Notorious Pleasures Page 3

“That’s wise. As I’ve said, my brother would not think the better of you for your involvement.”

  Uncertainty whispered in her mind. As much as Hero didn’t want to believe it of Mandeville, her fiancé might just jump to the wrong conclusion.

  She shook off the thought and looked Reading in the eye. “It’s your reputation that I seek to preserve with your brother.”

  He threw back his head and laughed, the sound rich and masculine, drawing stares from the other dancers. “Didn’t you know? I don’t have a reputation to preserve, my Lady Perfect. Put away your shield and sword; lay down your shining armor. There is no dragon to slay for me. Nothing to protect at all.”

  “No?” she asked, sudden curiosity making her speak without forethought. She’d heard a few whispered rumors about her fiancé’s mysterious brother, but they’d been maddeningly vague. “Are you so irredeemable?”

  “I am a veritable blackguard.” He circled her, pacing slowly to the music, whispering so only she could hear. “A seducer, a rake, the worst sort of profligate. I am notorious for my pleasures—I drink too much, wench with abandon, and belch in mixed company. I have no discretion, no morals, and no desire for either. I am, in short, the devil himself, and you, my dearest Lady Perfect, would do well to avoid my company at all costs.”

  A BURST OF male laughter made Thomas Reading, the Marquess of Mandeville, glance at the dance floor. Griffin had thrown his head back as he laughed with unbecoming abandon at something Lady Hero had said. Fortunately, the lady appeared less amused. Still, Thomas couldn’t help the instinctive tightening of his shoulders.

  Damn Griffin to hell.

  “Your brother seems to be enjoying his dance with my sister,” Wakefield murmured.

  Thomas looked at the duke and met cool brown eyes. It was always deucedly hard to puzzle out what Wakefield was thinking, but at the moment the man could’ve modeled for a male sphinx.

  Thomas grunted and turned his gaze back to where Griffin paced about his intended bride. “He does indeed.”

  Wakefield folded his arms across his chest. “Hero has been sheltered all her life—as is proper for her station—but her personal morals are of the highest. I know she will not fall even if presented with temptation.”

  Thomas nodded, feeling a flush of mortification creep up his neck. He had an urge to tug at his neckcloth at the duke’s veiled admonition. “I believe you, Your Grace. Lady Hero has my complete faith, and I shall never treat her in any way other than with respect.”

  “Good.” Wakefield clasped his hands behind his back and was silent a moment as they both watched the dancers. Then he said quietly, “The clause is ineffective.”

  Thomas glanced at him sharply. In an effort to act against the scourge of gin drinking among the poor of London, they’d attached a gin clause to parliament’s Sweets Act last June. The clause gave a bounty to informers who brought in illegal gin sellers.

  “Every day more gin sellers are hauled before the magistrates,” Thomas said slowly. “How is this ineffective?”

  Wakefield shrugged. His voice was low and controlled, but his ire was plain. “They drag in the poor women who sell that devil’s drink in wheelbarrows. Wretches who make only pennies a day. What we need is to catch the men distilling the gin. The powerful ones who hide in the shadows growing rich off the backs of those poor women.”

  Thomas pursed his lips. On the dance floor, Lady Hero was frowning at Griffin and the sight relieved him. “Catch enough of the gin sellers and it will impact the makers as well—I assure you. The clause is only months old. We must give it time, my friend.”

  “I haven’t time,” Wakefield replied. “London is wasting under this plague. More citizens die than are born in our great city. Bodies litter the streets and garrets of the East End. Wives are deserted by their drink-destroyed husbands, babes killed by their drunken mothers, children abandoned to die or prostitute themselves. How can England prosper if the workers deteriorate in mind and body? We will wither and fail as a nation if gin is not eradicated from our city.”

  Thomas knew that Wakefield was concerned about the gin problem, but to care so deeply about this one cause? Such passion didn’t fit the man he knew.

