Vanity (26 page)

“Yes, Griffin. Show him into the drawing room. I’ll be down directly.” Octavia put down the newspaper she’d been reading to her father. “You’ll excuse me, Papa.”

“Yes, of course, my dear,” he said comfortably. “Go and do your duty. I must say the door knocker never ceases to fall these days. You seem to be a very popular couple, if I may say so.”

“Yes, we do,” Octavia agreed demurely, smoothing down the skirts of her pink muslin morning gown. “But I expect it’s because we’re new on the scene and society craves variety.” She stood on tiptoe to examine her reflection in the mirror above the fireplace.

“Warwick maintains a lavish establishment, at all events,” Oliver remarked. “I daresay his hospitality reflects it.”

Octavia glanced at her father in the mirror as she combed her fingers through the cluster of ringlets on her shoulders. Was he probing? Surely not. It would be quite out of character.

“He’s a wealthy man, Papa,” she said, licking a finger and smoothing her eyebrows before turning back to the room. “Do you care to go for a drive this afternoon? It’s a beautiful day.”

“No, I think I’ll take my usual promenade, thank you, child,” Oliver said. “Your guest awaits. You’d better hurry.”

She kissed him and hastened from the room, frowning slightly. Her father had always been somewhat vague about the everyday world, and that vagueness had become insensibility after the catastrophe, but he was beginning to recover some of the awareness he’d had before Harrowgate. It would not be at all convenient if he started showing an interest in the intricate ramifications of their domestic life. It was going to be difficult enough as it was to find a satisfactory explanation for the end of her marriage, the return of his fortune, and their reinstatement at Hartridge Folly. But she’d been relying on his customary willingness to accept her statements at face value. If he was becoming skeptical now, when everything looked perfectly ordinary, there was no knowing how the fantastic future would strike him.

But it was still very much in the future, Octavia reminded herself as she sped down the stairs. And the present required all her wits.

She paused on the bottom step, steadying her breathing. If Philip Wyndham was alone, and she assumed he was, this would be the first tête-â-tête they’d had.

The footman on duty in the hall sprang to open the double doors to the drawing room. Octavia composed her expression and sailed into the room.

“Lord Wyndham, what a delightful surprise.” She curtsied in a delicate cloud of pale muslin.

Philip turned from his contemplation of the street outside the window. He raised his glass and subjected his hostess to a long assessment.

Unconsciously, Octavia put up her chin. There was something faintly insulting about such an appraisal in her
own drawing room, without even a preliminary answer to her greeting.

The earl smiled and bowed. “Enchanting, ma’am. You have a flawless instinct with your dress.”

“You count yourself something of an expert on female attire, sir?” She stepped, toward him, a tinge of asperity to her tone.

“I know what I like,” he said, taking her hands in a warm clasp. “Forgive me if my lack of formality has offended you. The sight of you drove all conventional conduct from my mind. I could only gaze.”

“La, sir, I thought you above such outrageous sallies,” Octavia chided playfully. “We both know what value to place on such compliments.” She made a move to withdraw her hands from his, but his clasp tightened.

“I assure you that was no empty compliment, my lady,” he said, his eyes fixed upon her face so that she found herself unable to look away from his gaze. Once again she had the uncanny sense of something familiar about him … familiar and yet completely wrong.

“Then I will accept it in the spirit it was intended, sir,” she returned, once again trying to withdraw her hands. “May I ring for some refreshment? You’ll take a glass of sherry with me?”

“By all means.” He released her hands and she pulled the bellrope by the fire. “I’ve come to collect my wager, Octavia … if I may call you that?” A lifted eyebrow punctuated the question.

“Of course,” Octavia said. “Griffin, bring sherry, please. Is his lordship in the house?”

“No, my lady. I believe he was visiting his tailor.” The butler bowed and withdrew.

Had Lord Wyndham known that?
“So,” Octavia said. “Your wager, Lord Wyndham. I forget, did I lose the game?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” he assured her, taking snuff, regarding her with his unreadable gray eyes. “You lost two games out of three.”

“I have a shocking memory,” she said. “Just leave it on
the table, Griffin. I’ll pour for Lord Wyndham.” She moved to the decanter as the door closed behind the butler and filled two glasses. “What shall we drink to, sir?”

