Willa had never, ever thought of buying a print of Lord Wilde. Or rather, Lord Alaric.
Of course she didn’t want Lavinia’s prints. “Right,” she said, “they should be easy enough to give away. Let’s find your mother.”
“He knew that that was an excuse,” Lavinia said. “I know you don’t think much of his books, but I promise you that Lord Wilde’s accounts are more captivating than you have assumed.”
“I am sure you are correct,” Willa said. Leaving it at that.
A footman presented a tray with glasses of sickly sweet ratafia. “I wish that young ladies were allowed to drink more than a single glass of sherry,” Lavinia said with a sigh.
“The Season is over,” Willa pointed out. “We can allow ourselves some leeway.” She sent the footman off for sherry instead.
“It’s a good thing Mother didn’t overhear you,” Lavinia said, very entertained.
“You’re not alone in your aversion to ratafia. I feel the same way about the drink as Diana does about Lord Roland.”
“Just look at Diana now,” Lavinia said. “She is in anguish.”
Willa’s imagination was a pale, stunted twig in comparison to Lavinia’s bountiful creativity, and as such she tended to discount Lavinia’s more fanciful opinions. But she obediently turned to look across the drawing room at Diana, trying to decipher signs of anguish.
They had spent a good deal of time together during the Season, since Diana and Lavinia were distant cousins, but somehow Willa never felt she got to know Diana. At the moment, she looked pale, but then Diana had a porcelain complexion. After Lord Roland fell in love at first sight, general opinion declared that her complexion must have played a signal role.
“She may have slept badly,” Willa suggested.
Lavinia shook her head. “It’s monstrously unfair that she caught Lord Roland when she obviously doesn’t want him. I wish a future duke would fall in love with my complexion. It’s such a pure emotion. I suspect most of the men who offered for me have far more indelicate inclinations.”
Willa agreed. Lavinia’s suitors had trouble keeping their eyes off her chest, and for good reason. “I watched Lord Roland talking to Diana at breakfast, and his motives are definitely not pure. His eyes were quite desirous.”
“Thank you!” Lavinia said to the footman, who had returned with sherry. “We can’t rule out the possibility that he was experiencing lust for her wig rather than her person,” she told Willa, with a wrinkle of her nose. “I don’t think I could bear to be with a man who took his attire so seriously.”
Lord Roland was certainly a peacock, from his golden heels to his tall wig. This evening he was wearing a coat of silver silk with cherry twill. The combination would have made most men look effeminate, but the violent black slashes of his eyebrows saved him. In fact, in an odd way that bouffant wig just made him more masculine.
“I have the impression that he wears lip rouge,” Lavinia added.
His lordship had a deep ruby lip, but it might be natural. “He has the courage to do so,” Willa acknowledged. “I’ve never seen a man in a wig that high.”
“He must have acquired it in Paris,” Lavinia said. “Mother doesn’t approve—although if he’d fallen in love with my complexion she would have changed her mind—but I must say that he carries it off.”
Lord Roland was a beautiful animal, and any woman in his vicinity would find her eyes resting on him pleasurably.
His brother was just as beautiful. But Lord Alaric was rougher. Untamed. Their features were equally pleasing, she supposed. But somehow the same jaw on Lord Alaric looked harsher, more stubborn.
More troublesome for anyone in his life, such as his wife. It was just as well that she hadn’t the faintest wish to audition for the role.
“We can’t join my mother until we finish the sherry, so we ought to talk to Diana,” Lavinia said. “Since she’s over there by herself. Again.”
Sure enough, Diana was standing with her shoulder turned to the room, staring out the darkened window with passionate interest. Enough to make it clear that she did not care for company.
“I’ll join you after a visit to the ladies’ retiring room,” Willa said. “Just imagine what a fuss there will be if she changes her mind about the marriage, given that this entire house party is in honor of her betrothal.”
“You may be a natural philosopher, Willa—and I’m still not certain what that entails—but I can read faces,” Lavinia said. “I could make a fortune if I set up a stall at the fair. My cousin is in despair.”
