Vixen in Velvet

by Loretta Chase

  But she had these last few moments.

  “Then let’s just dance,” she said.

  Perhaps it was better not to talk.

  When Leonie spoke of Paris, Lisburne’s chest felt tight. He remembered her saying that of the three sisters she’d spent the greatest percentage of her life there. And this night he caught—along with the so-faint hint of Paris in her speech—the small, elusive note in minor key, of loss.

  Any idea who your pretty vixen is, really?

  Lisburne had thought he knew her, or knew all a man needed to know. She was pretty and shapely. She was clever and surprisingly well read, quick-witted and confident. He’d ended her virginity and discovered the sensuality and passion lurking under the businesslike exterior.

  But this wasn’t enough. He wanted to know the girl she’d been before she came to London. The girl Swanton had met in a shop in Paris.

  He almost hated Swanton for having seen her when she was—what? Fifteen or sixteen, perhaps. She must have been more French than English then, a girl who laughed more, Lisburne was sure, than she did now, and in other ways, not only the low, intimate laughter that crept under a man’s skin . . .

  Whatever she’d done or said, she’d made an impression on Swanton, when scores of women hadn’t.

  In those days she must have smiled more easily and naturally, and talked entirely in French, and she must have been more lighthearted and less well armored.

  Lisburne wanted that girl as well as the woman in his arms.

  He’d almost said that and everything that was in his mind.

  He’d wanted to believe she danced so well at least partly because she danced with him, and they were meant to be together, and they’d met in front of the painting of Venus and Mars because they were meant to be lovers, too. It was Fate. Inevitable.

  He became aware of her scent first, and realized he was leaning in too close, much too close for dancing in public. He felt her pull away slightly, in the instant before he did.

  “They’re all watching Swanton and Gladys,” he said.

  “And you think no one notices you?” she said. And laughed.

  The music was ending, and more than one head nearby turned toward the sound of her low, rich laugh.

  He had the presence of mind to release his hold of her. But not enough to control his tongue. “It’s you they’re looking at,” he said softly. “The most beautiful girl in the place.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes shining.

  “That’s the perfect thing to say,” she said. “A perfect ending.”

  “Ending?”

  “Adieu, my lord.”

  She moved away, and he couldn’t grab her and haul her back, with all the world looking on. In an instant she was gone, slipping into the crowd and disappearing, before his brain had caught up with what was happening. Had happened.

  And while he stood there, bewildered and on the brink of anger, a familiar voice said, “Lisburne, if you do not save me I’ll find a dastardly way to get even.”

  He looked to one side and not very far down, for it was his cousin Clara. She wasn’t exactly an Amazon, although to some fellows she seemed so, but she was decidedly on the tallish side.

  The habits of a lifetime came to his rescue. He collected his composure, his manners, and his powers of address.

  “Of course I’ll save you,” he said. “Who needs a broken jaw, cuz, and why can’t Val do it?”

  “It’s not that sort of thing. It’s Sir Henry Jaspers.”

  She made a small movement of her head. Lisburne threw a discreet glance that way—enough to spot a young man of fair coloring and bull-sized proportions—before returning his attention to her.

  “He’s bearing down on me,” she said, “And I know that look in his eye. It means a lot of pretty poetry and admiration of my this and that and would I do him the honor of marrying him. He asks once a week, and even Mama cannot seem to dampen his ardor. He has a wonderful obliviousness. And one can’t be cruel to him, because he’s too sweet. But here! At Vauxhall of all places. He means no harm, I know, but if Gladys catches my eye, I’ll never be able to keep in countenance, and one doesn’t laugh at a gentleman in love, even if one doesn’t want him. Oh, here he comes. Do be a darling, Simon, and dance with me, I beg.”

  He donned the right smile and said, “Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”

  Since resisting temptation wasn’t in her nature, Leonie had to get herself out of its vicinity. Had she gone home to Maison Noirot and Lisburne followed her there, she’d never be able to maintain her resolve. She lacked the strength of character to send him away.

