A Duke of Her Own(39)

She kept talking, but Eleanor wasn't listening. The kohl black that Anne had put on her lashes and smudged around her eyes made them look twice as large as they normally did. She looked...

Beautiful. Mysterious. Sensual. Anything but a virgin.

"Your curls are in terrible disarray," her mother said. "You shall come upstairs with me, Eleanor, and I shall have a word with Willa. That sort of tawdry effect she's created simply won't do. If we do decide that you should accept Villiers's proposal, you'll have to find someone who understands the consequence of your position."

"No," Eleanor stated. She couldn't pull her eyes away from her own face. Her small, ordinary face was transformed. Her lips looked naughty, like a woman who kissed in corners and laughed inordinately, rather than with the kind of constrained emotion that befit a duke's daughter.

She didn't look like the kind of woman who stood around, moping after her former lover. She looked like the kind of woman whose former lover pined for her.

"What on earth do you mean?" her mother demanded.

She turned to her mother, chin high. "I like the way I look, Mother."

"You don't look like a duchess."

Eleanor knew perfectly well that her mother loved her, and that she only wanted the best for her daughters. But she was finished with the pretense that she was a perfect daughter.

"I don't want to look like a duchess," she stated.

"Villiers pays more attention to his appearance than the queen herself does. You wouldn't catch him going about with his hair falling out of its ribbon. I've never even seen his neck cloth in less than pristine condition. He must assign a footman to follow him with spare cloths."

"Quite likely," Eleanor said. "But if he wants to waste his time being perfect in dress, he'll have to do it alone." "Eleanor!"

It was harder to withstand her mother when she was pleading rather than browbeating. But Eleanor didn't want to dress like a wilting virgin any longer. "You've often criticized me for not being appealing enough to gentlemen," she pointed out.

"I never criticize," her mother said stoutly. And the worst of it was that she believed it.

"You have called me foolish," Eleanor replied. "And you were right. I simply wasn't interested in getting married. I couldn't picture myself doing it."

"Until Villiers changed your mind. I suppose every gentleman has peccadilloes. I'll just have to impress upon him that he may never mention those children in your presence or mine again."

"It wasn't Villiers who changed my mind."

"Whatever it was, I don't see why that change entails dressing like a shameless wagtail," her mother said, reverting to her former theme. "Wagtail, Mother?" "You know precisely what I mean!"

Eleanor smiled at her reflection. "I like that word." She gave an experimental wag of her hips. "And more to the point, Villiers likes the way I look." "It is true that he proposed to you immediately."

"There's the evidence, Mother," Eleanor said, cheerfully ignoring the truth of the matter.

Unfortunately, Villiers hadn't turned a hair when he saw her transformation. He must have noticed her face paint, but it certainly hadn't warmed his heart, given the way he had been hovering over Lisette.

As if her mother read her mind, she gave her a little shove. "You'd better go back in the sitting room, now that I think of it. Lisette is the same as she ever was, but she's so pretty that one hardly notices at first."

"Poor Lisette," Eleanor said.

Her mother snorted and headed up the stairs.





Chapter Eleven


Villiers looked down at his son's head. Tobias—he'd be damned if he'd ever call him Juby—was sitting on the floor throwing the knucklebones. The boy had inky black hair that was just like his own. He'd have to warn him about the white streaks; they'd showed up just past his eighteenth birthday.

At first, as a boy, he'd been afraid that he would turn as white as an ostrich. Then he realized that the ducal picture gallery held a portrait of an ancestor from years back, who had the same hair. The same face too. Nasty cold-eyed bastard, he looked, and so Villiers didn't have any illusions about his own visage.

The whole idea that Tobias had his hair and eyes gave him a queer feeling.

Lisette looked up and gave him the lavish smile with which she seemed to greet everyone. He'd seen many beautiful women—his former fiancee, Roberta, was exquisite—but Lisette was extraordinary.

She was like some sort of chaste and joyful goddess.

"Join us," she cried, gesturing toward the floor. She was seated in the middle of a puddle of shimmering silk, looking like a flower. It was refreshing to see someone with no regard for convention, as opposed to the Duchess of Montague, a woman whom he would personally nominate as the person one most doesn't want to welcome into the family.