Potent Pleasures (17 page)

“Won’t you join us, my lord?” Sophie asked.

Alex hesitated, looking at Charlotte’s downcast face. He only had to see her to become aflame with desire. Even now, the one thing he wanted to do was sweep her off her horse and carry her … where? Into his house, his bad angel quickly said. Charlotte’s eyelashes were so dark and thick that they cast shadows on her cheeks.

This was ridiculous. “I am sorry to say that I cannot,” he replied, watching Charlotte’s enchanting profile. Surely a tiny sigh escaped her lips when he said that?

Sophie looked a silent question.

“I have been informed by my man that if I do not make my way to Guthrie’s this afternoon he will leave my employ, and that would never do.”

Sophie giggled.

“You see the problem, don’t you, Lady Sophie? I would be vexed beyond all bearing if Keating decided to leave me. Ah, the life of a dandy. Guthrie will take all afternoon to fit me for one coat, and then it will take all evening for me to shrug myself into another one, and a good two hours to achieve a proper waterfall with my neck scarf.” He sighed deeply.

Despite herself, a small smile curled around Charlotte’s lips. She stole a glance at Alex. His coat was close-fitting but by no means could it promote him as one of the dandy set.

“Alas,” she said sweetly, “I fear that with such a
low
collar as the one you are sporting today, sir, and such a plain neck cloth … dear, dear. Indeed you must rush to Guthrie’s establishment. I would recommend some lemon-yellow pantaloons.”

“My goodness,” Alex said appreciatively, bending dangerously close to Charlotte and looking straight down into her green eyes. “Do you know, I believe you are the very first young lady who has had the temerity to mention my unmentionables, let alone criticize them?”

Charlotte flushed slightly. It was true. No proper lady would be caught discussing pantaloons in the company of a gentleman. Alex stared down at her, his eyes burning into hers. Suddenly his horse tossed his head and he reined back sharply in order to avoid bumping into Charlotte’s mount.

Sophie noticed with satisfaction that if Charlotte had turned pink, Alexander Foakes also seemed to be a little overheated. Alex met her eyes, and a rueful smile touched his lips for a second. The man could not be impotent, Sophie decided. In fact, she was going to do everything in her power to further a marriage between her closest friend and this particular earl.

“Charlotte and I were just discussing the Shakespeare play we see tonight,” Sophie said airily.
“King Lear
, I believe. Are you familiar with the play, sir?”

“I am much looking forward to seeing Kean in the role,” Alex replied, his smile turning into a positive grin.

Charlotte turned her head from Sophie to Alex, a rather bewildered look in her eyes. She wasn’t even aware that the two knew each other. Sophie had been at home most of the week; when had they become so friendly?

Alex doffed his hat again, remarking gravely that he hoped to have the pleasure of greeting them that evening, and rode away. His whole body protested, riding down the street away from his delectable love, especially given that her riding costume emphasized every lovely curve. His eyes darkened as he imagined picking up Charlotte and putting her on his library table, tossing up her elegant skirts, uncovering … His horse curvetted in protest as his hand involuntarily shortened the reins. For God’s sake. He rode a bit faster. The tale about Guthrie was flummery. In fact, he had to be home before Pippa awoke from her nap.

He was extremely irritated as he threw the reins to a waiting groom and strode into the front hallway of Sheffield House. Instantly he paused and cocked an experienced ear. No piercing screams meant that Pippa had not yet woken up. Alex walked into his library, only to be greeted by his desperate-looking secretary, Robert Lowe. Alex’s desk was piled with papers and had been for days; his secretary seemed to tag behind him everywhere, asking for signatures. Alex grimaced, remembering his ordered life before Pippa’s arrival.

Meanwhile he sat down at the desk and quickly began working through the largest pile of papers, tossing them in the direction of his secretary with instructions about how to respond. Suddenly he stopped in astonishment. Before him was a sheet of newsprint, clearly one of the scandal sheets printed daily, with an arrow pointing to a paragraph.

Last night Lord L——was caught with Lady D——
.

If Mrs. B——will still continue flirting

We hope she’ll draw, or we’ll undraw the curtain
.

