“How sad,” Roberta said softly.
“Jemma had to return from Paris and do her wifely duty.”
The words wouldn’t have meant much to Roberta before this, but now she could feel herself getting pink again.
Damon’s mouth curled into a wicked smile. “I don’t imagine Beaumont doing the business in the sitting room with his breeches at his ankles, do you? He’s far too proper.”
A mad choke of laughter came from Roberta’s chest. “No!” Now Villiers…She felt almost feverish at the thought. Villiers she could easily see dragging down his breeches and turning someone over the arm of a chair.
There was a touch on her cheek and she turned, to find Damon looking at her. “You’re not thinking about my brother-in-law,” he said, his eyes slightly narrowed. “So who, my dear Roberta, cousin and relative, are you thinking of?”
She gasped but said nothing.
“It’s Villiers, isn’t it? I forgot that you’d already found the love of your life.”
He still held her chin and it seemed to Roberta as if the world stopped spinning and froze, with the two of them but a hair’s breadth from each other.
“Of course I was thinking of Villiers,” she said, pulling backward. Pulling herself together.
He raised his glass to hers. “To many lazy afternoons spent in the drawing room with your husband.”
“You shouldn’t say such things,” she scolded, taking another delicious sip from her glass.
“Why not?”
He had green eyes. She’d never realized that before; she thought they were blue, like those of his sister. But no, they were green, and beautifully shaped, with a little turn upward at the corners. “Because I am a young lady,” she said, looking at the fire again.
“I suppose that young ladies don’t think about disreputable people tupping in drawing rooms?”
“Never.”
“But you, Roberta, aren’t you rather extraordinary among young women?” There was a thread of laughter in his voice.
She shook her head. “Not at all.” She almost choked when a large sip of fiery liquor went down the wrong way.
“I thought you were…For one thing, I thought you told the truth.”
“Well, of course I tell the truth,” she said. She dared to look at him again. There was something different in his eyes, something daring and delicious and altogether not like the Damon of yesterday. She was shivering with excitement, and yet she hadn’t the faintest impulse to leave the room. Which she ought to.
“As to the truth,” he said, stretching out his legs again, “I found the whole scene rather arousing. Didn’t you?”
She couldn’t think what to say. One had to suppose that arousing covered feelings like the queer warmth in her legs.
“Look at that,” he said, obviously thinking the conversation was no more important than an exchange over muffins. “Lady Piddleton ran my stockings.”
There was a large snag running through the clocks splashed on the outside of his stocking. And then she noticed that higher up, where his tight breeches turned into a waistband, there was—
One had to pretend to be a virtuous young lady and not have even seen that.
“What was she doing in such a position as to scratch them?” Roberta asked, and then felt herself going purple as all sorts of thoughts as she’d never had before came to mind. She stared at the mantelpiece so that she wouldn’t accidentally gaze at his breeches again.
He let out a peal of laughter. “Lady Piddleton, Roberta! Coming into fifty years old, with a face like the back of a rusty saucepan?”
“I merely wondered how it came to pass,” she said with dignity.