No Mistress of Mine

Chapter 17

She looked like a stricken doe surrounded by hunters. And the hunters, he noted as he glanced around, were out for blood. A glance at his father’s face told him some of those hunters were in his own family. Denys moved, taking a protective step toward her, but a hand curled around his arm, stopping him.

He turned his head and found Georgiana staring at him, her gray eyes wide and appalled. “Denys, what are you doing?” she whispered. “You can’t be thinking to actually walk over and speak to that woman?”

He returned his gaze to Lola. He’d never seen her look this way—mortified and frightened. It was so unlike her, and he knew she was waiting to see what he would do. “Of course I shall speak to her,” he said, keeping his voice low and as matter-of-fact as possible. “She is my business partner. We discussed that fact only yesterday, Georgiana.”

“Being her business partner does not mean you can acknowledge her publicly!”

That sort of hair-splitting was so absurd he nearly laughed. “I see no way to be one without doing the other.” He glanced over to where Lola was still standing on the lawn surrounded by a sea of faces, avid and eager for scandal, and he knew all of them were wondering what he intended to do. “We can discuss this later. Everyone is waiting on my action, and I cannot allow her to be humiliated this way a moment longer.”

“Humiliated?” Georgiana tightened her grip on his arm before he could turn away. “If you speak to her, if you even acknowledge her, it is I who am humiliated,” she choked. “Do you not see that?”

He shook his head, knowing what she was expecting, knowing he could not do it. “I will not give her the cut, Georgiana. Even for you, I will not do that.”

She made a sound—surprise, outrage, pain—he didn’t know which because he hadn’t seen her display any of these emotions before, not since they were children. Without warning, tears welled up in her eyes. “I knew it,” she whispered. “I’ve always known.”

And then, Georgiana, admired by all for her self-control and restraint, began to cry. Her hand slid away from his arm, she ducked around him, and ran for the house.

Christ Almighty.

He couldn’t go after her, for he had an even more pressing problem than Georgiana’s tears. He took another step toward Lola, but he was stopped again, this time by an unmistakably masculine grip. He turned, ready to tell his father not to interfere in his affairs, only to find it was Jack behind him.

“Georgiana’s right, old boy.”

“I won’t give Lola the cut, Jack,” he muttered. “I won’t.”

“Acknowledge her, if you must. But you can’t go over there and speak to her. If you do, everyone will see it as a slap in Georgiana’s face. She doesn’t deserve that.”

“I know, but hell, Jack, I can’t leave Lola standing there in limbo.”

“I’ll take care of Lola. You go after Georgiana. You must,” he added, as Denys opened his mouth to argue. “Georgiana’s the girl you’re thinking to marry.” He paused, his dark eyes looking into Denys’s. “Isn’t she?”

Denys knew the answer to that question, knew it with abrupt and absolute certainty, but he also knew his sudden realization didn’t change the fact that Jack was right. He nodded. “Get Lola out of here.”

“I’ll run the gauntlet with her, never fear.” He winked. “Right past Conyers and all the rest.”

“Linnet won’t like it,” Denys felt compelled to point out.

“No,” his friend agreed, and grinned. “But my wife has been angry with me many times before. I’m sure she’ll be angry with me quite a few times more before I’m finally laid in the ground.”

With that, Jack turned and started toward Lola, who was standing with her friend, pretending a vast interest in the roses and trying her best to ignore the fact that everyone within fifty feet was observing her.

He waited as Jack walked to her side, bowed to her, and offered his arm, and it hurt to know that he’d had to allow a friend the honor of rescuing her.

Jack and Lola started in his direction, her friend trailing a couple of feet behind them, and as they approached, Denys’s gaze slid to his family. They stood huddled together about a dozen feet from him—Susan, with her hand over her mouth and her eyes wide, his mother, displaying all the stoic calm a lady could manage in these circumstances, and lastly, his father, stone-faced and grim. He met the reproach in the earl’s eyes with an unwavering gaze of his own before returning his attention to the couple coming across the grass. As she passed, he bowed to her, a polite but brief acknowledgment that, though it might offend Georgiana, wouldn’t be a public insult to her.

Lola gave him a nod in return and strolled on by, but though his duty to her was done, he waited until Jack had seen her through the gates and into the park before he turned his attention to the house and another duty, one that he suspected was going to be every bit as painful.

