lisa smiled and blushed, but before removing her half boots she quickly went over and closed the window. In her stockings she rearranged the bed linen, so she could freely slip under the bed sheet and coverlet. And with his body no longer trapped by the bedsheet, she was acutely aware of the shape of him. She gingerly pressed herself along his curved length and snuggled in, and soon their legs were comfortably entangled.

  He seemed to have drifted off to sleep again, for he was quiet a very long time, and then he said, “I must rest, or the headache lingers.”

  “Then rest.”

  “You won’t go away…?”

  “I won’t.”

  “It’s not—It’s not Jack’s big day, is it?”

  “No. The wedding is the day after tomorrow.”

  “I thought…” He sighed. “Good. I don’t want to miss it.”

  “He does not want you to miss it either.”

  “He forgives me?”

  “He does.”

  “He is a dear man.”

  “He is. As are you.”

  “I am not,” Henri-Antoine grumbled. He pulled her arm further across his body, to bring her closer, and to find anchorage. “I am a scoundrel and an arrogant wantwit… I’m still furious with you.”

  Lisa stifled a smile into his back, fearing she might giggle. But she could not hide the laughter in her voice.

  “Yes, I saw how furious you were with me when you goaded Jack into striking you.”

  “You don’t care, do you?”

  “That you provoked Jack to hit you and then you hit him back? I most certainly do!”

  “Not that, witch. You don’t care I’m furious with you.”

  “Not a drop.”

  “I tried to warn you.”

  Lisa set her cheek between his shoulder blades.

  “You did. Thank you.”

  There was a protracted silence before he said, “I’m sorry—sorry for everything… For what I said… I didn’t mean any of it. It was despicable… I’m despicable… Staying with me will be your ruin.”

  “I am already ruined, my lord.”

  At that pronouncement, he unsettled them both by rolling over to face her and demanded she explain herself. Her response was to smile across at him and wonder how it was possible that even when he was unshaven and disheveled, with one black eye and a thunderous frown, he was still the most handsome man she knew. He might be overbearing, arrogant, uncompromising, and oft times inscrutable, but as she had discovered he was generous, compassionate, loyal, and loving, and all in all, the most complex person she had ever met, and she loved him. She was very sure she had fallen in love with him almost from their first meeting. She believed in fate, and had told him so. She also believed in being truthful, so she came right out and said it, and why not? She was here with him. She had agreed to be his mistress, and she could not wait for them to share a house, and a bed.

  “Because I love you, Henri-Antoine.”

  He closed his eyes and turned his head on the pillow to stare unseeing at the stars sprinkling the ceiling, enjoying the few precious seconds to bathe in her declaration. And he found he was suddenly heady, as he had been when he had kissed her under the oak tree. He was so overcome with happiness, he grinned. But his grin made her frown and sit up on an elbow to stare down at him.

  “I do beg your pardon if I have said something that makes you grin like a wantwit,” she retaliated with a pout, feigning offence. “If this is how His Lordship responds to a declaration of love, then perhaps Jack did not hit you hard enough to knock the sense into you, as I had hoped!”

  He chuckled, and reverted to his first language and said in French, “But you are the wantwit—my beautiful wantwit. You confess to loving a man who contrives to have his best friend hit him—to prove to you he is the last man with whom you should spend your life. You do this when he is as weak as a puppy and as woolly-headed as a lamb, thus he cannot respond as you deserve… His greatest wish is to show you he desires you, body and soul… And you wonder why I am smiling like a court fool?”

  “If you expect me to feel sorry for your predicament—”

  “Oh no! I feel sorry for yours!”

  She gasped, and then laughed with him. And when she smiled down into his eyes he gently took her face between his long fingers, to draw her closer, and kissed her tenderly.

  “You have made me very happy, Miss Lisa Crisp.”

  “And that makes me happy.”

  They snuggled in again, this time with his arm around her and her head on his chest, content to remain still and silent, and for long enough that they drifted off into a state between sleeping and waking. When he spoke, Lisa wondered if they had been asleep at all.

  “I want to stay here, with you, forever.”

  “We would then become an entry in one of those guide books about grand estates—”

  “Guide books? About grand estates? Are there such things?”

  “How else are ordinary persons to know about how their betters live?”

  “I had no idea.”

  “That’s because you live inside one—”

  “Inside a guide book?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would we feature in such a compelling read?”

  “Because if we stayed here forever we would eventually die—”

  “How morbid you are.”

  “You did say forever.”

  “I did.”

  “And so if we did stay here forever our skeletons would eventually be discovered, lying together as we are now. And such a discovery would be worthy of an entry in any guidebook. Possibly as a cautionary tale about lovers—or in our case, soon to be lovers—that it is never wise to remain in bed forever—”

  “Not wise? Hang that! Who wants to be wise when I can be in bed with you?”

  Lisa sighed and smiled and kissed his chest. She suddenly became pensive. Perhaps it was mention of death and dying. She wanted to know about his father. It was something he had said, and then done, when she had looked after him at Lord Westby’s townhouse. It had remained unspoken between them but she wondered if now he might talk to her about it, and about his father, the illustrious fifth Duke.