  A movement from the other side of the dance floor caught his eye and scattered his thoughts. A woman stepped to the edge of the crowd. Her skirts were a flaming orange over primrose petticoats. Her hair was a deep, impossible wine-red, her lips and cheeks artificially rouged. Every man on that side of the dance floor watched her as she flirtatiously rapped her male companion’s arm with her folded fan. He said something, and she arched her white throat and laughed, making her breasts jiggle.

  “… only if a man of substance is brought to account for gin making,” Wakefield said.

  Thomas blinked, realizing that he’d missed most of what his companion had said. He turned his head to the duke, but out of the corner of his eye he could still see the woman playfully drawing her fingers across the slopes of her breasts. “Wanton baggage.”

  “Who?”

  Damn, he’d spoken aloud and now Wakefield waited for an answer.

  Thomas grimaced. “Mrs. Tate.” He jerked his chin to indicate the woman across the room. “Every time I see her, she has a different beau, all younger than herself. The woman should be hauled up on indecency charges. Anyone can see that she’s five and thirty if she’s a day.”

  “Eight and thirty,” Wakefield murmured.

  Thomas turned to look incredulously at him. “You know her?”

  Wakefield’s eyebrows rose. “I believe most of London society knows her.”

  Thomas glanced back at Mrs. Tate. Was Wakefield speaking of biblical knowledge? Had the duke bedded the woman?

  “She has a quick wit and an easy manner,” Wakefield was saying lightly. “Besides, she married a man three times her age. I don’t begrudge her a little merriment now that she’s widowed.”

  “She flaunts herself,” Thomas gritted. He could feel Wakefield’s look.

  “Perhaps, but only with unmarried gentlemen. She is careful not to dally with a man otherwise engaged.”

  As if she’d heard the word engaged, Lavinia Tate suddenly looked up, her eyes meeting his across the distance that separated them. He knew, even though he could not see them now, that her eyes were a plain brown. That, he thought with satisfaction, was something she couldn’t change. Her eyes were and always would be ordinary brown, no matter how much paint she employed.

  She held his eyes and lifted her chin in a challenge that would bring any red-blooded man to attention. It was a look as old as Eden, as old as Eve daring Adam with a bit of over-ripened fruit.

  Thomas deliberately looked away from her proud gaze. He’d tasted that fruit once, and though it had been difficult, he’d weaned himself from its heady sweetness. The woman was a jade, plain and simple. And if there was one thing he’d had enough of in this lifetime, it was jades.

  LADY HERO’S FACE was calm and grave and almost beautiful—and she looked not at all impressed by Griffin’s dramatic recitation of his sins.

  “I had already decided you were a rake,” she said as he halted before her. She sank into a graceful curtsy. “But as you are to be my brother-in-law, Lord Reading, I think avoiding your company entirely may be somewhat difficult.”

  The woman certainly knew how to prick a man’s illusions about himself. Once again he was hit with the awful irony that this woman out of all the women at the ball should be the one Thomas had chosen as his bride. A woman who made no bones about her displeasure with Griffin. A woman who had seen him at his very worst—and showed no signs of forgetting the sight. A woman who was proud of her snowy-white soul.

  Lady Perfect—a perfect lady for his perfect brother.

  He eyed her with disfavor, watching as she arched her damned left eyebrow in pointed query. She wasn’t quite a beauty, his brother’s fiancée. Instead she had that sort of elegance that was found sometimes among the upper crust of English society—creamy pale skin, a
slightly overlong face, properly neat features, and hair that was red without going so far as to be gauchely ginger.

  He’d seen her type a hundred times before, and yet… something about Lady Hero was decidedly different. For one thing, most of the ladies of her rank would’ve simply left him to his fate in the sitting room. Yet she had gone against her own rigid morals to save both him and Bella. Had she acted out of compassion for two strangers? Or merely a stolid code of ethics that superseded even her own distaste for what she’d found in the sitting room?

  Griffin looked about. The music had halted, the dance was at an end, and he was supposed to escort her back to stodgy Thomas. Which he would do, of course—just not yet.

  He bowed, proffering his elbow in feigned docility. “Sad, isn’t it?”

  She looked at his arm with sudden suspicion, but was forced by her own rigid propriety to take it. Griffin tamped down a surge of triumph.