He knew Georgiana well enough to know where he’d find her, and it didn’t take long to confirm his guess had been right. For he’d barely started down the corridor to Bute’s music room before the melancholy notes of a Chopin concerto floated to his ears. In the doorway, he paused, and seeing her over the piano reminded him of when they were children and they’d played duets together.

He felt now all the same warm affection he’d felt for her then, but that was all he felt, and he knew now it was all he would ever feel. He also knew it was not enough, not for him. It could never be enough.

The music stopped, and she looked up, and though it was a hard, hard thing to look into her eyes, he did it. They were dry now, no sign of tears, but he could still see pain in their gray depths. He took a deep breath, removed his hat, and said the only thing that a gentleman could say in such circumstances.

“I’m sorry, Georgiana.”

She lifted her chin a little higher, a proud gesture that reminded him of Lola though he doubted Georgiana would have seen that particular comparison as a compliment. She swallowed hard. “Just what,” she said in a choked voice, “are you sorry for, Denys?”

He suspected they both knew the answer to that question, but of course, it had to be said aloud.

“I’ve hurt you, and I’m sorry for it,” he said simply. “That has never been my intent. I have a great deal of fondness and affection for you, and have always regarded you as a dear friend. But—”

He stopped as she closed her eyes, and he waited for her to open them again before saying the rest. “But I have come to realize it is not enough for marriage.”

She did not reply. Instead, she lifted her hands from the piano, and they trembled a little as she clasped them together. She steepled her index fingers, pressing the tips to her lips, considering her next words with care. “But surely,” she said at last, “fondness and affection—along with suitability, of course—are the perfect foundation for marriage.”

He had been trying to accept that particular premise all his life. When she had returned last year from an extended trip to the Continent, he’d already decided he was done with crazy, ungovernable passions, and he’d worked to accept everyone else’s notion that mutual affection and fondness were a better basis for a happy marriage than romantic love could ever be. He thought he had succeeded, but he knew he had not. “Some people say that’s how it is.”

Her hands opened in a gesture of bewilderment. “I don’t know anyone who would say otherwise.”

That premise might be true for most people, but he knew now, as surely as he knew his name, that for him, marriage without romantic love would be as cold and colorless as the North Sea in January.

Georgiana deserved better from matrimony than that. So did he.

“I would,” he said. “I would say otherwise.”

She shook her head, a sudden, violent movement of denial, and jerked to her feet, but when she spoke, her voice was low, controlled. “All my life, I’ve waited for you, Denys, because I’ve always known we would be perfect together. Our families know it, too. We are so well suited. We have many interests in common, we think alike about most things. Why, in the whole of our lives, we’ve never had so much as one disagreement.”

“That’s not love, Georgiana,” he said gently.

She ignored that. “I waited for you, wishing, hoping that one day, when you were ready to settle down, I would be the one you chose. And then, she came along, and ruined everything. All my hopes . . .” Her voice broke, and she stopped.

He pressed his fist to his mouth, and it was a moment before he could reply. “I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you. Having had my heart broken, I always vowed I’d never cause anyone else that kind of pain. That I have done it to you—”

“She broke it.”

Her words cut through his like the lash of a whip.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your heart was broken because she broke it, Denys. I am the one who picked up the pieces.”

The former might be true, but though he could have quibbled about the latter, he chose not to. Let her believe that if it made her feel better.

“And now,” she went on, her voice rising a notch, vibrating with repressed anger, “now, just as I begin to believe that everything I have planned for us could still happen, that the future I have wished for could be mine after all, she comes back, and all my good work is undone.”

Good work, he noted, and plans, and wishes, but no mention of love. He began to wonder if his concern for her broken heart was unfounded.

“And now? Now I have stood by,” she went on, “as a lady must, able to do nothing while that woman waltzes back into your life and chases after you shamelessly. And then, she has the unmitigated gall to show up here? Here, at your own mother’s event, as if she feels she is entitled to arrive anywhere you happen to be.”

“Well, she is entitled to be here,” Denys pointed out reasonably. “She bought a ticket.”

“You took her side,” she said, and the anger formerly in her voice was gone. In its place was disbelief, the same wondering disbelief a child might display upon discovering that wishes are not reality, and life is not always fair. “You took her side instead of mine.”

“It was not a matter of taking sides. Would you have had me ignore her? Give her the cut?”

She stared. “Of course you should have cut her. There was no other proper alternative.”

“Be deliberately cruel, you mean?”

“Oh, please. I know why you didn’t do it. Everyone knows why.”

“Indeed?”

