He had not entered the room at all, or stood in the doorway to watch her. He would have had to be blind not to have noticed the deep revulsion in her eyes whenever she looked at him. But it did not matter. He was not looking for any sort of relationship with her. He merely hoped she would be good for Pamela. And he liked her music.
“Adam, my dear man.” The voice was low, the perfume seductive. Lady Victoria Underwood, widow, who had decided during the Season the year before that they were close enough friends that they could drop the cumbersome formality of using titles, smiled up at him from beneath artfully darkened eyelashes. “What a very splendid home you have. Why have you not invited me here before?”
She was leaning slightly toward him. For some reason she had never found his scar repulsive.
“It makes you quite the most attractive man of my acquaintance,” she said to him the year before on one of the many nights when she had failed to entice him into her bed.
He often wondered why he had never given in. She was not beautiful, but there was a seductive sexuality about her. Coupling with her would have been a somewhat more sensual experience than the one he had had with Fleur Hamilton.
But he wished he had not had that thought. He had been unconsciously trying to divorce in his mind the Miss Hamilton who wanted to teach and care for Pamela and who made of Mozart and Beethoven haunting experiences of the soul from the thin and pale and lusterless prostitute he had taken with such quick lust in a cheap tavern room a month before.
“I thought you did not like to leave London, Lady Underwood,” he said, smiling.
“Victoria,” she said, looking down to his lips. “I believe I would accept an invitation to the Hebrides, my dear Adam, if I knew you were to be there.”
“I never would be,” he said. “It sounds too cold for me.”
“But what a delicious excuse,” she said, “to huddle under a blanket for warmth—with the right company, of course.”
He laughed and used the excuse of a plate of cakes passing at that moment to draw the Mayberrys into the group.
He could stomach the flirtations and the empty chatter when in London. He could even derive some amusement from them, though he preferred evenings of serious and stimulating conversation with his closer friends. But there he could always withdraw to the quiet of his own home when he had had enough. Here he was in his own home.
That was always the trouble with Sybil’s confounded parties.
Fortunately the guests did not linger. Almost all of them had had long journeys and welcomed the chance of some time to rest and refresh themselves in the privacy of their own rooms. The duchess, too, flushed and bright-eyed, retired to her own apartments until dinnertime.
The duke wandered out onto the terrace. He wondered if Pamela was visiting her puppy and heard a distant shriek of laughter even as he did so. He turned and strolled in the direction of the stables, wondering idly if Fleur Hamilton would be there too or if Pamela had brought a footman with her as she had the day before. He did not imagine that Nanny would consider a visit to the stables and a puppy consistent with her dignity.
Pamela was sitting on top of the fence around the paddock beside the stables, her legs swinging, while Fleur, inside the paddock, tickled the puppy’s stomach with her slippered foot. She was laughing, a look of such carefree beauty on her face that his grace hung back, reluctant to be seen.
A groom—Ned Driscoll—was also laughing, one foot resting on a lower rung of the fence, his arms draped over the top, his cap pulled low over his eyes.
“I think the puppy likes it,” Fleur said.
“But then, who wouldn’t, miss,” Ned said boldly a moment before spotting his master standing quietly behind him. He straightened up hastily, pulled at the brim of his cap, and scuttled off in the direction of the stables.
Fleur did not look up, and continued to tickle the dog with her toes. But the laughter in her face faded. His grace knew with an inward sigh that his presence had been noted.
“Papa.” Pamela looked at him petulantly, her laughter of moments before forgotten. “Mama promised that she would call me down for tea. Nanny got me all dressed up, but Mama did not send, and Miss Hamilton would not let me go down unless she did.”
The duke looked at Fleur, who was watching the puppy try to eat the grass.
“She was not sent for,” she said. “I explained to her that all the guests must be tired and that her grace must have decided to wait for another day. I brought her out here, hoping she would forget her disappointment.”
“But she promised, Papa,” the child said. “And Miss Hamilton would not let me go. Nanny would have let me.”