“As it happens,” she said, schooling her voice to calm indifference with every bit of strength she had, “Jemma gave me the direction of the Duke of Beaumont’s solicitor in the Inns of Court. I shall make inquiries as to how we go about an annulment.”
There was a flash of something in his eyes. What? Regret? Surely not. He sat there, looking calm and relaxed, like a king on his throne. He was throwing her away because she wasn’t a docile little seamstress, because she would make him angry.
Angry—and lustful. That was something to think about. She could unclothe herself right here, in the drawing room, and then he would have to marry her, but that would be cutting off her nose to spite her face. Why would she bind herself in marriage to a man like this? With these foolish ideas learned in the desert?
“Why don’t we make a trip there tomorrow afternoon?” he was asking now.
Isidore refused to allow his eagerness to visit the solicitor to throw her further into humiliation. He was a fool, and she’d known that since the moment she met him.
It would be better to annul the marriage.
She sat down opposite him, reasonably certain that her face showed nothing more than faint irritation. “I have an appointment at eleven tomorrow morning with a mantua-maker to discuss intimate attire.”
“Intimate what?”
“A nightdress for my wedding night,” she said crushingly.
“If we visit the solicitor first, I would be happy to accompany you to your appointment .”
Isidore narrowed her eyes, wondering about the look on her husband’s face. She was no expert, but it didn’t look like a man who was in control of his lust.
There were three things that no man was supposed to act on, weren’t there? Anger, lust…and an idea of marriage that included what?
Oh yes.
An intelligent woman within a ten-foot radius.
That must be where fear came in.
Chapter Eight
Gore House, Kensington
London Seat of the Duke of Beaumont
February 26, 1784
“Your Grace.”
Jemma, Duchess of Beaumont, looked up from her chess board. She had it set out in the library, in the hopes that her husband would come home from the House of Lords earlier than expected. “Yes, Fowle?”
“The Duke of Villiers has sent in his card.”
“Is he in his carriage?”
Fowle inclined his head.
“Do request his presence, if he can spare the time.”
Fowle paced from the library as majestically as he had entered. It was a sad fact, Jemma thought, that her butler resembled nothing so much as a plump village priest, and yet he clearly envisioned himself as a duke. Or perhaps even a king. There was a touch of noblesse oblige in the way he tolerated Jemma’s obsession with chess, for example.
Naturally, the Duke of Villiers made a grand entrance. He paused for a moment in the doorway, a vision in pale rose, with black-edged lace falling around his wrists and at his neck. Then he swept into a ducal bow such as Fowle could only dream of.
Jemma came to her feet feeling slightly amused and thoroughly delighted to see Villiers. She used to think that he had the coldest eyes of any man in the ton. And yet as she rose from a deep curtsy and took his hands, she revised her opinion. His eyes were black as the devil’s nightshirt, to quote her old nanny. And yet—
“I have missed you during my sojourn at Fonthill,” he said, raising her hand to his lips.
Not cold.
His thick hair was tied back with a rose ribbon. He looked pale but healthy, presumably recovered from the duel that nearly killed him a few months before. She felt a small pulse of guilt: the duel had been won by her brother, after which he summarily married Villiers’s fiancée. Much though Jemma loved her new sister-in-law, she wished that the relation could have been won without injuring her favorite chess partner.
“Come,” she said, leading him to the fire. “You’re still too thin, you know. Should you be upright?”
“I could challenge you for that insult. I’ve knocked on death’s privy and came back to tell the tale, and you’re saying I’m too thin?”
She grinned at him. “Do say that you came to play chess with me? It has been over a month since your fever broke, and that was the length of time for which your doctor issued an embargo on the game, was it not?”
He sat opposite her. She leaned forward, began rearranging the pieces; his large hand came over hers. “Not chess,” he said.
“Not—chess?” If not chess, what? She knew him to be a master at the game, just as she was. What did a master do, but play? “I thought your doctor decreed merely a month without chess; have I mistaken the date?”
He leaned his head back against the chair. “I’ve gone off the game.”