When the Duke Returns(19)

“Do you know,” he said, sitting down opposite her, “I think we should discuss the question of annulment.”

She gasped, her eyes flew to his, and one of her gloves dropped to the floor.

“You must have thought of it,” he said, more gently. He picked up her glove and dropped it back in her lap.

“Of course.”

“If you would like an annulment, I would not stand in your way.”

She blinked at him for a moment, and then said, “I don’t understand you.”

He didn’t understand himself. He’d been offered one of the most beautiful women on three continents, and he was throwing her away. But she was trouble. The skin prickling all over his body told him that…as much trouble as he’d ever encountered, and that included the crocodile who almost chewed off his toes.

“I know that I behaved in an extraordinarily ungracious way, wandering around foreign parts and not returning to consummate our marriage. The least I can do is offer you another option, should you wish to take it. My mother has made it vehemently clear that I am unfit to marry a proper gentlewoman.”

Her eyes rested on his trousers. He wasn’t wearing breeches. He didn’t mind baring his lower leg when he was running, but he simply couldn’t get used to slipping into stockings. His mother had shrieked, of course. Apparently no one wore trousers except for artisans and eccentrics.

He had replied with the obvious truth: it seemed that he was an eccentric.

“Eccentrics and robbers!” his mother had added. “Yet even they wear white trousers!”

“I am wearing a cravat,” he said to Isidore now.

He couldn’t read her face. She had obviously noted the fact that he wasn’t wearing hair powder or a wig. “I tried on a wig with three rows of little snail shells over the ear. I looked like a lunatic.”

There was just a suspicion of a smile at the corner of her mouth. If he could find rubies that color, he would…

“Do you wear color on your lips?” he asked.

She shot him a look. “Why? Are you averse to women wearing face paint?”

“No, why should I be?” he said, surprised.

She seemed to relax. “There are men who consider themselves an apt judge of what a woman should or shouldn’t wear on her face.”

“I’m hardly the one to complain,” Simeon said, “given as I do not conform to all the customs of an English gentleman.”

“Obviously.”

“My mother tells me that I greatly underestimated your complaint regarding Nerot’s Hotel and that, in fact, ladies stay in such establishments only while traveling outside London. I had no idea from your protest that the experience was prohibited for women.”

“Is it my fault, then? I should have been more vehement?”

Simeon opened his mouth. Paused. “I should have listened to you?” he suggested.

There was a hint of a smile on her lips. “You must have worn a cravat at Eton.”

“Of course I did. But that feels like a lifetime ago. I am who I am because of the places I have been. And Eton is just a tiny kernel of my past. I’m fond of English seasons. There were times in the midst of the desert when I almost cried to remember how beautiful our rain can be. But the core of me was shaped by the deserts of Abyssinia, by the sands of India.”

She sighed.

“I know,” he said, nodding. “That’s why I thought it was better to bring up the question of annulment rather than let it fester silently between us.”

“Why don’t you wish to marry me?” she asked bluntly, looking up at him.

He opened his mouth but she raised her hand. “Please don’t tell me once again that you are offering me an annulment for my sake. I know precisely the weight you put on my opinion; it was eloquently expressed by your absence in the past years.”

He deserved that. And she deserved the truth.

“I am beautiful,” she added with a pugnacious kind of honesty that suggested it was second nature to her. “I am a virgin. And we are married. So why would you wish to annul that ceremony?”

“The desert changed me.”

She waited, and he had the feeling that it was only by a masterful effort of self-control that she didn’t curl her lip. Well, it did sound insane. Put that together with his virginity…“I met a great teacher named Valamksepa, when I first traveled to India. He taught me a great deal about what it means to be a man.”

“Ah,” she said. “A man is obviously not defined by his wig or his legs. So do tell me, what is the measure of a man?”

Her voice was calm, but underneath were banked fires. He was right to annul the marriage.