Chapter 9
Maximilian, a mile or two away in his own luxurious silk-hung bedchamber, wasn’t sleeping any better than Allegra.
He’d left the ball a short while after Miss Constantine had so emphatically chastised him for his insolence; he’d had no wish to lay eyes on her in company with any other man.
Her slap had not served to cool his ardour; rather the reverse.
She had revealed herself to be a creature of passion and impulse.
He had suspected as much before, but in moments of self-doubt he had paused to wonder if he might perhaps have been projecting his own unruly and unwelcome emotions onto her. After tonight, he knew he wasn’t.
Now his desire for her was raging so strongly, like a river in full flood carrying away trees and houses, everything in its path, that he would have suffered the acutest of torments if he’d seen her dancing with someone else.
Laughing, flirting. She had a perfect right to do whatever she wanted with whatever partner she chose, and his brain knew as much; the blood pounding in his veins paid no heed to rationality and would not, it seemed, be so easily checked.
It had been a long while since physical desire had come so close to overmastering him, and he had good cause to know how violently destructive such a force could be.
Did he not owe his very existence with all its complications to a few heedless moments of passion on a Caribbean beach some six or seven and twenty years ago?
Ten more minutes in that garden, and he’d have been caught very neatly in the parson’s mousetrap he’d so carelessly described to her.
And it would have been entirely his own fault, not hers.
He had gone to her, had sent the foolish boy away so that he could be alone with her, knowing where it was likely to lead, which she probably had not.
It was nothing less than sheer reckless madness and he had every reason in the world to know better.
He’d made his way slowly inside, shaking his head at his own folly, and yet still unable really to regret it because it had felt so wonderful, and so damn right.
His Oxford friends Tom Ivory and Gil Glasscock had hailed him with pleasure when they’d seen him in the hall of the mansion.
Was not this the dullest of dull affairs, Sev?
they’d cried. Doing the pretty to young ladies on the Season’s marriage mart was poor sport, after all: a great deal of danger for very little reward.
They had just this moment decided to seek far less decorous entertainment elsewhere – not that his evening had been notably decorous so far, but of course they didn’t know that.
They’d pressed him to go with them, to make a night of it, but he’d turned them off with some excuse, and they had shrugged and gone on their way to some disreputable destination.
There was a discreet house just off Tavistock Place…
but no use to think of that now. He needn’t be alone and frustrated tonight, but he was, by his own deliberate choice.
The plain fact was, he didn’t think another woman – any other woman – would truly satisfy him when he had had Allegra Constantine warm in his arms for that brief, unforgettable moment.
No doubt he could easily have achieved much-needed release, and his generously paid and skilfully professional companion would not have cared that all his thoughts might be of another.
It must be a common enough occurrence, after all.
But… he hadn’t wanted that. The idea of putting someone else in her place was unaccountably repugnant to him.
He was in the Devil of a coil. He could not be seen to seduce a debutante – say rather, he had no intention of seducing a debutante.
No doubt debutantes had been seduced before and would be again, every day of the week including Sunday, but not by him.
Not this time. But he had no wish to marry, not when the other tangled circumstances of his life made it highly inadvisable.
Therefore, she was not for him. Therefore, he must cease playing with fire by watching her all the time like a mooncalf, and seek safety, which would only come from entirely letting her be.
Probably he should leave London, go back to his estate in Kent, or anywhere a good long distance away – Scotland?
Ireland? – and not return until he heard she was safely married to Milton, or Eager, or even Englishby.
What could it matter who, since it would not be him?
Perhaps, he thought cynically, if she did in fact marry one of them – maybe Milton, who didn’t appear to have hot blood in his veins, but some other, more lukewarm and sluggish fluid – she might one day look kindly on him as a lover.
He was not lukewarm, and nor was she. She might welcome him discreetly to her bed in a year or two, in an arrangement that happened every day in the haut ton.
Then he could have her, enjoy her, but not, of course, possess her fully, because she would always belong to another man.
There was a great deal wrong with this statement, he was aware.
The smallest part of it was the fact that she had slapped him, he’d richly deserved it for the way he’d egregiously insulted her, and she was therefore very unlikely ever to look kindly on him in any capacity again, least of all that of clandestine lover.
But that was as nothing beside the uncomfortable truth that, even if she did prove herself one day willing to play her hypothetical husband false – which she’d only do if she was unhappy in her match, was he really wishing misery on her?
– it was not, in fact, possible to possess another person, nor should it be.
He of all people should not be thinking like that.
Other men might use such words carelessly, out loud or in their own heads, but he could not.
Other men, and women too, here in England and in France, still owned slaves, built their vast fortunes on them and yet thought themselves the pinnacle of civilisation.
His face, his very existence gave that the lie.
He was the descendant of such wealthy, heartless people, yes, but also of the human beings they called property.
He didn’t suppose they’d ever let him forget that, even if he could for a second.
But this was a road he didn’t want to go down in his thoughts just now, if he hoped for any rest at all tonight.
He shifted uneasily in his luxurious and lonely bed.
All-consuming passion could only have any chance of a happy outcome if it was mutual and fully consensual, he believed.
Desire and duress did not belong together.
A man whose ancestors – whose paternal grandmother, for one – had had no say at all in the direction of her own life, would not contemplate taking that precious freedom away from another.
And even then, even if it was entirely shared, uncontrolled passion seemed more likely to destroy lives than anything else.
Every adult knew that. Setting aside the cloudy, undeniably illicit circumstances of his own conception, history and literature held thousands of examples to teach him of the danger of unfettered lust. Perhaps he could begin listing them in date order, if sleep still proved elusive.
But if he was still seeking to comfort himself with the hope of one day, somehow, having her, Allegra, he was in serious trouble and must acknowledge it.
And yet, he found he had no intention of leaving London, even though he knew in every fibre of his being that he should go tomorrow and not look back.
He was enmeshed somewhere deep in tales from Ovid when slumber finally claimed him, and his dreams were rendered uneasy by images of Allegra Constantine, more lovely in her nakedness than any marble statue of a goddess could ever be, fleeing him and transforming in her flight into something unsettling and half-human that had branches instead of hands.
They’d sent him to an English public school to mould him into something he was not, and now as a result, their stories invaded even his nightmares.