“Oh, Denys, must we pretend again today?” She looked at him, and the pain in her eyes seemed deeper, darker, mixed with anger. “She’s your mistress. Everyone knows that.”

He stiffened though he’d known all along this was bound to be the way people’s minds would run. “Then everyone is misinformed. She is not my mistress. She is my business partner. We discussed this only yesterday, Georgiana.”

“Business partner,” she scoffed, making short shrift of their conversation the day before. “Do you think I didn’t see through that arrangement the moment I heard about it? And no, I’m not talking about our conversation yesterday. I heard about that woman and why she’s here the day before I departed for Kent.”

“Perhaps you did,” he acknowledged, “but you did not hear about any of it from me until yesterday, and what you heard elsewhere is gossip.”

“It is? Do you think I didn’t see how you looked at her today?”

Of the many tumultuous emotions Lola always managed to evoke in him, he had no idea which ones he had displayed moments ago. But there was one thing Georgiana had concluded that he could dispute. “Whatever you saw, or think you saw, in my countenance earlier, you are nonetheless mistaken about the nature of my relationship with Lola Valentine. I can see,” he added, noting the disbelief in her expression, “that I must be blunt about a very indelicate subject. A mistress is a woman that a man pays to sleep with him. Lola has not indicated any desire for such an arrangement with me, and I can assure you that if she were to do so, I would not dream of accommodating her. I have not made her my mistress, and I will not. Not now, nor at any point in the future, and I am astonished that you would think I could come to you, and look into your eyes, and give you false explanations of the situation.”

Her shoulders went back. “I chose to accept those explanations. And live with them.”

“But not believe them.” He paused. “So my supposed mistress is to be tolerated, but not acknowledged?”

“If necessary.” Had he still possessed any doubts about his decision before walking into this room, that answer would have banished them. He took a deep breath. “You may be willing to accept such an arrangement, but I am not. I will always think of you with fondness and affection, Georgiana, and I hope one day, you can once again regard me in that light.” He bowed. “Good-bye, my dear.”

“You’ll regret this, Denys.” There was pain in her voice, and there were tears in her eyes, but he couldn’t help feeling that they weren’t the pain and tears of heartbreak, but rather, the disappointment of thwarted wishes. “You will regret this one day.”

He wouldn’t, but a gentleman could never say such a thing. “That is quite possible,” he said instead, and donned his hat. “Good-bye, Georgiana. I wish you every happiness.”

He left Georgiana in the music room, but he did not rejoin his family in the gardens of St. John’s Lodge. Instead, he left Bute’s house by the front entrance and began walking. It was nearing sunset, and ominous clouds were gathering overhead, but he paid little heed to that. He needed to walk—to move and to think—so he simply started around the park’s Inner Circle and kept going, over both bridges of the boating lake, across Hanover Terrace, and onto the Park Road.

As he walked, he thought of his youth, of how he’d ignored his responsibilities and the expectations of his loved ones. He thought of his cavalier seduction of a dancing girl and his even more cavalier disregard of the consequences. He thought of his heartbreak and his resolve to straighten out the mess he’d made of his life, and though he was proud of what he’d achieved, he knew the changes he’d wrought within himself had somehow sent him ricocheting to the opposite extreme. The callow, careless youth had become a man so fixed on duty and obligation and doing the responsible thing that he’d actually considered marrying a girl he did not love.

Lola’s return was making him realize that neither man was the man he wanted to be. He felt chained by forces that were pulling him in opposite directions. On one side were obligation, duty, and expectation, his deep love for his family, and all the conventions and beliefs with which he’d been raised. On the other was only one thing: his deep, unwavering desire for one woman.

A drop of rain fell, tapping the brim of his hat, then another, and another, but he did not stop. When the road forked at St. John’s Church, he veered left and kept walking.

Was there no middle ground? he wondered. Was there no way for him to bend with the forces around him and not break? Was there no compromise? No stable, solid center, no eye in the midst of the hurricane where he could be content? That was what he really wanted.

In other words, he thought wryly, he wanted to have it all. And perhaps, like Georgiana, he could not quite accept that life wasn’t willing to hand it over.

Ah, but what if he took it?

There was, he knew from schooldays, a Persian proverb, something about taking what you want, but being prepared to pay the price to the gods, whatever the price might be.

What price was he willing to pay?

He stopped on the sidewalk, and it was only then that he took stock of his surroundings. He was in St. John’s Wood, walking along beside the pretty little villas of Circus Road, villas where many mistresses had been kept over the years by many young and callow gentleman of the aristocracy.