“Wagers lost and won,” he replied, raising his glass. “And to further games.”

The man was not talking about backgammon. Octavia raised her glass with a little smile of mischievous suggestion and drank with him.

The earl placed his glass half-empty on a console table and turned back to her. “Will you renege on your wager, Lady Warwick?”

Octavia shook her head, putting her own glass down. Her fingers quivered, and she curled them into her palms. How did one kiss a man only with one’s mouth, keeping one’s mind and spirit on some other plane, unsullied by a loathsome contact?

She didn’t know. She’d kissed only one man in her life, and her mind and soul were inextricably bound up with her body whenever she touched Rupert Warwick.

Philip placed his hands on her shoulders, drawing her close to him. Then he cupped her chin in the palm of one hand and brought his mouth to hers.

Octavia told herself to respond. She would achieve nothing standing like a dummy waiting for it to be over. Closing her mind as tightly as she’d closed her eyes, she parted her lips. His tongue immediately accepted the invitation, and she could taste wine as the muscular presence explored her mouth. His hand dropped from her chin, slip-ping around her body, holding her tightly against him, and the hard bulge of his erection in his tight silk britches pressed against her belly.

Touch him. Explore his body.
Maybe she could feel what she sought somewhere on his person.

She moved her own hands inside his coat, stroking and kneading as if with an answering urgency, sliding her hands around to his back, over his buttocks, feeling for a pocket. He groaned and his teeth closed abruptly on her bottom Hp. She tasted blood and instinctively tried to pull back. But he held her now with a powerful strength, crushing her against
him so she could no longer insert her hands between their bodies. His ringers curled into the flesh of her hips with a bruising pressure, and she could sense the overpowering force of his arousal, hear it in the short moans against her mouth, feel it in the hot breath on her neck, the roughness of his hold, the ache in her compressed breasts.

She was suffocating in the heat of this passion, struggling like a bird in a trap. Faintly, she heard the door open. And then, after an infinitesimal pause, it closed again.

Octavia knew in her blood that Rupert had been there. Had returned from his errands. Had seen what was happening. Had quietly withdrawn because she was doing what she had agreed to do. She was seducing his enemy. Apparently it didn’t matter to him that the mouth that opened with such willing warmth beneath his own kisses was being ravished by a man he detested.

It didn’t matter to him. It couldn’t matter to him or he couldn’t tolerate it.

She struggled with a final desperation, and Philip Wyndham slowly drew back. “Why would you fight me? A minute ago you were as eager as I.” His face was flushed, his eyes excited, and Octavia flinched from the predator, red in tooth and claw.

“You frightened me,” she said with soft meekness, touching her swollen hp. “Such ardor, my lord. I confess … I’m not accustomed …” She turned away to hide the disgust she couldn’t keep from her eyes.

“Oh, that husband of yours lacks passion, does he?” The earl laughed, a grating sound that mingled contempt and self-congratulation. “My dear, I’ll show you what a man is capable of in these matters. You have passion in you, I could feel it. You need a man worthy of that passion. A man who can show you what desire is really like.”

“And you are such a man?”

“I believe so.” It was an assertion of such resounding complacence that Octavia, even through her disgust, wanted to laugh in astonishment. The vanity of the man. Did he really believe he could hold a candle to Rupert Warwick in
anything?

“You must be gentle with me, my lord,” she said, keeping her face averted. “I beg you will excuse me now. I must compose myself before my husband returns.”

“Of course,” he said readily, as if it went without saying that a woman who’d just had the earth-shattering experience of kissing Philip Wyndham would need time to compose herself before she could face anyone else, let alone her husband. “Until later, my dear.” He brushed a hand down her back, allowed it to linger on her bottom. Then he was gone.

Shaking, Octavia turned back to the room. She examined herself in the glass. Her lips were swollen, her hair disarrayed. Her entire body felt sore, as if she’d been crushed by a python. Philip Wyndham’s willowy frame was deceptive. He was a powerful man.

She spun round as the door opened. Rupert closed the door and stood for a moment leaning against it, his expression impassive. “So you have begun,” he said.