  And so she went straight from Vauxhall to Clevedon House, where she often spent Saturday night.

  This night she found Marcelline looking well, truly well, for the first time in weeks. Her Grace was in good spirits, too. This was partly because she felt better and partly because today Lucie hadn’t clung to her like a limpet—as she’d done from the time Marcelline had first displayed symptoms of her pregnancy.

  Lucie had stopped clinging because Bianca Williams had mysteriously arrived in the house in the middle of the night, “like a golden fairy princess,” Lucie said.

  “Bianca is the perfect playmate,” Marcelline said after she and Leonie had withdrawn to the duchess’s sitting room. “She’ll sit still for hours on end while Lucie arranges her hair. She’ll wear whatever outrageous ensemble Lucie concocts. Lucie treats her like a doll, and Bianca, like a good little actress, plays Doll. She’ll play any other part, too. They made scenes from The Arabian Nights and went hunting as Red Indians. They played soldiers and had a tea party to celebrate the end of the battle. They’ve made costumes—and a fine wreck of the nursery, not to mention one of my gowns. Bianca hasn’t Lucie’s sewing skill, but she has strong ideas about proper costume. And props.”

  “I believe she was onstage from the time she could walk,” Leonie said. “Or maybe before.”

  “She’s been wonderful for Lucie,” Marcelline said. “Clevedon says she was lonely here.”

  “But the servants dote on her,” Leonie said.

  “Lucie adores Clevedon and she likes being a princess in a grand house with servants, but it’s not what she’s used to,” Marcelline said. “After all that happened in the spring . . .” She frowned. “He seems to understand her in a way I can’t, and when he’s about, she’s calmer and happier. When he isn’t about, she can be a little beast. But Bianca seems to have a positive effect. I’ll be sorry to see Mrs. Williams go. Not that they’ll be allowed to do so right away. She isn’t quite as strong as she pretends. Clevedon is looking about for something suitable for her.” She laughed. “But listen to me with my domestic tales!” She refilled Leonie’s brandy glass. “What about you, my love? Have you something to tell me?”

  There had been too much to do lately and Marcelline had been too ill when there was time. And so it was only now that Leonie could tell her the full story of the last two and a half weeks. She didn’t cry. She’d never been one for weeping. But she’d almost wept at Vauxhall.

  It’s you they’re looking at. The most beautiful girl in the place.

  And her heart had broken then.

  She and her sisters had looks, certainly, and they made the most of their assets, but they were not, strictly, beautiful. Leonie was the least beautiful of the three, with her crooked nose and too-sharp jaw and red hair.

  But Lisburne had said she was the most beautiful girl in the place and he’d said it in a way that made one believe he believed it, which only a man besotted could do.

  “Your taste, as it ought to be, is excellent,” Marcelline said. “He’s handsome to a painful degree.” She patted Leonie’s hand. “I was beginning to worry about you. I feared you’d hold out for a respectable professional man and save your virginity for the wedding night—and our ancestors would turn in the
ir graves.” She broke out into giggles then, and Leonie couldn’t help giggling, too.

  When they’d sobered, Marcelline said. “Clevedon didn’t like it because he says Lisburne is slippery.”

  “Slippery,” Leonie said blankly.

  Marcelline smiled. “I think he means that Lisburne is like the Noirots and the DeLuceys in one way. Charming but elusive. He treats women beautifully, Clevedon says, and stays with them long enough for them to believe he’ll stay forever. Then he leaves them beautifully, with very expensive trinkets to help mend their broken hearts.”

  “That’s nothing I hadn’t worked out for myself,” Leonie said. “I knew he was a charmer from the instant I met him. Completely irresistible. Entirely dangerous.”

  “That’s why you’re here,” Marcelline said.

  “Better to leave than to be left,” Leonie said. “And I preferred to leave on a high note.”

  “Without the trinkets?” Marcelline said in mock astonishment. “Can you truly be a Noirot? Or did Gypsies take our real sister, and leave you on the doorstep as a consolation prize, as Sophy used to claim?”

