Beguiling the Beauty

CHAPTER 5

The rumbles of thunder had grown more distant. The pelting of rain was not as savage upon the deck. The Rhodesia still wobbled, but she no longer lurched in unpredictable directions.

Christian rolled onto his side, taking the baroness with him. Her hair, cool and silky, tickled his arm. Her breaths were little puffs of moist warmth at the crook of his neck. Her body, at last, was slack, almost limp.

He was pleased with himself—too much so, perhaps. To a naturalist, there was no act more mundane than the sexual one. Yet making love to Baroness von Seidlitz-Hardenberg had been anything but ordinary. To the contrary, it had felt momentous, far more significant than merely the beginning of a weeklong affair.

He’d been so caught up in the heady events of the evening he hadn’t even given a thought to a sponge or a French letter until now, he who was usually far more scrupulous about such things. That she was in his bed was another aberration. In his liaisons, he preferred to set the itinerary, to leave or stay as he chose. But this time, he’d ceded the control to her: She wanted to conquer her fear, and that appealed to his sense of gallantry.

He lifted a strand of her hair and wound it about his fingers. “I’m glad you decided to reconsider my proposition.”

Against his shoulder, she made a sound, something of a humfft.

He let go of her hair, turned her face, and kissed her on her mouth. “What made you change your mind?”

Her answer was the same humfft, but she tensed again—he felt it in the set of her jaw.

He had an idea why she might not be keen on speaking to him: She probably thought he’d propositioned her randomly and she still hadn’t made peace with her eventual acceptance.

“There is an interesting contradiction to you. You hide your face, but your gait is anything but retiring.”

Not only did he want her to stay, tonight he’d be the one to make conversation as well—quite a reversal for a man who was more accustomed to seeking his solitude afterward.

“Oh?” she murmured against his cheek.

“You walk with a certain swagger. Not a strut, mind you, but a confident, assertive gait. A woman out and about with her face covered can expect a great deal of attention, which can be daunting. But you carry on as if this attention is the least of your concerns, as if you daily part a sea of staring eyes.”

She stirred. “And that interests you?”

“Your reasons interest me. I asked myself whether you might be a fugitive, and decided no, the veil makes you far too visible. There is also a small chance you are a Musulman, but no Musulman woman who takes the trouble to cover her face entirely would be caught dead traveling unaccompanied. Which leaves two possibilities. One, you simply do not wish to show anyone your face, and two, there is something highly irregular about your features.”

She pulled away. “You’ve a taste for deformed women, sir? Is that why you asked me to be your lover?”

“Did I ever ask you to be my lover?”

“Of course you—” She stopped.

When he’d stated that he’d like to know her better, she’d been the one to ask whether he was looking for a lover.

“When you instantly jumped to the conclusion that I’d like to sleep with you, you answered my question. A woman of highly irregular features might be suspicious about my interest in her, but she is unlikely to immediately accuse me of a lascivious overture. You, on the other hand, take it for granted that a man’s interest in you lies in that direction.

“Since there is nothing physically wrong with you, if I were to pretend I did not have some carnal curiosity about you, I’d be lying. So, yes, I acknowledged that component of my intent. But if you’d asked, I’d have told you that I was more interested in the why of you than the naked pleasures of your body.” It was strangely easy to talk to this faceless woman in the dark, as if he were speaking to the sea or the sky. He brushed her hair back from her shoulder. “Although, had I known just how monumental were the naked pleasures you’d bring into the bargain, I’d have pursued you with much greater vigor.”

He must have failed abysmally at explaining himself—or offended her anew. For she pushed away from him and sat up.

“I should go.”

Would you like me to help you find your clothes? They might be scattered around—I’m afraid I wasn’t too careful about collecting them in a neat pile.”

His German was quite nimble and there was a smile in his voice. She bit her lower lip. Why hadn’t she planned things better? How would she be able to find everything in the dark—and dress herself to a semblance of decency?

He left the bed the same time she did. “This is something of yours. This is mine. What is this? A corset cover?”

Her toes encountered her shoes and stockings. But before she could pick them up, he was already upon her, handing her a bundle of clothes. When she took the clothes from him, his hand brushed her arm.

“Need some help dressing?”

“No, I—”

“We’ll pretend this is an excavation site and work methodically,” he said, taking the clothes from her again. “I’ll lay out your clothes on the bed one by one, then we’ll know what is what and which pieces are still missing.”

She had not expected this helpful alacrity. Her clothes landed on the bed with a small whomp. He rounded to the other side of the bed, presumably to begin the classification of said garments.