Diana’s expression was indeed curiously tragic, as if she’d prefer wearing sackcloth and ashes to a Parisian gown covered with ruffles and bows … to say nothing of all the fruit pinned to the top of her wig.
“Her eyes resemble a basset hound’s,” Willa said thoughtfully. “A basset looks glum even if given a bone all to itself.”
“Lord Roland undoubtedly has a very fine bone,” Lavinia said, deadpan.
Willa choked with laughter. “You have no knowledge on that subject. He might have a twig, for all you know.”
“I’m telling you now, Willa, that if Diana breaks her engagement, I mean to see what that man has to offer. Under his wig, I mean, of course.”
“A shaved head,” Willa said blandly. “As bald as a nut. To go with his bone, of course.”
“Wil-la!”
Chapter Five
What do you think of the young ladies I introduced you to?” Lady Knowe whispered, throwing Alaric a smirk. “They were the undisputed toast of the Season; the only question was which of them received the most proposals.”
He had no time to answer before he was surrounded by admirers. His aunt began tossing out introductions as if she were announcing the field of horses at the Royal Ascot.
The interruption was just as well, since he wasn’t at all sure how to answer her question.
He felt as if he’d taken a sharp blow to the gut.
For some reason, Willa Ffynche inspired intense interest, a fierce impulse to know everything about her. What she thought, and why she thought it. Willa looked as if she kept her thoughts to herself—and he wanted them. All of them. He wanted to learn her private language.
He couldn’t remember ever meeting an Englishwoman who managed to be so courteous while being transparently skeptical. Not just about his books, but about him. She didn’t like him. Even looking at him made her turned-up little nose wrinkle.
Frankly, she might as well have waved a red cloth in front of a bull. The uncivilized male inside him, the one who hated wearing a wig, had got wind of a hunt.
Willa Ffynche didn’t look flirtatiously from under her lashes. She didn’t want a signed book, a proposal, or a baby.
She had absolutely no interest in becoming Lady Alaric Wilde.
She wanted nothing from him.
In fact, he had the impression that she considered him akin to a circus barker trying to charm visitors out of ha’pennies by boasting of a two-headed giant hidden in his wagon.
At one point, she had flicked him a glance that implied she believed his travel accounts to be blatantly dishonest.
Another thing: she didn’t seem to giggle. He was surrounded by giggling women at this very moment, so he appreciated her restraint.
Add to those qualities her beauty. It wasn’t just the clean way her cheek swept to her jaw. Or the wide eyes that had undoubtedly been serenaded by a hundred dubious poets.
The sum of her was so much greater than the parts. Lashes, pale skin, arched brows—
Long legs and a surprisingly deep bosom. Nothing like her friend Lavinia’s, who had breasts about which men wrote real poems, as opposed to doggerel about pretty eyes.
Lavinia’s bosom wouldn’t suit him, though. Willa’s breasts were creamy mounds that would just fit his hands.
They were perfect.
He smiled mechanically in response to a fawning comment, even as his body tightened at the thought of those breasts.
Willa held herself apart, and it undoubtedly drove men mad. Put together with that face and figure, the poor sods who frequented polite society hadn’t a chance of maintaining their equilibrium.
Even as he kissed hands and accepted yet more compliments, most of which had nothing to do with his books but everything to do with his stage portrayal as a lovelorn fool, he kept sorting through the difference between Willa and, say, a pirate. “Fascination” wasn’t quite the right word.
He’d never wanted to kiss a pirate, for one thing.
He wanted to kiss Willa Ffynche’s impudent mouth into silence, and then coax her to talk again.
The thought gave him a feeling of vertigo, followed by a wash of nausea. What in the bloody hell was he thinking?
“Lord Wilde,” a lady insisted, and he realized that he had lost track of the conversation.
“I do apologize,” he said. “You were telling me of your ancestor in the East India Company.”
She nodded. “I have his diary, and my husband and I think you are just the person to turn it into a book. He was dreadfully brave, you know. Frightfully so. It’s a family trait; my son takes after him.”
Alaric thought about explaining that he didn’t write for hire, but discarded the notion. “Is your son also a member of the Company?”