There was a flurry of movement at the door, and then Lavinia was bending over him in a purple wrap, her outrageously red hair about her shoulders. In dishabille, without the artful application of her paint pots, she looked every year of her age. And yet when he stared up at her, he thought her the most beautiful woman in the world.
“What has happened to you?” she cried.
“I love you,” he said thickly.
She rolled her eyes. “You’re drunk. Hutchinson, help me get him inside.”
Thomas began to protest the help of the manservant, but as his legs did appear to be a bit wobbly, it really seemed a moot point. A few minutes more and he was ensconced in her sitting room on the yellow settee.
“I’ve always liked this settee,” he said, patting the cushion beside him. He gave her a seductive look. “Some of my best memories took place here.”
She sighed, which was not how he remembered her responding to his seductive looks in the past. “Why aren’t you at your fiancée’s house, Thomas?”
“Not my fiancée anymore,” he said, sounding petulant even to his own ears.
Her delicate eyebrows rose. “I thought you’d signed the marriage papers?”
“She fucked Griffin.”
Lavinia merely looked at him, her arms folded beneath her magnificent bosom.
He shook his head irritably, glancing about the room. “Fucked him under my own nose. Jus’ like Anne. Whores, all of ’em.”
She moved slightly at the second use of the crude verb. “You know I dislike such language, Thomas.”
“Sorry.” He laid his head in his hands, for it had begun to spin slowly.
“What happened to your face?” she asked softly.
“Griffin.” He laughed, feeling his nose. It was large and lumpy and no doubt broken, but at the moment he hardly felt it. “He attacked me, if you’ll credit it. After seducing my fiancée, he hit me. Should call him out.”
“Did you deserve it?”
He shrugged guiltily. “I hit her. Lady Hero. I’ve never before struck a woman in my life.”
“Then it does sound like you deserved it,” Lavinia said briskly. She bent to examine him. “Even so, your nose looks quite painful.”
He looked at her slyly. “You always cared for me, Lavinia.”
“Not anymore.”
He frowned. She could at least pretend a sentimental affection. “Lavinia…”
She sighed. “You need cold water for that nose.”
She moved to the sitting room door, and he watched her longingly as she called for the hulking butler and asked for cold water and a cloth. Her wrap was a deep amethyst that hugged her luscious bottom. He noticed that her slippers were worn, though, the embroidery tattered. She should have new slippers, ones with jeweled heels. He’d give her jeweled slippers and much, much more if only she came back to him. He closed his eyes a moment.
When next he opened them, Lavinia was beside him with a basin of water. She draped a cold cloth over his nose.
“Ouch.” Thomas winced.
“Hold still,” she said.
He watched her as she leaned over him, her brows knit.
“Why did you leave me?” he asked.
“You know why.”
“No, but really,” he said somewhat indistinctly. He needed the question answered right this moment. “Why?”
“Because,” she said as she lifted away the cloth and rewetted it. “You decided it was time to marry. You asked Lady Hero to be your wife.”
“But why leave me?” he asked stubbornly. “You know I could’ve kept you in luxury for the rest of your life.”
“The rest of my life?” Her brown eyes met his, and he couldn’t read the emotion that lay within them.
“Yes,” he said, suddenly sober. “For forever. I would not take any other mistress. I would’ve been true to only you.”
“And to your wife, you mean.” The strange spell that had been between them broke. She shook her head. “I’d not take well to being a kept woman, I’m afraid, Thomas.”
“I can’t marry you, damn you,” he snarled.
He knew he wasn’t charming anymore. Wasn’t anything but ugly, but he couldn’t prevaricate. The emotion welled up in him too strongly.
“I know you can’t marry me,” she said, sounding almost bored. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t marry some other gentleman.”
His head jerked back, the blow more painful than his brother’s fist. “You will not!”
She raised her eyebrows. “Whyever not? You have no claim on me.”
“Damn you,” he hissed. He threw aside the silly cloth and grabbed her close. “Damn you!”
And he kissed her with all the desperation of a man with a torn and bloodied heart.
She tore her mouth away even as he delved beneath the amethyst silk wrapper. “This won’t solve anything, Thomas.”
“Might not,” he grunted as he licked her neck. “But it sure as hell will make me feel better.”
“Oh, Thomas,” she sighed, and since that didn’t sound like a rejection of any sort, he went ahead and did what he’d been wanting to do for months now.
Make love to Lavinia.
GRIFFIN WAS DOZING in one of his brother’s chairs when the front door of Mandeville House opened and closed. He jerked awake, rubbing at his face groggily.
He’d tried Thomas’s house the night before—after seeing the Duke of Wakefield—but Thomas had been out. When it was clear that his brother wasn’t returning home any time soon, Griffin had decamped to St. Giles.
This morning he’d come directly to Thomas’s house to catch his brother before he left for the day. Except Thomas, that most staid of bachelors, appeared to have spent the night out.
Curious.
Griffin peered into the hall.
