“Too many breasts,” came a deadpan voice at her left shoulder.
Eleanor jumped and uttered a little scream. “Villiers!” Then she looked back at the poet. “Don’t mind him, Sir Roland.”
But Roland wasn’t there any longer. “Oh, no!” she cried, dropping Oyster and running forward. Sure enough, the ladder was slowly swinging away from the house, the poet clinging to the top of it.
“He’ll be all right,” Villiers said.
“No, he won’t! He might—he might—”
The ladder gained speed as it went down and finally crashed. There was a sound of splintering wood. Eleanor peered into the dark, trying to figure out where Roland had landed.
“Help, someone!” she shrieked. “Go see what happened! Go get help. Don’t just stand there—are you laughing?”
“Of course not, princess. Just wait a moment. Your swain liveth.”
She couldn’t see exactly what was happening, but someone was cursing and it sounded like Roland.
“I estimate that he landed in the raspberry bushes,” Villiers said. “He probably hit them dead on. Not good for his clothing. Or,” he added thoughtfully, “delicate parts of his anatomy. But the good news is that he landed rump down rather than the other way around.”
“Sir Roland!” Eleanor called, ignoring the jaundiced commentary at her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
There were thrashing noises.
“Do you want help? Shall I call someone?”
A door had opened onto the gardens now, and a couple of servants were cautiously emerging.
“Go help Sir Roland out of the raspberry bushes,” she called over the balcony.
They peered up at her and then set out across the lawn.
“Why don’t you go help?” she asked crossly, turning to Leopold.
“I’m holding up your towel,” he said. She could just barely see his smile in the light from the doorway. If Roland looked like a troubadour, Villiers looked like Lucifer himself, all dark shadows and pure lust.
He dropped the grip he had on the back of her towel and fell back a step. All of a sudden she could feel the place where his hand had touched her skin, burning as if he had branded her.
Below them, Roland was being hauled out of the raspberry bushes. Eleanor tore her eyes away from Villiers and tucked her towel more securely around her. “Sir Roland, are you quite all right?” she called, turning to lean out over the balcony.
He was limping across the lawn, supported by one of the footmen. A lock of hair had fallen over his face, making him look like a beautiful, fallen warrior.
“Your poetry is sublime,” Eleanor called, hoping Villiers would keep himself out of sight. “I’m so sorry that you were startled and the ladder slipped.”
“I was pushed,” he said.
Eleanor blinked. “Oh, no, I assure you—”
“Pushed by words!”
“Words?” she repeated.
She couldn’t see Villiers. She couldn’t hear him or feel him. But she knew that he was shaking with laughter.
“The force of sarcasm pushed me from the perch of love.”
“Ah. Well…”
“They jest at scars that never felt a wound.” He limped past and into the house without another word. She was still bent over the balcony, looking down, when a large male body encircled hers from behind.
He was warm, burning…hard…strong. She suddenly felt, as if through his body, the provocative tilt of her bottom as she leaned over the balustrade. Where his body touched hers, she felt the impress of his desire, as if she were experiencing her curves through his skin.
“You could drive a man insane,” Leopold said. His lips were on her neck, but it wasn’t his lips that she felt most acutely. She wriggled against him. “Don’t move.” His voice grated in her ear but she moved anyway, straightening.
He allowed her, of course. She turned around, hitching up her towel once again. “Now I know why women wear such large panniers,” she said.
“To repel their admirers?”
“Precisely. Now if you’ll forgive me, I shall retire for the night.”
He caught her hand. “Are you marrying me?”
“I thought—”
“What?”
“I thought,” she said, picking her words carefully, “that you were rather admiring of Lisette, and might wish to make her your duchess. And I say that without prejudice, Leopold, as one intelligent person to another. I hope we can speak to each other without tempests of emotion.”
His smile was all the more welcome for being so rare. “You are an unusual woman, Eleanor. Though I don’t think I like that name.”
“Tell me it’s heavy and I’ll push you directly off the balcony.”
“Maybe I’ll take a leaf from the poor poet’s book and call you princess.”
“I’m no princess,” she said, laughing. “Though my mother tells me that you live in a castle.”
“Since I never go to that particular estate, you’d have to settle for my other houses.”
She laughed as if he’d made a joke, because there was something odd about his voice that didn’t welcome any further questions.
“I will admit, then, that I’m torn between the two of you,” he said abruptly.
Something in her heart, in her chest, in her stomach—somewhere—fell with a resounding thump. She managed to keep her voice light and even. “Between myself and Lisette?”
“I am persuaded that she would be a truly superb mother for my children. She seems to have no regard whatsoever for the circumstances of their birth, either in the way she treats them here, in her house, or in her daily work with orphans.”
“I have never known Lisette to display the least prejudice toward any sort of person,” Eleanor said, adding, “Though she is quite unreasonable toward dogs.”
Villiers smiled. “Poor Oyster has not made an admirer there, it’s true.”
Eleanor thought that the way people acted toward dogs, especially innocent puppies, said a great deal about them, but she held her tongue.
“But then when I think about marrying you,” Villiers said, his voice deepening, “well…”
“You think about bedding me,” Eleanor said.
He didn’t move toward her, but the flame that was always between them suddenly leaped higher. “It’s impossible not to do so,” he said. “I think about you first thing in the morning when I wake, and last thing at night. And,” he added thoughtfully, “a good deal in between as well.”
All Eleanor could think of was dropping the towel and moving toward him. But she had succumbed to pleasure before, and it had ended in heartbreak. Not that she could ever love Villiers the way she had loved Gideon, but she must have learned something from her mistakes. Hadn’t she?
She should return to her room. She didn’t move.
“There’s something about the way you move, the way you laugh, the way you snap at me that I find—appealing,” Villiers said.
He was making her sound like a warmed-over apple tart.
“Yet I swore to myself that I would find the best mother possible for my children. This evening, Lisette was wonderful in the nursery. The girls adore her already. I asked her how she would handle the ton when the children grew up.”