She bent down and gathered her stockings. When she straightened, she came up against what felt like a very soft blanket at her back. “Put it on, or you’ll be cold,” said Lexington.

It was a dressing gown of merino wool. She tightened the sash at her waist. “What about you?”

“I have found my trousers. Now, let’s see about your clothes. Your dress”—something rustled; his voice once again came from the far side of the bed—“will form the bottom of the heap, to be followed by everything else in reverse order. How many petticoats were you wearing?”

“One.”

“Only one?”

“The skirt is split, so the dress comes with an embroidered inner skirt. And the cut is narrow. More than one petticoat and the fit will suffer.”

Why had she explained in such detail? It was almost as if she was afraid he’d think the lack of multiple petticoats translated into moral laxity on her part. When she’d just slept with a man to whom she hadn’t even been properly introduced!

“Wise choice,” he murmured. Again that smile in his voice. “The fit most certainly did not suffer.”

She felt as if she’d fallen down the rabbit hole. Or perhaps he was a strange incarnation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—but instead of turning evil in the dark, he became much nicer.

“Can you find your way here?” he asked. “I have your things in readiness.”

She skirted the edge of the bed. “Where are you? I don’t want to step on your foot.”

“Hmm,” he said, “there is an accent to your German.”

She halted. She’d grown up with a German governess. Native German speakers usually remarked on her lack of an English accent. “What kind of an accent?”

“I’ve spent some time in Berlin and you don’t have the vowels of Prussia proper, either the German parts or the Polish parts. You sound as if your origins are farther south—Bavaria, I’d say.”

Her German governess had indeed been from Munich and spoke the lilting Bairisch dialect. “Very good for an Englishman.”

“Yet I’m not convinced you are German.”

Too good for an Englishman. “Why not? You yourself identified my Bavarian accent.”

“When I mentioned your accent, you stopped cold. You are still standing in place, by the way.”

She remained where she was. “Does it matter whether I am German, Hungarian, or Polish?”

“No, I suppose it doesn’t. Is your name really von Seidlitz-Hardenberg?”

“And what if I am not a baroness, either? Will that cause the Rhodesia to sink?”

“No, but I’m convinced it precipitated the storm.”

Judging by his tone, he was smiling once more—and standing all too close.

His hand combed her hair. “What are you still afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid of anything.” Yet she sounded as if she were cowering.

“Good, you shouldn’t be. What can I do to you? Once we disembark, I wouldn’t know you even if we came face-to-face.”

But she’d planned differently, hadn’t she? At Southampton, she meant to reveal herself and let him know he’d been had. She’d imagined this denouement in dozens of delicious variations, each leading to that inevitable point of rage and devastation on his part. Looking back, it was as if she’d planned a trip to the moon, with her only qualification an enthusiasm for Monsieur Verne’s scientific romances.

He tucked back her hair and kissed her beneath her earlobe, the sensation so jagged it almost hurt. Nibbling a path down the column of her neck, he pushed aside the collar of her dressing gown and exposed her shoulder.

“You are so very tense again, my dear baroness who may or may not be a baroness.”

“You make me feel nervous.” And guilty, even though she’d yet to do anything more reprehensible than sleeping with a man she did not love—or like.

He lifted her and set her down at the edge of the bed. “Unforgivable on my part. Let me offer my recompenses.”

He undid the sash on her dressing gown. She fought a renewed surge of panic. “Why are you nice to me?”

“I like you. I’m never unpleasant to people I like.”

“You are a high-minded man, are you not?”

“I do have some exacting standards.”

“As a man of exacting standards, can you justify to yourself why you like me, beyond that I am a source of naked pleasures?”

“You turned me down, and that speaks well of you—a man who went about it with as little finesse and forethought as I did deserved to be rebuffed. Other than that, you are right; I don’t have any firm foundations for approving of you. All the same, when you changed your mind, I was terribly flattered. So I am going to be unscientific and call this simply an affinity.”

Affinity. When in real life, he had the greatest antipathy for her.

“There is something else about you that I like,” he continued. She didn’t know when he’d pressed her into bed, but she lay with him beside her, her dressing gown completely open. Lightly he ran his hand over her breasts and her abdomen. “I like that I can make you forget, however briefly, everything that agitates you.”

He made love to her again. Afterward, when she began to deliberately bring her breathing under control, Christian knew that she’d left her sweet oblivion behind. This time, when she told him that she must go, he pulled on his trousers and helped her dress. Then he went out to the parlor and brought back her hat.

“What about your hair?” He’d discarded the pins and combs that had held together her coiffure. “I’ve scant knowledge on the repair of ladies’ hair.”

“I’ve the veil,” she said. “I’ll manage.”

