Footsteps tapped on the marble floor, interrupting this delicious experiment, and he straightened away from her, stepping back as she turned her head toward the door. When a pair of elderly ladies entered the gallery, she returned her attention to him with evident relief. “Thank goodness.”
He gave her an inquiring look.
“I’m hiding,” she confessed. “My aunt insists upon accompanying me everywhere, and when she cannot, she sends Robert in her stead.”
“And which of them are you hiding from at present?”
“Robert. He’s somewhere about, and sure to find me any moment now.” She sighed, looking quite unhappy at the prospect.
“Your reconciliation with your family is going quite well, I see.”
“Do not tease me about this, Your Grace, I beg you. I never have a moment to myself.”
“And you don’t like that?”
“I’m not used to it. I have lived out since I moved to London when I was seventeen. Being chaperoned everywhere makes me feel quite smothered.”
Far be it from him to pass up a golden opportunity. Putting his hand on her elbow, he led her toward one of the doors leading out of the gallery. “Come with me.”
“Where are we going?”
“If you wish to hide from someone,” he said, pausing to glance left and right before propelling her through the doorway, “you’d best do it properly.”
They crossed into another gallery, then another, as Rhys searched for a place that would give him a few minutes to be alone with her. They had almost reached the end of the building before he spied what might serve the purpose—a long, dim corridor, its entrance blocked by a velvet rope hung between two short metal poles. “Now this looks like the perfect hiding place.”
“But can we go back there?” She pointed to a sign on a stand beside the entrance. “This wing is closed in preparation for an exhibit from Rome. It is inaccessible to the public.”
He reached for the hook that held the rope across the opening and unfastened it. “Nothing is ever inaccessible to a duke,” he said, and ushered her into the corridor. “Besides, your cousin will never think to look for you back here.”
“That’s true,” she said as he refastened the rope. “Robert never does anything against the rules.”
“Poor fellow. No wonder he’s so deadly dull.”
“Your Grace!” she remonstrated him, but was laughing as they walked side by side down the length of the empty corridor. At the end, it opened into an enormous room filled with Italian statues, reliefs, and glass display cases containing smaller sculptures. A massive statue of Neptune and his Tritons, half assembled, stood in the center of the room, ringed by metal scaffolding.
He made a show of looking around. “There, you see? Not a chaperone in sight.”
“Thank you,” she said, looking at him with gratitude and relief, two emotions he knew she would never have felt were she to know his true motives. If he still had a conscience, that might have bothered him. But his conscience, like his innocence, had disappeared long ago.
“It looks a bit eerie in here, doesn’t it, with all these white marble statues?” she commented, glancing about the room, bringing Rhys out of his speculations. “An exhibit from Florence, the sign said.” She returned her gaze to him. “You lived in Florence, you said?”
“I did, but I hope you’re not expecting a lecture tour about Italian statues.”
“If I’d wanted a lecture tour, I’d have stayed with Robert. He loves to show off his Oxford education.” She gestured to the massive statue before them. “No doubt I’d have received at least an hour-long dissertation on this piece.”
“Your cousin spent his days at university far more productively than I. But I can tell you this much: this is a statue of Neptune and his Tritons. Now, before you begin to be impressed with my Oxford education, I must confess I only know it’s Neptune because this is a replica of the Trevi Fountain in Rome.”
She turned toward him, her face alight with curiosity. “Did you really swim naked in a fountain?”
Rhys groaned. “Lord, is that old story still being circulated?”
“Did you?”
“Yes, although ‘bathed’ might be a more accurate term. It was too shallow for swimming.”
“People say you were with a Russian countess at the time.”
She was Prussian, actually. Rhys schooled his features into an expression of earnest dignity. “As a gentleman, I am not at liberty to discuss the details.”
“Your discretion does you credit, and I do admire you for it, though I think it must be such a bore to be a gentleman.”
He raised an eyebrow. “A bore?”
