The Rake's Retreat
Page 28
“What? No sonnets to your beautiful green eyes?”
“They’re blue,” she retorted, and then grinned when she realized that he’d caught her out.
He grinned back. “Whatever color they are, they’re the eyes I want to see when I awake each morning.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Still, it’s a shame about the poetry business… I was feeling inspired only moments ago to take up my pen. It went something like, ‘Nothing could be finer, than to marry my Jemima—’ ”
“Bryce!” she moaned. “That poem is far worse than anything I ever drew.”
He chuckled as he lay back on the pillow, his hands behind his head. “Done, then. I promise to stay far away from poetry. And the other condition?”
“Your books,” she said, mustering a stern, maidenly expression. Which was difficult, as she wasn’t feeling the least bit maidenly with Bryce stretched out, languorous and seductive, beside her. “The ones from the cabinet in the library.”
“Oh, Lord,” he said wincing. “I suppose you want me to burn them.”
“No,” she said with a wicked smirk as she rolled right on top of him. “I want you to bring them. On the ship. To Barbados.”
He looked startled for an instant, and then he laughed out loud.
“God, I do love you, Jemima,” he breathed as he took her face between his hands and kissed her in proof of it, like the not-quite-so-fallen angel he was.
* * *
Lovelace and her brother, Charlie, came strolling down the street, arm in arm. They stopped across from Bryce’s row house, where Troy was leaning up against a streetlamp. Lovelace sent her brother off to buy them lemonade from a vendor at the corner, and then turned to Troy.
“Well? Did she do it? Did she really walk in there and throw herself at his feet?”
He nodded. “Hard to tell the outcome, though. She’s only been inside for twenty minutes or so.”
Lovelace considered this a moment, and then she smiled. “If I know Mr. Bryce, he’d have tossed her out after five minutes if he wasn’t going to come around. Oh, Troy, this is so romantical. You will have to write a poem in their honor.”
“Already did,” he said smugly. “Though I didn’t know it at the time.” He pulled some tattered sheets from his waistcoat pocket. “Been carrying the deuced thing around with me. A talisman of sorts, I guess.”
She took up the first page and read aloud, “ ‘Ode to Persephone.’ ” Recognition dawned. “Oh, Troy…this is the poem that—”
“Yes, yes. That started the whole blasted business. Read on, Sheba, just the first stanza should do it.”
Lovelace continued in her most eloquent stage voice:
Virtue is a smug estate, without the lure of vice,
A feast upon an empty plate, a cider without spice.
Who writes upon this barren slate, who carves a sure device?
The rake, the rogue, the reprobate, who lives to thus entice,
Sweet virtue from her pristine state, with potent, pretty lies,
And flatteries intemperate, till blushing she complies,
Unable further to debate, this willing sacrifice,
Relinquishes a heavenly fate, for earthly paradise.”
She drew a breath as she lowered the sheet. “It’s perfect, Troy. And Papa shall write a play for me based on it—Persephone, Goddess of the Underworld, and I shall play—”
“Persephone,” he interjected with a wink. “Yes, I know. Come along now, Sheba. I think we’d better help your brother. It appears he has his hands full.”
He chuckled as he took her arm and led her toward the corner. “Which is exactly the state Bryce will find himself in, if my sainted sister gets her way. I hear he’s already put Bacchus up for sale…which is a sad state of affairs.” He added under his breath, “Can’t think of anything I’d like better than a brother-in-law with a bawdy house.”
For my siblings Richard, John, and Jo-Ann
Laughter is our truest bond
Copyright © 1999 by Nancy Hajeski w/a Nancy Butler
Originally published by Signet (ISBN 9780451197894)
Electronically published in 2017 by Belgrave House/Regency Reads
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This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.