There was Thomas, looking damnably grumpy, and with a nose the size of a turnip, speaking sharply to his butler. “I don’t care who has come to call. I’m not at home.”
“Not even for blood relations?” Griffin drawled.
Thomas swung violently in his direction and then winced and lifted a hand to his head as if it ached. “Especially not to bloody blood relations!”
He turned toward the stairs in dismissal.
Griffin was beside him in a couple of strides. “That’s just too damn bad, brother mine. You and I are overdue for a heart-to-heart.”
“Damn you,” Thomas started.
“No.” Griffin leaned into his brother’s face. “Not unless you want me hanging out your dirty laundry here and now and within earshot of the servants.”
Thomas eyed him sourly for a moment, then jerked his head toward the stairs and began climbing without a word.
Since this was a better reception than Griffin had hoped for, he followed.
They ended up in a study on one of the upper floors. Griffin prowled around the room while Thomas crossed to a crystal decanter and splashed amber liquid into a glass.
Griffin raised his eyebrows. “Bit early in the day, isn’t it?”
“Not for me,” Thomas replied moodily.
Griffin grunted as he studied a medieval etching on the wall. “This was father’s study, wasn’t it?”
Thomas looked up as if surprised. “Yes. Don’t you recognize it?”
Griffin shrugged. “I didn’t come in here much.”
“Father used to call me in every Sunday evening,” Thomas mused. “Before I went away to school. Then when I was home, we’d retire here after dinner.”
“What did you do?” Griffin asked.
“Talk.” Thomas shrugged. “He’d ask me about my studies. Have me recite my Latin lesson when I was younger. Discuss politics when I was older.”
Griffin nodded. “He was preparing you to be the marquess.”
“I suppose he was.” Thomas looked at him. “Didn’t he do the same with you?”
“No. I wasn’t invited,” Griffin said without heat.
Thomas stared at him a moment as if baffled, then looked down at his glass. “What do you want with me, Griffin?”
“I want you to decline to marry Hero.”
“She’s already declined me.”
Griffin looked at him. Apparently he hadn’t heard yet from Wakefield. “Her brother wants her to marry you this Sunday.”
Thomas narrowed his eyes. “Does he indeed?”
“Yes.” Griffin grit his teeth. “I want you to refuse to marry her.”
Thomas snorted angrily. “Of course you do. I suppose you want her for yourself, just as you wanted my first wife for yourself.”
“This has nothing to do with Anne,” Griffin said as calmly as he could.
“Oh, no?” Thomas sneered. “Poor, poor Anne! What would she do if she knew her lover had forgotten her so easily? But then you do go through women fast enough. I suppose there’s little point in learning their names, much less remembering them when dead. Have you told Hero about Anne?”
“Yes.”
The reply pulled Thomas up short. He blinked before recovering. “What? That you make a habit of seducing your brother’s women?”
“No. I told her that I’d never touched Anne.” Griffin met his brother’s somewhat bloodshot eyes grimly.
Thomas barked a laugh. “You lie.”
“No, I do not.” Griffin couldn’t stop the heat entering his tone. God! He’d lived with this slander for years. “I never made love to Anne, never seduced her, never had any intention of seducing her. If she told you otherwise, she lied.”
“Anne told me on her deathbed you were her lover.” Thomas banged his glass down on the side table. “She told me the baby was yours. She said you’d been lovers for months, that you’d started seducing her before we’d even wed.”
“And I told you at her funeral that she lied!”
“Do you really expect me to believe a known rake over my wife?”
“I expect you to believe your brother!” Griffin’s shout echoed about the room. He bent forward, grasping the back of a chair, trying to regain his composure. “Jesus, Thomas. How could you? How could you believe I would seduce your wife? I’m your brother. You never even thought to give my words credence. You just believed a hysterical woman dying in childbirth over me. It was as if you’d been expecting it all along, and her words merely confirmed your suspicions.”
“I had been expecting it.” Thomas picked up his glass and drained it. “You flirted with Anne, admit it.”
“Yes! Fine! I flirted with her. I flirted with her like every other gentleman does with every other lady in a ballroom.” Griffin threw up his hands. “But that was all it ever was. It never went beyond silly words in public. I never meant it to go beyond that.”
“She loved you.”
Griffin inhaled. “If she loved me, it wasn’t because I encouraged her. You know that, Thomas. Once you were married, once I realized that she might be taking our social flirtation at all seriously, I went north.”
But Thomas was shaking his head. “You knew she had a tendre for you and you exploited it.”
“Why the hell would I do such a thing?” Griffin asked in exasperation.
“Jealousy.” Thomas gestured with his glass. “You said it yourself: Father never invited you to his study. You weren’t the heir.”
Griffin laughed incredulously. “Do you think me such a pathetic man that I’d seduce my brother’s wife out of jealousy?”
“Yes.” Thomas downed the rest of his glass with one gulp.
Griffin closed his eyes. If Thomas had been any other man, Griffin would have called him out. The insult to his honor, to his integrity, to his very character was unbearable. But this was Thomas.