  “When you were ill as a child, was it your father who tended to you, because at Lord Westby’s you—”

  “Yes. I spent much of my boyhood recovering on a chaise longue in my father’s libraries—”

  “Libraries?”

  “Here. London. Paris. Mostly here.”

  “And he would stroke your hair…”

  “No matter what he was doing, he would leave it all to sit with me after one of my attacks… He’d recount stories of his youth… His voice soothed me… I still hear it in my head… He had this way of speaking—It was compelling. He was compelling. And his voice… Hard to describe, but if you’d heard it you’d never forget it…”

  “Like your voice.”

  “Mine? Unforgettable?”

  “No—”

  “No? But you just said—”

  “Your voice is-is—glorious.”

  He grinned. “Glorious?”

  “You know it is! And I told you once before. Don’t you remember? When you visited at Gerrard Street and gave me my most wondrous writing box. I said I could listen to you talk on and on in whatever language you chose.” She smiled cheekily. “And Becky agrees with me. In fact she was the first to mention the hot chocolate—”

  “
Hot chocolate?”

  “Your voice. That’s what it sounds like. Your voice sounds like hot chocolate tastes: Smooth and delicious and-and just a tiny bit sinful.”

  “Hot chocolate? Sinful?”

  He chuckled deep in his throat and then pulled the pillow over his face and held it there. Lisa wondered what was the matter until she felt his whole body shaking, and knew he was shaking with laughter. She pulled the pillow away and he blinked up at her and she glared down at him, blushing.

  “I was not exaggerating,” she said earnestly. “Or-or trying to-to flatter you.”

  “Heaven forbid!” He winced at the pain behind his eyes and pulled the pillow out of her fingers, but before putting it back behind his head said, “I was laughing with happiness, witch. You make me happy. Stop it!”

  She smiled, and they both settled and were silent. He surprised her by confessing,

  “When you stroked my hair at Westby’s I thought… For one blinding moment I believed it was my father—”

  “Ne vous arrêtez pas, mon cher papa. Dis m'en plus.”

  “Is that what I said: ‘Do not stop, dearest papa. Tell me more.’?”

  “You did, and now I understand why.”

  “I-I blubbered like an infant!”

  “Because you realized I was not him. Sentiment is nothing of which to be ashamed. You loved your father immeasurably. It is only natural you still mourn him… And you were young when he died, were you not?”

  “He became ill just after my ninth birthday. I was twelve when he died. I thought—as a boy I thought—I thought I had infected him with my illness.”

  “Oh no! I hope your mother, your brother, his physicians, assured you that was not so.”

  “I told no one… But why not think it? Many physicians—who my parents consulted about my illness, my father’s personal physician, in fact—all warned that the falling sickness is contagious—”

  “Rot! If that were the case your whole family, and all your servants, would have caught it and suffer from it. And no one else in your family has it, do they?”

  “No—”

  “I rest my case! Oh, except your mother’s father. But you did not catch it from him because he was dead well before you were born.”

  “Ah, but until it is disproved, there are physicians who will continue to believe we are infectious and demand our removal from society.”

  “And there are also physicians who think it is a manifestation of evil, a sign of madness. I know, because Dr. Warner told me in one of his morning lectures at the breakfast table. He is vehemently opposed to the postulation that the falling sickness is contagious or that it is a sign of evil—”

  “Which is why I will fund his research, and his anatomy school.”

  “—but he does not discount the theory that when in the throes of a seizure, the sufferer is having a moment of madness.”

  “That could well be true. I do not know. I have no recollection.” He turned his head on the pillow and met Lisa’s gaze. “And because I do not know, who’s to say that inside my head there isn’t a monster—”

  “I won’t allow you to believe that!” Lisa said fiercely, and kissed him to stop his words. She smiled when he winced. “Forgive me. I forgot about your split lip. But as you brought that on yourself, I have little sympathy. But for the boy, yes, I feel for him, deeply. The death of a parent, particularly one so loved as your father was loved, is a most harrowing experience. Though my own father’s passing was a blessing in disguise. It may have left me an orphan but I no longer had to put up with his drunkenness. I preferred the poorhouse to living with him.”

  “I always wondered,” Henri-Antoine mused, only half in jest, “if being sent to a poorhouse was like me being sent to Eton…”

  “A school for the sons of the nobility like a-a poorhouse?” Lisa was aghast. “If you think that, then you do live in a fairy tale! You have no idea what life is like in a poorhouse.”

  “No. I don’t. But you, my sweet girl, have no idea about life at Eton. Brutal place. Full of bullies. Boys locked up together in such places are little monsters… For this boy who thought himself a monster, I was scared witless. Never mind I was shadowed by a physician; he was bullied too. If not for Jack, I’d not have survived. I lasted a few months, then my father rescued me. The experiment I could be like other boys my age was a miserable failure.”