  “Oh, I’ll get a trinket,” Leonie said. “But better than jewelry, chérie. My goodbye gift from him will be priceless.”

  Lisburne House

  On Sunday, a special edition of the Spectacle published Tom Foxe’s blow-by-blow account of Theaker and Meffat’s unmasking at Vauxhall. While dashes and asterisks stood in for names, nobody in Society remained in any doubt of Lord Swanton’s innocence or his manly display when women bystanders were insulted, or the dastardly behavior of two men who had been, the Spectacle reminded its readers, intimate friends of a recently disgraced member of the peerage.

  In the entire edition, otherwise overflowing with gossip and innuendo, there appeared no sly insinuations about a certain dressmaker and a marquess. The children’s fête received due attention, however, and in that context Miss Noirot’s dress, along with those of Lady Gladys, Lady Clara, and other patrons of Maison Noirot were described in brain-freezing detail.

  Swanton being late coming down to breakfast, Lisburne had more than sufficient time to read and reread the Spectacle. As though he’d find a clue there to explain what had happened between him and Leonie.

  What had happened to him. When she left.

  He’d stood blind and deaf and paralyzed until Clara had demanded his attention.

  After a long, hard fight with his pride he’d gone to Maison Noirot. Leonie ought to have arrived long since, but she wasn’t there. Fenwick had answered the door and said, “I fought she was wif you,” or something to that effect.

  A sound from the doorway brought Lisburne back to the moment.

  Swanton entered, all aglow. He actually chirped a greeting. He hummed while filling his plate.

  Lisburne wanted to throw the coffeepot at him.

  Instead he flung the Spectacle across the table to Swanton’s place. “You’ll be happy to know you are once more an angelic being, whom all ladies must worship and adore,” he said.

  Swanton sat down. “Not happy to see you in a fit of the blue devils,” he said. “My redemption is mainly your doing, after all.”

  “It’s Miss Noirot’s doing,” Lisburne said. He felt a sharp ache in his chest. He ignored it. “If she hadn’t had the wit to let that strange little boy loose on the streets of London, we might never have found Mrs. Williams. Or maybe we ought to thank her sister, for finding Fenwick in the first place.”

  “I saw you dancing with Miss Noirot,” Swanton said. “You looked like a man in—”

  “I saw you dancing with Gladys,” Lisburne cut in.

  “Yes.” Swanton ducked his head and attended to his breakfast. Had Lisburne been paying attention, he’d have noticed the color creeping up his neck.

  But Lisburne’s mind was elsewhere. Swanton hadn’t been Gladys’s only partner at Vauxhall. She was never without a partner during all the time Lisburne had remained at Vauxhall—and a very long time it had seemed. After dancing with Clara, he’d danced and flirted with other young ladies. And why shouldn’t he, when Leonie saw fit to abandon him? Not that he blamed her, after all, when she had just recovered her shop’s reputation. He understood that shopkeepers, especially milliners, had to be careful about public perception of their morals, and she needed to be more than usually careful, because of the young women she sponsored. Still, she might at least . . .

  “But I’ll call tomorrow,” Swanton was saying. “And I should like to borrow the curricle. I think, if I’m quick enough off the mark, she’ll consent to drive with me.”

  “Yes, of course she will.”

  “Then it’s all right?”

  “What is?”

  “For me to borrow the curricle,” Swanton said. “Can’t have the other fellows stealing a march on me.”

  “Certainly not. Help yourself.”

  Lisburne left the breakfast room and went upstairs to his room, where Polcaire waited, to dress his master for the day. The master dutifully played his part: He maintained an air of calm insouciance during this lengthy and critical procedure, and delivered the necessary bon mot for Polcaire to share with the other valets at their favorite drinking place.

  Wednesday 29 July

  Lisburne told himself he had nothing to be irate about. He had intended to seduce Leonie Noirot. He’d succeeded. She’d made his enforced stay in London very interesting, indeed. But he’d always known he’d return to the Continent, which meant that sooner or later they would part ways.