Once her face was safely obscured behind the veil, he turned on the lamps and shrugged into his shirt.

“It’s late. I’ll walk you back.”

The light danced upon the warp and woof of her veil, which rippled just perceptibly as she exhaled. He had the feeling she was about to turn down his offer, but she said, “All right, thank you.”

A sensible woman, for he’d have insisted.

He remained in the bedroom. She walked slowly about the parlor, taking in the coffered ceiling, the stack of books on the writing desk, and the vase of red and yellow tulips on the mantel. For some reason he’d thought her dinner gown cream-colored, but it was apricot, the skirt spangled with beads and crystal drops.

He snapped his braces over his shoulders and tossed on a waistcoat and an evening coat. His cuff links, emblazoned with the Lexington coat of arms, were on the floor. He bent down and retrieved them.

As he straightened, he felt pinpricks upon his skin—the weight of her gaze. He glanced at her. She looked away immediately, even though he could see nothing but her faintly glimmering veil.

She did not trust him—or like him entirely, for that matter. And yet she’d let him seduce her—or was it the other way around?—twice. He could flatter himself and attribute the discrepancy to an intense attraction on her part, but years of training in objectivity made such delusions impossible.

He put on the cuff links. He even went to the trouble of a fresh necktie. If they were seen together at this hour, it might lead to certain suspicions, but he was not about to give concrete evidence by looking disheveled.

“Shall we?” He offered his arm.

She hesitated before laying her hand on his elbow. Still jittery, his baroness, almost as much as she’d been when she’d arrived in his suite. But questions to that regard set her on edge, so he refrained.

Instead, as they walked out of the suite, he asked, “Why were you celibate for so long? Clinging faithfully to the late baron’s memory?”

She made a sound that could only be termed snorting. “No.”

The Rhodesia was quiet except for the thrum of the mighty engine deep in its hull. The first-class passengers, whether asleep, seasick, or vigorously plugging away at their spouses, kept up the courtesy of decorous silence. The lamplit corridors might well have been those of a ghost ship.

“If you weren’t still mourning the baron, then I can’t imagine going so long without.”

“It is hardly unheard of.”

“True, but you don’t seem like someone who would want to be deprived for years upon years.”

Her sigh was one of impatience. “As much as this might amaze you, sir, a woman doesn’t always need a man to satisfy her. She can see to it herself with great competence.”

He chortled, delighted. “And you are, no doubt, tremendously capable in this respect?”

“I daresay I am sufficiently skilled from all that practice,” she said, rather grumpily.

He laughed again.

Even across the veil he could feel the glance she shot at him. “Are you always this cheerful afterward?”

“No, not at all.” His mood usually turned somber, sometimes downright dark—the women he slept with were never the one he wanted, whose hold over him remained unbreakable. But tonight he’d thought not once of Mrs. Easterbrook. “Are you always this testy afterward?”

“Maybe. I can’t remember.”

“Was the late baron a clumsy lover?”

“You’d like him to be, wouldn’t you?”

He’d never known himself to care whether a woman had had better or worse lovers than he. But in this instance, he found that, yes, he did have a preference. “Indeed. I’d like him to be thoroughly useless—impotent, if possible.”

He wanted to be the only one who’d ever brought her to peak after peak of shocking pleasure.

“Sorry to disappoint you. He might not have been Eros reborn, but he acquitted himself quite well.”

“How you thwart me, baroness.” A thought occurred to him. “So what was wrong with him?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He was a decent lover, yet after his death, you resorted to your own … manual dexterity. And you did not dedicate your chastity to him. Was he unfaithful?”

She stopped. Not for long—she resumed her progress almost immediately, and at a faster pace. But he had his answer.

“He was a fool,” he declared.

She shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

“Not all men are philanderers.”

“I know that. I have chosen to stay away from men not because I have lost faith in all of them, but because I am no longer confident of my ability to choose well.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Being unattached has its advantages.” Her face turned toward him. “At least I have been married. What is your excuse? Shouldn’t a man who holds a title as lofty as yours have produced an heir or two by now?”

He did not fail to notice she’d changed the subject. Deftly, too.

“Yes, he should. And I have no excuse, which is why I am on my way to a London Season, to do my duty.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic. You’ve no love for the idea of marriage?”

“I’ve nothing against the institution, but I suspect I shan’t be happy in it.”

“Why not?”

Again, her anonymity made him speak freely of things he would not even consider mentioning before others. “There is no question that I must marry—and soon. But I have little hope of finding a girl who will suit me.”

“You mean, no woman is good enough for you.”