  “I cannot imagine you were ever like other boys, and I am not referring to your illness. Just as you are not like other men, particularly not those your equal. What other nobleman thinks about poorhouses, and dispensaries for the poor, and how best to advance medical science, or wholly sponsors a foundation that supports this work, and offers scholarships to poor but brilliant students—”

  “The worth of a great inheritance is measured not by how it is kept, but in how it is spent. Words of wisdom my father left me in a letter the day I came into my inheritance on my twenty-first birthday… I have a thudding headache. I must sleep now. While I do, reflect on whether you wish to spend your life with a man who will forever be debilitated. When I wake and you are gone, I will accept your decision. I won’t seek out Jack and punch his nose. If you stay—there will be no turning back, for either of us.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  WHEN HE CAME downstairs, it was late afternoon. He found the little table by one of the windows set for dinner. The French doors were wide. Just beyond the doors, where the path split left and right, the lads were seated on stools in the shade, playing at cards. He looked back at the table. It had two place settings. It gave him hope Lisa had decided to stay. But she was not at the folly, which had only this room and the one above, so nowhere for her to hide, if indeed she was being playful with him. There was only one other place she could be, and that the lads had positioned themselves at the fork in the path, to stop trespassers, gave him the answer.

  He pulled the hair out of his eyes and went outside in his shirt and bare legs. The lads continued on with their card game as if he were not there. They were, after all, shadows, and he rarely needed to interact with them. Yet this time he came straight up to them, which had them instantly on their feet. But he gestured for them to sit and enquired, “You’ve kept the furnace stoked?”

  “We have, my lord. Should’ve taken the chill off by now.”

  Henri-Antoine nodded and lingered. For the first time in his life he felt awkward and at a loss to know what to say to his lads, they who had been everywhere with him and so knew his habits intimately. None of that had bothered him in the past. It did now, because of Lisa. So it was a relief when one of them said levelly, “Mr. Gallet will be here with supper soon. But we were to tell Your Lordship that if we thought there was time, to send you to the grotto.”

  “And is there time?”

  The lads looked at one another and then looked at Henri-Antoine and nodded. It was only when he went off down the path that wound its way through the coppice to Neptune’s Grotto that they dared to grin at his back. They returned to their card game.

  HE SAW HER discarded clothing before he saw her. Each garment was neatly folded and the pile placed at the base of the white marble statue of a sea nymph. It was one of Neptune’s daughters, seated at the edge of the plunge pool with a jug pouring water forth from its spout and into the pool. Lisa was partially hidden from view by this statue, submerged up to her chin, one hand holding onto the stone ledge. He wasn’t sure if modesty had sent her into hiding, or if she was playing hide-and-go-seek. Or indeed if she realized he had seen her. He suspected not. And if she had been any of the females he had bedded, he’d have stripped off and jumped right in, without a second thought.

  He wondered how much, if any, male anatomy she had managed to glimpse while at Warner’s Dispensary. He knew that in any given medical situation she would not have been prudish or squeamish. But that was with patients. And then he recalled that the lads said they were to send him to the grotto. So she was expecting him, and here she was in the pool naked. So there was only one
course of action for him to take.

  He stepped up onto the stone ledge where three steps descended into the water, wriggled his bare toes, and then pulled his white shirt up over his head, and dropped it beside her clothes. Naked, he mentally counted to five, so that should she blink in surprise she still could not help but see him in all his glory, even if now her eyes were shut tight on such a sight as her first full-frontal male nude. At least her response had not been to scream, laugh, or giggle. He hoped her eyes were wide open. That what she was doing was taking a good look at him from messy head of hair right down to his wriggling toes, and that she lingered on everything in between, most particularly on everything in between. He was arrogant enough to hope his was the first naked male body she had seen, and conceited enough to know he had an admirable physique. Previous lovers had fed his vanity, but as a member of Burke’s he’d seen enough of his fellow members, in every sense of the word, to be comfortable in his own skin. Yet knowing Lisa was watching him, his past loves, Burke’s, and his conceit became insignificant; she was all that mattered.

  And just as he was about to step down into the water, she slowly waded out from behind the statue and came towards him. And when she was in front of him, she stood on the bottom step and rose up. The water lapped at her navel, and the long wet strands of her thigh-length hair floated around her and were plastered to her curvaceous loveliness like long tendrils of seaweed, providing the only tantalizing covering to her nakedness. She was the living personification of Botticelli’s Venus, and her beauty left him speechless. And when she smiled shyly up at him and put out her hand in invitation, he did not hesitate to join her.

  THE LADS REMAINED vigilant during the rest of that day and the next, while Lisa and Henri-Antoine divided their time between the folly and the pool, making certain the couple’s time together remained uninterrupted by others. And there were others who tried to encroach. On several occasions guests from the big house, either on foot or on horseback, were drawn to this section of the grounds by the smoke from the furnace’s chimney. It was as if the white gray plume rising up into the blue of the sky beckoned all comers, a signal of invitation, much like the warmth of a fireplace fire on a chilly night.