“Apparently,” she responded in the same tone, picking up her discarded sherry glass and taking a sip that became a gulp. The wine stung her bitten lip.

“That’s good,” he stated, moving from the door to pour a glass for himself.

“You came in earlier?” There was a slight tremor in her voice. Octavia took another gulp of wine, hoping that it would steady her, would smooth out this whirlpool of fear, bitter confusion, and resentment, bringing her once again into the calm waters of cold purpose, where Rupert Warwick swam with such single-minded deliberation.

“Yes,” he agreed. “I thought it politic to withdraw.” He kept his back to her as he sampled the sherry in his glass. He still had not mastered the wave of revulsion that had swept through him when he’d seen Octavia locked in his brother’s arms, and now the sight of her bruised hp and disheveled hair filled him with such a violent anger, it required all the control learned so painfully over the years to keep it from his face. It would do Octavia no good to know how he felt.

“You have another assignation?” he asked casually, turning back to the room.

“Not precisely. But I don’t imagine Wyndham will wait long before suggesting something.” Octavia felt as if she was being examined by a tutor on some work in progress. “I tried to feel if he had something hidden on his person, but I couldn’t find anything. It would help if I knew precisely what I was looking for,” she said, refilling her glass.

Rupert withdrew from his pocket a small silk pouch. He opened it and shook the contents on the table. “This is what you’re looking for.”

Octavia came over to the table. A tiny, intricately worked silver ring lay winking in a ray of pale sun.

“It’s so tiny,” she said, picking it up between finger and thumb. “Wyndham’s is identical?”

“Its pair.” He held out his palm for it and she dropped it into his hand. “There’s a mechanism that opens it … concealed in the eye of the bird … here it is.” He indicated a minute speck representing the eye of a delicately carved eagle. “It’s too small to be opened by human fingers; it requires a silver toothpick or the tip of a pair of compasses.”

“Scissors, perhaps?” She rummaged through a basket of embroidery silks and produced a small pair of scissors.

Rupert took them, inserting the tip of one blade in the eye. The tiny circle sprang open. “The ring in Wyndham’s possession locks into this one, forming a signet ring that would fit an adult’s finger,” he explained. “A slender finger,” he added unnecessarily.

“But what’s the significance?” Octavia gazed up at him in fascination, but his face, which had been open and receptive, closed at the question.

“You don’t need to know that.” He closed the ring and slipped it back into its pouch.

“Maybe not. But am I not entitled to?”

“How do you work that out?”

It was such a cold snub that she could think of nothing
to say. She wasn’t entitled to anything, except what he’d promised her.

“Listen to me, Octavia.” His voice changed, became soft and almost cajoling. He took her hand and drew her to the sofa, where he sat down, pulling her down beside him.

“I cannot tell you more than I have without confusing the issues for you. If you know what lies between me and Philip Wyndham, you may let something slip, and if he has the faintest hint of the truth—a truth so fantastic he will at first believe it impossible—everything will be over. You can know at this stage only what you
need
to know. You must trust me in this, Octavia. When it’s all over, you will know everything. I promise you.”

Octavia and the world would know everything.

He caught her face between his hands, smiling at her as if he could smile away her hurt and frustration, smiling as if a smile could smooth away the evidence of his twin’s mouth on hers. He ran his fingers through the cluster of ringlets framing her face. “Trust me.”

“I do,” she said, wishing perversely that she didn’t. “But it’s very hard to work in the dark when
you
know everything there is to know about both of us. And why should you imagine I would let something slip, anyway? Why don’t you trust me?”

Rupert sighed and his hands fell from her hair. “I wouldn’t trust anyone but myself to keep this secret, Octavia. But if you wish to withdraw from our contract, then I will accept that.”

“How could I do that?” she exclaimed in a fierce undertone. “You know that’s not possible. We’ve gone too far to pull back now.”

“I was hoping you would believe that,” he agreed gravely. “But understand this, Octavia. I am not forcing you.”

No, she thought bitterly. He wasn’t forcing her. But if she didn’t fulfill her side of the bargain, he wouldn’t fulfill his. And how could she choose to take her father and return to the grim, mean streets of Shoreditch, the daily terror of
haunting the crowds with stealthy fingers? It had hardly been endurable before. Now it was unthinkable.