Three Weeks With Lady X(44)

"We must not kiss after you are promised to another."

"You're implying . . ."

He grinned at her, Lala wasn't his yet, and India wasn't Vander's yet. So he kissed her.

But something still bothered him. "You were not walking easily earlier today," he said, tracing her lower lip with his finger.

India's eyes had a desirous look that made him long to push her backward  and simply thrust into her. Not that he would, but he wanted to.

Oh God, did he want to.

"I didn't what?"

"When you walked around the drawing room with Vander . . . your movement was rather stiff."

The dazed expression in her eyes disappeared; she straightened and  scowled at him. But her lip was swollen from his kisses, and her frown  just made him harder, hungrier. Still . . . he had to know.

"You walked as if you had been a virgin last night," he said flatly.

It was one thing if Lady Xenobia India was a loose woman, practiced in  the arts of shaking the sheets, taking her pleasure where she would. He  would never fault a woman for that, any more than he would fault  himself.

But if he had seduced a virgin . . . Actually, there was something oddly  relieving about the thought. He'd have to marry her. They would fight  all the time. They'd probably make each other miserable. But he would  have no other choice.

"India?" It came out like a command, though he had meant it only as a question.

She picked up a heavy fall of silky hair and pushed it behind one  shoulder. "I fail to see why I should share the history of my intimacies  with you. As I told you, I was not a virgin."

He watched her carefully. "I don't know if I believe you."

She jumped to her feet. She looked outraged, like Juno fighting with  Jupiter. This could be his life. He couldn't help himself, and grinned  at her, which just made her angrier.

"You are insisting that I say this aloud again? Then I will. You were not the first."

Well, that was definite. Thorn was well aware that his pang of  disappointment was absurd. He had forced her to admit something that no  lady would wish to announce. He was an oaf, a thoughtless, mannerless  oaf.

"I'm an idiot," he admitted. "I thought you were walking stiffly."

She gave him one last furious glance and turned on her heel. "I shall  return to the house in the pony cart, and you can find your own way  back, Mr. Dautry." With that, she was gone.

Thorn climbed the stairs and entered the nursery. Rose was curled on her  side, arms around Antigone, all that duckling hair of hers spread over  the covers. He leaned down and kissed her good-night.

Instead of returning to the main house, he walked to the gatehouse, to the bedchamber where he'd bedded India the night before.

He stripped to the skin, because that's the way he always slept, and  slipped naked between sheets that still had the faintest scent of India.  She had called her perfume "moonflower." He'd never heard of it.

They probably didn't have moonflowers in London; certainly there were no  flowers down by the Thames. He lay awake, hands behind his head,  staring at the ceiling for a long time.

Perhaps it was time to put the Thames behind him. He was tired of  measuring his life by whether a mudlark would have known what a  moonflower was. Who cared? At the heart of it, the really important  point was that India smelled like a woman beneath that delicate trace of  flower.

Not just any woman, either: India. Spicy, sweet, bold, desirous.

He'd never had a woman like her before. Even thinking of the way she  moaned, low in her throat, made him harden to the point of pain.                       
       
           



       

Yet his life was planned. There was no space for a woman who made him  feel unmoored. He had to shovel all this feeling back into a hole in the  ground and bury it.

It wasn't healthy. Some madness was making him imagine, over and over,  the journey from the gatehouse to the main house. A quiet trip up the  stairs, a left turn, and straight to India's bedchamber.

She slept deeply, and she wouldn't wake when he entered the room. Not  until he drew back the covers and slid into the bed, naked, ready, his  hands slipping beneath her nightdress. Even the thought of touching her  limbs made his cock throb.

And that slapped him back to reality. Had he lost his mind? One woman  and one night, and he forgot reason and logic? He wasn't a gentleman,  but that didn't mean that he didn't have an obligation to Lala.

He did.

Plus India was exactly what Vander wanted. They would have a marriage  like that between his father and Eleanor. Exactly what Vander had talked  of. Their children would have India's hair.

He and Lala . . . well, they wouldn't. She wasn't a simpleton, the way  everyone in the ton thought, but she wasn't India, either. They would  have children as well.

It was unfortunate that the thought of babies with Lala's timid  expression, even if they had her dazzling beauty, made him feel slightly  queasy, but that was the truth of it. He would be kind to his wife, and  she would follow him about the way a duckling follows its mother,  quiet, docile, obedient . . . sweet and fluffy.

Thorn reared up, punched his pillow violently, and lay back down. No  more kissing India, touching India, making love to India . . .

That was for Vander now.





Chapter Twenty-four

The next day India didn't see Thorn until evening. She spent a  less-than-wonderful morning talking to Lala and her mother, who had come  downstairs for a few hours before retreating back to her bed. And in  the afternoon she helped Rose create an elaborate schoolroom from paper,  complete with a bookshelf and fireplace.

"Where on earth have you been?" she asked, as Thorn came into the drawing room before supper.

"The factory. Look at this, India." He pulled something from his pocket  and showed her a queer-looking string that seemed to form a closed  circle, without a knot or seam.

"What is it?"

"It's your band."

"What?"

"The band you wanted. Made of rubber. We were able to solve the problem  once we made it small, which I never considered." He gave her a smile so  glowing that India's heart actually thumped.

She took the band and stretched it. "This is brilliant," she said,  muttering because she was thinking of all the ways she could use it.  "Can you make me more? I'd like one about half this size, and one twice  as large too."

He started laughing, which caught the attention of the whole party. They all came over and stood around, admiring the band.

Lala was particularly enthralled. Her eyes became very bright, and she  came up with a plan to put the ear trumpet Dr. Hatfield used to listen  to people's chests on a band around his neck. "He kept putting it down,"  she told everyone, "and some houses are not as clean as they might be."

"Does the ear trumpet have articulated joints?" Thorn asked her, after  which he and Lala got into a long discussion about whether it would be  possible to create a flexible tube, using Thorn's galvanized rubber,  that would preserve sound better than the current model.

Eleanor had invited Dr. Hatfield to dinner as a thank you for his  faithful attendance on the convalescent Lady Rainsford; once he arrived  and they were all seated at the table, Thorn brought up the ear trumpet  again.

Secretly-and shamefully-India became rather cross as she watched Lala  become a shining, smiling woman who easily held the attention of her end  of the table. Vander had made no bones about finding the subject  boring-that is, until Lala pointed out that if the trumpet was modified  to have a longer tube of rubber, one might be able to listen to horse's  hearts. Or even stomachs, to see whether they might have colic.

Thorn wasn't seated beside India tonight; he was across the table. Their  eyes met once, and he gave her a little frown. She turned away and  managed to get into an interesting conversation with his father about  the recent income tax Pitt had established.

When supper concluded, and the women retired to the drawing room, India  tried to decide whether she could sneak away to pay another visit to  Rose. If she went to the dower house once again, Thorn might assume that  she was sending him a message. Flirting with him.

Instead she sat down and wrote Rose a little goodnight story about Lord  Parsley, which she gave to Fleming with a request that it be delivered  to the dower house.                       
       
           



       

She felt a bit wistful, remembering how she had told Rose that she would tell her more of the story in person.

But it was better this way.

The last thing a motherless little girl needed was to form an attachment to a woman she'd never see again.





Chapter Twenty-five

After breakfast the following morning, Lala went upstairs and seated  herself on a hassock in her mother's bedchamber, appearing to be a  dutiful daughter while in reality she dreamed of being a country  doctor's wife. It wasn't as if Dr. Hatfield lived in a hovel. He had  pointed out his house to her, and it was a perfectly respectable house  in the middle of the village, with a picket fence and likely a garden in  back.