  “What is?” she asked, her voice wary.

  “Oh, that a woman as pious as you should have to put up with the company of a rake like me merely because of polite convention.”

  “Humph.” She lifted her chin as he led her slowly through the crowd. “I hope I know my duty.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Buck up. Enduring my presence in your life will surely give you points toward sainthood.”

  If he hadn’t turned to look at her at that very moment, he would’ve missed the twitch of her soft, pink lips. Egad. Lady Perfect had a sense of humor! He’d seen her smile, but the expression had been fixed and immobile. What would a genuine smile look like on her face? What would happen if she actually laughed?

  Intrigued, he bowed his head toward hers, inhaling the scent of flowers. “If you aren’t marrying my brother for his title, then why?”

  Wide gray eyes looked up, startled, into his. She was so near he only had to lean an inch or so closer and his lips would touch hers. He could find out what she tasted like, if she would break under his tongue and run soft and sweet like honey.

  Good God! Griffin jerked his head back.

  Fortunately, she seemed to have missed his confusion. “What do you mean?”

  He inhaled and glanced away. They were nearly across the room now and moving in the opposite direction from Thomas, though she didn’t seem to notice. He was playing with fire, but he’d always found danger terribly tempting.

  “Why marry Thomas?”

  “My brother and he are friends. Maximus urged me to make the match.”

  “That’s all?”

  “No, of course not. My brother would not have considered Mandeville for me if the marquess weren’t well regarded, kind, and a man of substance.” She rattled off his brother’s attributes as if listing the points of a breeding ram.

  “You don’t love him?” he asked with honest curiosity.

  She knit her brows as if he’d burst into Swedish. “I have no doubt that I will someday have affection for him, naturally.”

  “Naturally,” he murmured, feeling again that idiotic triumph. “Rather like a favorite spaniel, perhaps?”

  She stopped dead, and if she hadn’t been restrained by her propriety, he had the feeling she would’ve set her hands on her hips like an irate fishwife. “Mandeville isn’t a spaniel!”

  “A Great Dane, then?”

  “Lord Griffin…”

  He tugged her forward, leading her toward the outside edge of the ballroom. “It’s just that I’ve always thought it would be nice.”

  “What?”

  “To be in love with one’s wife—or in your case, one’s husband.”

  Her face softened for a moment, her gray eyes going a little foggy, her sweet lips parting. Griffin found himself drawn to her fleeting emotion. Was this a glimpse of the true Lady Hero?

  Then she was back to being Lady Perfect, her spine erect, her lips firm, and her eyes giving nothing away. The change was rather fascinating. What had made her into such a chameleon?

  “How romantic,” she drawled in a bored, social voice that set his teeth on edge, “to think that love has anything to do with marriage.”

  “Why?”

  “Because marriage at our rank is a contract between families—as you well know.”

  “But can’t it be more?”

  “You’re deliberately being obtuse,” she said impatiently. “You don’t need me to explain society’s rules to you.”

  “And you’re being deliberately thickheaded. My parents had it.”

  “What?”

  “Love,” he said, trying to keep the irritation from his voice. “They loved each other. I know it’s rare, but it is possible, even if you’ve never seen it—”

  “My parents, too.”

  It was his turn to look confused. “What?”

  Her head was bent so that he saw only her mouth, curved down in sadness. “My parents. I have memories of… of a deep affection between them.”

  He remembered suddenly—awfully—that her parents had been killed. It had been a cause célèbre over fifteen years before—the Duke and Duchess of Wakefield murdered outside a theater by common footpads. “I’m sorry.”

  She inhaled and glanced up, her face unbearably vulnerable for a moment. “Don’t be. Hardly anyone mentions them to me. It’s as if they’d never existed. I was in the schoolroom when they died, but I have a few fond memories of them, before… before it happened.”

  He nodded, feeling a protective tenderness for this proud, prickly woman. They strolled in silence for a moment, the crowd surging around them, but making no contact. It was as if they were strangely apart. Griffin inclined his head to one or two people as they met, but he kept walking, forestalling conversation.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” she said after a bit. “Marriage with love between the partners is surely the ideal.”