“Ladies always discuss the details,” she told him, smiling. “You would not believe the fascinating secrets revealed in a dressmaker’s showroom.”
“Indeed?” He could only imagine what ladies said about him over the choosing of silks and muslins. “But now that you’ve patched things up with your family, you no longer have to work as a seamstress, I hope?”
“No, and it seems a bit unreal to me to be choosing gowns for myself instead of making them for others.” She turned, curling her gloved fingers around the cross brace of the scaffold, staring at Neptune. “In fact,” she added with a little laugh, “my entire life seems unreal nowadays.”
Having an income of millions of pounds a year would seem unreal to him, too, though he suspected he could get used to it. Because he wasn’t yet supposed to know about her inheritance, he pretended not to understand what she meant. “Unreal in what respect?”
“In many respects.” She turned toward him. “The day before yesterday, I went to my former employer to tender my resignation, and when I was in the showroom, I decided to have a few gowns made up, thinking it a lark more than anything else. Madame was so horrible to me when I worked there, and I wanted to lord it over her a little, show off, you know. I thought it would be amusing.”
“And was it?”
“It was at first.” She paused and a tiny frown knit her brows. “But the fuss they all made! Heavens, women I’ve worked with for years tripping over themselves to wait on me! And Madame, with all her gushing compliments that a child could see through. All because I had money to spend. It made me a bit uncomfortable. And the other seamstresses, seeming to be happy for me, and yet, I had the feeling that underneath all the gush, they were not happy for me at all. I didn’t…” She paused and took a deep breath, her troubled expression deepening. “I didn’t like it.”
“You’ll get used to it,” he said, and as he spoke those words, he looked into her soft, dark eyes and thought of what she would become, of what money would inevitably do to her, and something hard and tight squeezed his chest.
“Will I get used to it?” she asked, looking doubtful. “I have been earning my own wages and doing for myself a long time now. I don’t know that I will ever become accustomed to being waited on or fussed over.”
“Or being chaperoned every moment of the day?”
“Exactly! Though in that, at least, I do appreciate the responsibility that my aunt and uncle feel to watch over me.”
You and your millions of pounds.
Rhys drew a deep breath and suppressed that cynical rejoinder. “Their protectiveness seems a rather…recent phenomenon,” he said instead, choosing his words with care. “Part of your reconciliation with them, I take it?”
“You might put it that way.”
“What caused the breach? Did they toss you out? Force you to work as a seamstress?”
“Oh, no, please don’t think they were cruel to me,” she hastened to say, as if fearing he would receive the wrong impression of her relations. “Living out and working in London was my choice. My mother died when I was fourteen, you see, and her annuity died with her. Her brother and his wife took me into their home, but they had daughters of their own, and there was so little money. I was rather a burden to them. Having to pinch pennies made my aunt quite cross sometimes. It’s hard to scrimp and save, and measure out the coal each week and never have beef. And there were quarrels, with their daughters especially, and I hated that. I finally decided I had to go off and make my own way. I don’t mean to seem ungrateful.”
“Gratitude is one of those things that can’t be rammed down our throats with any degree of success. It’s a bit like cod liver oil that way.”
She laughed. “How comforting it is to talk to you. You’re so straightforward.”
He didn’t even blink. “Quite.”
“Still, my uncle has always been kind to me. Whenever he’s been in town, he has paid a call at my lodgings to inquire after my situation and be sure I am well.”
How generous of him. Rhys did not say that aloud. “Does your uncle come to town often?”
“The first of every month, he journeys up from Sussex on matters of business.”
That sparked Rhys’s curiosity. What matters of business in London could there be for a poor squire from Sussex who couldn’t afford beef for his table?
“Anyway,” she went on, returning his attention to the topic at hand, “I am grateful to my uncle. The agricultural depression hit him very hard, and he took me in when one more mouth to feed had truly become a burden. And he sends me an allowance every quarter most faithfully. Besides, they are my only family. So you see, I do feel a sense of obligation to them now that I’m—”