He walked farther along the road, then stopped again in front of a small stone house that stood behind a discreet wall of ivy-laced wrought iron, a house that had once belonged to him. The delphiniums planted in the urn by the gate were vivid purple in the twilight, and the granite façade of the house shimmered silvery gray in the rain. It looks the same, he thought, and tightness squeezed his chest. It looks exactly the same.

Memories swamped him, memories of walking up those whitewashed steps, of Lola at the top of the staircase and her radiant smile beaming down on him like sunshine, of her running down the stairs and straight into his arms, of him carrying her right back up.

He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, feeling the raindrops spatter his face. He inhaled deeply, but what he smelled on the breeze was not the dampness of a spring day, but the delicate sweetness of jasmine.

The clatter of carriage wheels on the road opened his eyes, and he looked over his shoulder as a growler came up the street. It stopped beside him, but when he saw the astonished face of the woman on the other side of the window glass, her eyes widening in shock beneath the narrow brim of her white straw hat, he could not share her surprise.

To him, her arrival seemed inevitable. Fate offering him a choice: take what he wanted and pay the price, or walk away for good and all. There was no middle ground, no solid center. There was Lola, and there was everything else.

She’d said he didn’t know who she really was, and that was true, because he now understood that she was not at all what he’d thought her to be. She was not a force beyond his control, she was not something to be fought, or seduced, or conquered, or denied. She was simply his woman, for now and for always, and even if she broke his heart all over again, even if everything he’d tried to be was in ruins afterward, he did not care.

He took a step toward her, then stopped. He’d already made his choice, but he wasn’t the only one who had to choose, and he certainly wasn’t the only one who’d have to pay the price.

He doffed his hat, watching as the driver climbed down from the box, pulled out the step, and opened the door for her. Hat in his hand, heart in this throat, he waited.

She didn’t move, not to come out, nor to invite him in. “What are you doing here?” she asked, sounding bewildered, almost plaintive.

“The same thing as you. At least, I hope so.”

She shook her head, as if denying it, but then she sighed, seeming to realize denials were pointless. “I didn’t know you would be at that flower show. Kitty—my friend—she bought the tickets and asked me to go, but she didn’t say it was your mother’s event. Oh, God, Denys.” She paused, lifting one white-gloved hand in a hopeless gesture. “If I’d known, I’d never have—”

“It doesn’t matter.” He rubbed a hand over his rain-soaked face, and he waited.

“And your sweetheart?” She gave a laugh that to his ears sounded forced. “I’ll wager you had a great deal of explaining to do there.”

“She’s not my sweetheart, and that doesn’t matter either.”

A tiny frown knit her auburn brows together. “But you’re going to marry her, aren’t you? That’s what the scandal sheets are saying.”

“The scandal sheets will say anything if it will sell newspapers. The truth is, I had been considering the possibility of courting Georgiana, with perhaps a view to marriage, and had been spending much more time in her company this season than previously, but I had not yet indicated any serious attachment or intention.”

She drew a deep breath. “Perhaps you haven’t, but she feels a serious attachment to you. It was in her face. I saw it.”

“Georgiana has harbored hopes about me since our childhood, and I fear my recent attention toward her fueled those hopes, much to my regret. But today, I made it clear to her that those hopes will never be fulfilled. I daresay Georgiana will make some man a fine wife, but she now knows that man will never be me.”

The rain was falling harder now. His hair was soaked, and so were his clothes, but he didn’t point that out. Though he had no idea what she was going to do, he didn’t try to help her make a decision. He willed himself not to move. He hardly dared to breathe. And he waited.

And then, after what seemed an eternity, she slid back on the seat to allow him inside with her, and Denys’s heart leapt in his chest with such force, it hurt.

He was across the remaining distance in less than a second. “The Savoy,” he told the driver as he stepped into the cab. “If I don’t tap the roof when you arrive there, keep circling Covent Garden and the Strand until I do.”

And then, he was in the cab, Lola was in his arms, his mouth was on hers, and he knew he had just walked straight into the teeth of the storm. He knew the choice he’d just made might cost him everything he’d spent the past six years trying to earn. He knew he might have to give up all the trappings of his position and the pleasures of good society. He might even have to sacrifice the affection of his family and the respect of his father. But if that was the price to have the only woman he had ever loved, he’d pay it. He’d pay it gladly.