  He hadn’t expected to part ways quite so soon.

  He told himself he ought to have expected it, since she wasn’t a courtesan or a merry widow but a businesswoman with a shop to run, who couldn’t afford to be seen as a demirep or the mistress of a nobleman. He understood this perfectly well. He better than many of his peers understood the way business worked. He viewed his own extensive holdings as business. Since he oversaw them from abroad, he was all the more careful and attentive to details.

  He understood, truly he did.

  And he was wretched and angry all the same, and it took only until midweek for him to break down and visit the shop.

  He arrived shortly after opening time on Wednesday morning, when the ladies of the beau monde were least likely to appear.

  But he hadn’t reckoned on the wives of excessively rich barristers and their curst daughters who took it into their heads to become betrothed at the most inconvenient times and needed a thousand fittings for bride clothes.

  He arrived, in short, ten minutes after Mrs. Sharp brought her second-eldest daughter in, when Madame couldn’t possibly be spared.

  “I am so sorry, my lord,” Selina Jeffreys said, “but I can’t say when Madame will be available. Mrs. Sharp was one of our first clients, and Madame must attend her personally. But perhaps in an hour—two at most—Madame will be free.”

  He went out and walked the few steps up and across St. James’s Street to White’s. There he loitered in the coffee room, listening to gossip and losing track of what people were saying. Then he decamped to the morning room, where he read the papers without knowing what he was reading.

  He told himself he would not go back to the shop today. Tomorrow, perhaps. Or Friday. She would have to see him on Friday. It was the last day of July, the day of reckoning.

  Judging by the newspaper gossip of the last few days, the odds of his losing the Botticelli had improved. All that could save it was the failure so far of any of Gladys’s numerous admirers to come up to scratch.

  He supposed he had her father to thank. It would be one thing to get Gladys’s consent. Quite another to face Boulsworth and the prospect of becoming his son-in-law.

  That prospect was enough to make strong men quail.

  And if Lisburne won the wager, he would get his two weeks with Leonie, and of course he’d be very discreet and devise a
way of taking her away without causing any talk.

  But if she didn’t want to go?

  Well, then, he was a gentleman, and he’d never forced a woman in his life. He’d offer an alternative, though there wasn’t anything else he wanted and the thought of her not wishing to be with him made him feel . . . ill.

  He flung down the newspaper he’d been staring at. He collected his hat and walking stick and started up the street to Piccadilly. He reached the corner, where he stood for a moment. Then he turned back and walked down St. James’s Street and into Maison Noirot.

  She stood near the door, arranging a hat on a mannequin’s head. She wore an ivory color organdy dress, embroidered all over with little blue things. The sleeves might have doubled as hot air balloons, but instead of one of those pelerines that turned a woman’s upper half into a wide inverted triangle, she wore a satin lace-trimmed scarf, knotted very much in the style favored some generations ago. Unlike so many other daytime fashions, it offered a glimpse of the velvety skin of her neck and throat . . . and he remembered the scent of her skin and the taste and feel of it under his mouth.

  And though he’d been sure when he set out that he would offer her alternatives, his mind went to work devising seduction.

  When she spied him, she smiled her polite professional smile and advanced. “My lord.” She made a curtsey. Not the curtsey, but one suitably businesslike. “Jeffreys told me you’d stopped by. I was sorry I’d missed you.”

  “Were you really?” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “There are one or two business matters—”

  The shop bell tinkled and what seemed like a herd of young women poured in.

  But it was only Gladys and Clara and the other Morris girl—not Alda the adder, but the dark one—and Clara’s bulldog of a maid, Davis.

  “Lisburne,” Gladys said, with a nod and a little smile.

  “Simon,” Clara said.

  She turned to the Morris girl. “Lady Susan, I believe you know my cousin Lisburne.”

  She was dark and pretty and an agreeable sort of girl—rather a miracle, considering her mother and sister—and Lisburne wished her and his two cousins at the devil.