  “Then why settle for less?”

  “Love may grow between a husband and a wife after marriage.”

  “It also may not grow.”

  She shrugged, looking pensive. “All marriages are gambles of a sort. One tries to even the odds by choosing wisely—a man who is well liked, comes from a good family, and is kind.”

  “And the Readings do have a lack of madness in the family that is somewhat refreshing in aristocratic lineages,” he murmured.

  She wrinkled her nose up at him. “Would you rather I marry into a family with a history of madness?”

  “No, of course not.” He frowned, trying to articulate why her rather cold-blooded decision to marry his brother bothered him. Lord knew he wasn’t worried about Thomas’s heart. “You said yourself that a love match is ideal. Why not wait to make one?”

  “I have waited. I’ve been out for over six years.”

  “You’ve been looking for true love all this time?”

  “Maybe.” She shrugged, obviously irritated. “Or something like true love. Besides, how long would you have me wait? Months? Years? I’m four and twenty. I have an obligation to marry and marry well. I cannot wait forever.”

  “An obligation.” The words were sour on his tongue, though the thought wasn’t new. Didn’t all ladies of her rank have an “obligation” to make a good match?

  She shook her head. “What if I met my true love at sixty? What if I never meet him? There is no guarantee that I will. Would you have me remain a spinster on some faint hope?”

  He glanced at her curiously. “You believe that you do have one true love?”

  “Perhaps not one true love, but someone, surely. I think… yes, I think that we are each certainly capable of falling in love—perhaps deeply in love—and that somewhere out there is a person who will reciprocate that love.” She wrinkled her nose, suddenly looking self-conscious. “You no doubt find talk of true love foolish.”

  “Not at all. I do know romantic love is real. I’ve seen it, after all.”

  “And do you think a rake such as you could fall madly, deeply in love with one woman?” Her words were meant to mock, but her tone was serious.

  He shr
ugged. “Perhaps, though it sounds a deucedly uncomfortable state to find oneself in.”

  “Then you’ve never been in love?”

  “Never.”

  She nodded. “Nor have I.”

  “A pity,” he said, pursing his lips. “I wonder how it would feel? To be swept away by a grand passion? To give everything for only one person in the world?”

  Her lips curved wryly. “So idealistic for a rake. Really, you do spoil my prior understanding of what the word entailed.”

  “This is my social face,” he said lightly. “Don’t confuse it with the animal beneath.”

  She looked at him searchingly for a moment before nodding as if coming to a conclusion. “I’m hardly likely to do that considering how I first found you.”

  He smiled to cover a twinge of disappointment.

  “But if you’re so idealistic, my lord,” she said, “about the connubial state, then why aren’t you happily married with a score or more of offspring?”

  “I’m idealistic about love, my lady, not marriage. To be tied to one lady for the rest of my life, surrounded by small, grubby urchins?” He shuddered in mock horror. “No, I shall gladly cede the matrimonial state and all its attendant duties to my brother.”

  “And if you do one day find yourself in love?” she asked softly. “What then, my lord?”

  “Why, then, all shall be lost, my lady. A rake’s life crumbled to ruins, a splendid specimen of the bachelor state brought low by the bonds of matrimony and a delicate hand. But”—he lifted an admonishing finger—“that is, as you yourself have pointed out, very, very unlikely. My one true love may be a lady living in farthest China. She might be a crone of ninety or a babe of two. I may never meet her in this lifetime, and I thank God in advance for that fact.”

  He’d teased a slight smile onto those soft lips, and his heart beat faster at the sight. A smile—a genuine smile—from this woman was like total nudity from another. And what a very odd thought that was.

  “Why, my lord?”

  “Because”—he bent so close that his breath moved a wayward red curl by her ear—“while I may be far from perfect in your eyes, I do assure you that my life is perfect as it is. I enjoy my rakish ways, my freedom, and my ability to, er, dally with as many ladies as I might want. For me, true love would be a complete and utter catastrophe.”