“What the devil is this piece of rubbish doing here,” Alex said in a deadly voice, his dark eyes pinning his secretary to the chair.

“I just thought,” Lowe said miserably, “I thought you might want to consider a suit for libel…. Anyway,” he finished in a rush, “I thought you should know.” Alex’s eyes sharpened and he returned to the sheet he still held in his hand.

A certain earl had better stop a-knocking

It takes a stiff rapper to enter a duke’s locker
.

Alex swore and violently crumpled the sheet, throwing it to the ground. His secretary trembled.

“Out!”

Lowe left, clutching a sheaf of papers to his chest, bowing reflexively as he went. He felt ill. The whole house knew (thanks to Keating) just how perfidious his master’s first wife had been,
and
they knew quite well that he didn’t have any problems with his “rapper,” given the satisfied ladies—well, women—who had occasionally graced the master’s bed since his wife left. Although there haven’t been any in England, Lowe thought.

Meanwhile Alex leaned against the mantelpiece in the library, his face savage with rage. God damn her, God damn her! Maria, with her soft wails and shrieking complaints … he shook with disgust even thinking of her.

Finally he took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down. After all, his ex-wife was hardly responsible for insolent verses printed in a London scandal sheet. He could easily have refused the annulment if he wished. It had seemed a heaven-sent way out of a horrible situation, Alex thought, his mind drawn back to feverish nights in Rome during which Maria would scream incomprehensibly and regularly throw objects at his head. In a period of two months he had had the windows in their bedroom replaced four times, to the great amusement of the household servants.

He still remembered the awed sense of joy he felt when Maria confessed—in a moment of calmness—that she was in love with a priest and wanted to annul their marriage. He had, in fact, been on the verge of volunteering for the dragoon guards, even given his position as heir to the earldom. Hang his father! Patrick would make a better earl than he, any day. He would have done anything, anything to get away from his Italian wife.

Alex flung himself into a big armchair next to the fire, thinking moodily of his first meeting with Maria. He had been in Italy for barely a week, and he attended a
concerto
at the Palazzo Barberini with some count; he could barely remember his name now. Count Rossi-Ferrini, he thought. And there she was. She looked exactly like the girl he had met in the gardens of Stuart Hall, the girl he had spent fruitless weeks searching for. True, she didn’t have red hair, and he was certain that the garden girl, as he had taken to calling her in his head, did. And she didn’t smell as sweetly clean and innocent as that girl did. Odd, given that Maria was a well-born Italian maiden and that girl was training to be a prostitute. But their faces were the same shape, a delicate triangle, and they both had intriguingly full lower lips.

Fool that he was, he assumed that Maria and he would share the same passion that he and the garden girl had … what an absolute jackass, Alex thought, his lips twisting cynically. Once married, Maria had to be compelled to any sort of physical intimacy. When they finally did share a bed it was abundantly clear that far from being the innocent, convent-raised girl her family had represented her to be, she was no virgin. After that the marriage rapidly disintegrated, spiraling into a series of screaming tirades on her part and longer and longer absences on his part. He took trips into the Italian countryside, stopping at any
taverna
he saw, drinking local wine until he fell off the bench. By the end of a year his Italian was fluent and his tolerance for alcohol (never slight) had doubled.

But he was miserable. He was going to the dogs and he knew it. Then, just as he was on the verge of joining the Third Dragoon Guards, the papers signed and the only task remaining to inform his wife, Maria came to him and begged him to release her from the marriage. Release her! He would have done anything to wipe out their wedding. Oddly enough, they made love that night for the first time in months, rather tenderly, as he remembered. Unfortunately, it was also the night that Pippa was conceived.

Within a month her powerful family had arranged everything. Alex had one sticky and uncomfortable interview with three black-gowned bishops who asked him politely:
“Lei avrebbe per caso un problema?’

“Sì, sì,” he responded earnestly. He may not have had the problem they thought he had, but he had no trouble labeling Maria a problem. And he was free. Maria set off with her priest, now ex-priest he supposed, carrying with her all the household silver, jewelry, and every piece of furniture she could put her hands on. She even took a miniature of his mother, presumably to sell it since she could have no attachment to the picture.