“Quite the opposite. Other than my inheritance, I have very little to offer a woman. I’m hardly a dazzling conversationalist. I’d rather be in the field or locked in my study. And even when I am willing to linger in the drawing room and make small talk, I am not particularly easy to be around.”

“These are faults many girls would be more than willing to overlook.”

“I don’t want my faults overlooked. Members of my staff are there to deal with my eccentricities whether they approve or not. My wife should have the mettle to tell me I’m behaving abominably—if that is the case.”

“So you do know you behave abominably at times,” she mused. “But if you’ve such stringent requirements for a wife, if she must possess intelligence, gravitas, and fearlessness in equal abundance, why did you not start your search sooner? Why limit yourself to one Season and one batch of debutantes? Hardly an astute way to go about it.”

No, it was not. He’d gone about it in the stupidest manner possible, all but assuring that his marriage would be a formal, stilted affair. But this was not something he could admit, no matter how anonymous the baroness was.

“I shall pay for it, no doubt.”

“You sound very British, full of manly forbearance and resignation.”

He adored her acerbic tone. “We are quite bloodless when it comes to such matters. The pursuit of happiness we leave to Americans; romance we consider the specialty of the Continentals.”

She was quiet. The ship rose and fell gently, as if it lay upon the breast of a sleeping giant. The beads on her skirt slid and clicked against one another, like a distant rain of pearls.

They descended two flights of stairs and turned a corner. She stopped. “I’m home.”

He noted the number of her stateroom. “Will I have the pleasure of your company at breakfast?”

“You want to be seen in public with me?” There was an echo of surprise in her voice.

“Should I object to it?”

“You will be known as the man who accompanies the veiled woman.”

“That is more than acceptable to me.”

She stood with her back to the door, her hand on the knob—as if protecting the entrance from him. “And if I say no?”

“You will not be rid of me so easily now, baroness. If you say no to breakfast, I will ask whether you’d like to join me for a stroll after breakfast.”

“And if I say I will join you for breakfast, but won’t ever sleep with you again?”

“You are determined to make me weep, madam.”

He touched his fingers to the edge of her veil, which fell several inches past her chin. The netting slipped weightlessly upon his skin. She would probably have pulled away from him, but he already had her back against a wall—or a door, for that matter.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she said.

It was vain to enjoy the slight tremors he caused in her voice, but how he relished them. “The bargain is the same,” he said. “I will do my best to seduce you, and you can walk away anytime you wish. Now, will you meet me for breakfast?”

“No.” Then, after an interminable beat, “I can’t eat with this veil on. I will meet you for a walk.”

He hadn’t really believed she would turn him down altogether. Why then did his heart pound with relief? “Name the time and the place.”

“Nine in the morning. The promenade deck.”

“Excellent.” He leaned in and kissed her lips through the veil. “Good night.”

She slipped inside her stateroom and closed the door gently but firmly in his face.

Venetia leaned her back against the door, unable to take another step.

What had she done?

And what, in God’s name, had been done to her?

Revenge had seemed so simple. Lexington had injured her maliciously and unrepentantly. Therefore Lexington must pay. He dealt with fossils. She dealt with men. Ergo, she must have the upper hand in this very human struggle of theirs, even with her face covered.

Yet here she was, gingerly touching her lips, which still tingled from his chaste parting kiss.

She’d boarded the Rhodesia to punish a man, but he was not that man. He was someone else altogether.

After her marriage to Tony, it was not only her ability to choose a good man she doubted, it was also her ability to make a man—any man—happy. But Lexington, that most severe judge of character, had been almost buoyant in her company. And he now numbered among the few men to whom her appearance truly did not matter.

It was as if she’d set off across the Atlantic to find a route to India, only to encounter a whole new continent.

Had she accosted him in New York, she could have disappeared into the city. But on the Rhodesia she could not hide. And … she did not want to. The duke was affirmation that there was more to her than the shape of her face and the juxtaposition of her features.

Slowly she discarded her clothes, feeling her way to her berth. Under the covers she said her prayers, exhorting the Almighty to watch over Helena and bring the girl back to her senses. She also prayed that on the far side of the Atlantic, Fitz would continue to be patient and discreet, and that back in America, when they found out, Millie and Helena would not worry too much over her second abrupt departure in as many days.

For herself she did not pray—even if she thought her troubles important enough to bother the Good Lord, the fact remained that she no longer had any idea what outcome she wanted from her muddled revenge. So she lay for a long time, her hands over her abdomen, and thought of the spate of incidents and coincidences—beginning with Hastings coming upon Helena three nights in a row—that had brought her to this time, this place, this quandary.

And wished she had a crystal ball to see where it all would lead.