But two hours later the children had still not been found. Every room had been searched; the barns had been rifled; the sty was turned inside out.
There was no sign of two small girls.
“They must have run away,” Villiers said. “That’s what I would have done.”
“There’s nothing more we can do at the moment,” Eleanor said. “We must go home. It’s long past time for luncheon. You’ll send your footmen out to search the surrounding countryside and they’ll find the children in no time. They can’t have gone far.”
That was true. He could feel the logic of it like a balm to his soul. “You called me Leopold in the orphanage,” he pointed out.
“A moment of weakness,” she said, accepting a footman’s hand to climb into the carriage.
Once in the carriage, he put his head back so he didn’t have to meet her eyes and said, “You must think it’s very odd that I…” He tried to figure out how to phrase exactly what happened to him.
“You were terrified,” Eleanor said, pulling a little mirror from her net bag and rubbing a smudge on her cheek. “That sty! That grotesque woman! I was just as frightened, and the children aren’t even mine.”
“I can hardly claim them as my children, in that sense of the word. I didn’t even know where they were living until a few days ago. I never gave them a second’s thought until this year. They could have been spending every night in a sty, for all I knew.”
“Nonsense. You paid for them to be well-housed, warm, fed, and educated. That’s more than many fathers in the same situation do.” She peered at herself in the small glass and then dropped it back into her bag. “Lord knows, you’re rich enough to give them all settlements, and that will buy them a future.”
“No man is rich enough to buy back his past,” Villiers said.
She met his eyes and the regret in hers made him feel better. “True. But there’s no point in wailing over it. I hope to goodness that Willa remembered to walk Oyster. If not, my chamber is going to be as malodorous as the sty itself.” She started searching about in her bag again.
She is a good person, Villiers thought, watching her under half-closed eyes so that she didn’t realize. He’d never noticed what a firm chin she had until she faced off with Mrs. Minchem.
There was something about Eleanor that made him want to bite her. He’d like to bite that firm little chin. And then do the same to her neck. Her neck was as strong as she was: a beautiful, fierce column.
Without thinking too much about it he rose and sat down beside her, crushing her skirts. She squeaked some sort of reproach, but he kissed her silent. She tasted like one of the first raspberries in spring, so sweet and tart that it bit the tongue. And she tasted angry somehow, which made him wonder about why he could taste what she was feeling.
But then she stopped being angry and her arms wound around his neck and she said “Leopold” into his mouth. He stopped thinking altogether and just focused on kissing her. After a while it dawned on him that there was something different about the way she was kissing him. Something he didn’t recognize.
She was kissing him back. Really kissing him back.
She had one hand woven so hard into his hair that it almost hurt. And her tongue was playing with his, swooping and hiding and generally driving him mad with desire.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been kissed before. But when he let his mouth trail away over her cheek, thinking to bite her ear, she bade him return in a husky little command. And when he didn’t, she grabbed his head and pulled him back.
That was new. No woman had ever…
He lost the train of thought again because she said his name, his given name, in sort of a purr, and every inch of his body blazed.
She was flushed and pink and utterly desirable. She looked at him that way she had, as if she were smoldering, as if she wanted only one thing in the world…
“You’re no virgin,” he said, surprising himself. Gentlemen didn’t say that sort of thing to ladies, let alone the gently-bred daughters of dukes.
She let a finger run over his eyebrows, down his nose. He almost shuddered at her touch. Not even the highest paid courtesan in the world could manage the sultry look that Eleanor seemed to wield at a moment’s notice. There was something about that…he needed to think it out, but he didn’t have time.
“Tell me you’re not a virgin,” he said after a moment, assuring himself that he wasn’t begging.
“I don’t see how that is relevant to our particular activity.”
She wasn’t a virgin. He knew it. It would be extremely ungentlemanly to make her confirm it. The promise of illicit pleasure sang in his blood, so he had to kiss her again.
They stepped out of the carriage only to be greeted by frenzied barking. Oyster launched himself from the front steps, so ecstatic at the sight of his mistress that his squat little body actually twisted in the air. He literally catapulted into her arms. “Sweetheart,” Eleanor said as he licked her face. “Were you afraid I’d gone away and left you forever?”
Villiers could help thinking that he had reached a new low in his life. Jealous of a dog. Wonderful.
“Now I’m going to put you down, Oyster,” Eleanor said. “You must not start barking again, because Lisette is afraid of you.”
Oyster gave her a last lick; she put him on the ground; he started barking again.
Villiers stepped forward. “Oyster.”
Oyster sat back on his haunches and looked him over. Villiers had no pretensions about dogs. They were smart; they were self-centered; they were single-minded. Oyster opened his mouth.
“Oyster,” Villiers said, dropping his voice an octave or so.
Oyster shut his mouth, showing that he was as smart as the other dogs Villiers had encountered in life.
“What a good dog he is,” Eleanor said, sounding utterly delighted with the plump little mongrel she had just been kissing all over his absurd-looking head.
“There’s no such thing as a good dog,” Villiers said, “any more than there are bad men.”
“There certainly are bad men! And bad women too. Witness Mrs. Minchem.”
“There are men who lose fear. Mrs. Minchem had no fear, and therefore she acted with impunity. She wanted to put a troublesome child in the pigs’ dormitory, so she did. That’s not necessarily bad—just opportunistic.”
“I think it’s bad. And Oyster is a good dog, because he obeys. Stay, Oyster. And don’t bark. There, you see—”
Oyster suddenly leapt into the air with his strange twisting jump and began barking like a maddened rabbit with a voice box.
“Oyster!” Eleanor cried—but Oyster had leapt past both of them and through the open door of the carriage.
“No untrained animals in my carriage!” Villiers snapped.
He and Eleanor reached the door at the same moment.
Oyster was barking with the singular fixation that a beggar might give a steaming pudding.
One of the seat cushions was thrown to the side, the wooden lid was up, and two extraordinarily dirty and rather sleepy faces were staring back at Oyster. The faces were identical.
“Jane-Lucinda,” Villiers said. One of the girls nodded.
“And Jane-Phyllinda,” Eleanor breathed.