In the first joyful breath of liberty he didn’t care, thinking that the marriage was over and he would never again have to wake up to Maria Colonna in his bedchamber. But in fact he was still not entirely free. The debris from that dreadful marriage kept washing up on the shores of his life. The miniature of his mother showed up in a secondhand store in Naples. At one point Maria’s feckless brother tried to blackmail him. And now ribald verses. Personally, he didn’t give a hang what the papers printed about him. But Charlotte’s father, the Duke of Calverstill—that would be another story. To tell the truth, he himself would never allow Pippa to marry a man with a reputation like his own.

His thoughts were broken by the sound he was unconsciously waiting for. Little footsteps padded down the stairs, stumbling slightly but recovering, he knew, because Keating tightly held Pippa’s hand.

“Papa!” her little voice shouted a greeting as Keating pushed open the heavy double doors to the library. “Papa!”

Alex stood up and walked around from the back of the armchair, crouching down on his heels and opening his arms for a huge hug. Pippa toddled as fast as she could toward him, leaving Keating standing at the library door. As Alex scooped her little body into his arms, his heart melted. So what if he couldn’t have Charlotte? He had Pippa. He’d try harder to find a proper nanny. Miss Virginia had left after three days. She was the first nanny who hadn’t quit; Alex’s housekeeper had fired her. Apparently she became very close to two of the footmen in the week she spent in Sheffield House, and that intimacy resulted, naturally enough, in a whole brace of footmen sporting black eyes.

“Papa,
fwore
,” Pippa shouted. Shouting seemed to be Pippa’s normal mode of speech.
Fwore
mean
fuori:
outside, Alex translated. Pippa had only ten words that he had been able to decipher, and he couldn’t afford to ignore the ones she spoke in Italian. But she was adding them every day. Yesterday she said
kiss
very clearly, and this morning (before breakfast),
cake
.

“All right, pumpkin,” Alex said, the corners of his mouth curling upward. “Let’s go to the park.” He banished the fleeting image of Charlotte’s tight riding costume from his mind—but he did scoop up Pippa and stride quickly toward the hallway, shouting to Keating to have Bucephalus, his horse, readied once again. Keating handed Pippa up to him once he was seated on the massive stallion. Mrs. Turnpike, his housekeeper, emerged from the house looking anxious. She hated these excursions to the park with Pippa balanced on a great prancing horse. She wrung her hands in her apron, but stopped herself from saying anything. There was no telling with the earl. One day he was right as sunshine, and the next he would snap your head off.

Alex and Pippa paced gravely up and down the aisles of Hyde Park. Now that he had read the scandal sheet, he was able to see a clear influence in people’s demeanor. No one would ever snub him; he was an earl, after all. But older women bowed more stiffly than they were wont to, and men bent a sympathetic eye on him. The sapskulls! Alex’s chiseled face became even more forbidding. To tell the truth, some of his acquaintances avoided him, not due to the scandal, but from pure fear.

But more looked curiously at Pippa and then whispered behind their hands. Alexander Foakes’s daughter was his mirror image. In fact, if Pippa hadn’t been wearing a lemon-yellow dress she would look quite simply like a younger version of the earl. More than one member of the
ton
circled around the walks in order to drive a carriage past the pair again, or turned carelessly at the head of a walk to return toward them. Who was she? Who ever heard of an annulled marriage that produced children?

“The only annulment
I
ever heard of,” reported Lady Skiffing, “came about when young Lord Sybthorpe was married practically at birth to his father’s second cousin’s daughter, or some such relation like that, and then it was clear by a few years later that the bride was wrong in the upper story. So she had to be removed to an asylum, and he ended up marrying that consummate tart—what was her name? Barbara Cullerson, I think. Out of the frying pan, into the fire!” she finished triumphantly. “There were no children from that marriage either,” she added, “not that it signifies, of course.”

“Well, I know that when Miss Filibert—you must remember her, dearest Lady Skiffing, she was the one with such horribly gaping teeth—at any rate, when Miss Filibert eloped with her music teacher, or was it with her dance instructor? I vow, I have quite forgotten. At any rate Lord Filibert had that one annulled. They had only spent three hours alone together, and so …” Lady Prestlefield trailed off suggestively.