Chapter 2 #2
Even had he been thoroughly sober, the Duke of Marchmont could not have guessed what they were about.
This was nothing new. It would not be the first time he’d interrupted one of their incomprehensible family squabbles.
It certainly wouldn’t be the first time they promptly recommenced while he was there.
After all, they did regard him as a member of the family, which meant they felt as free to abuse him as they did one another.
He crossed to the table, where a decanter sat untouched, surrounded by wineglasses. He might as well have a drink while he watched the entertainment.
He had lifted decanter and glass and was about to pour when her voice, with its exotic lilt, rose above the rest.
“Marchmont, will you please marry me?” she said.
Mama let out a little scream.
Gertrude leapt up from her chair and tried to drag Zoe out of the room. Zoe broke away from her and moved closer to her father.
“A duke, you said,” she told her sisters. “Or a marquess. He is a duke. He has no wives. Wife,” she quickly amended. In England, it was only one wife to a man, she reminded herself.
“You don’t simply offer yourself to the first nobleman who walks through the door,” said Dorothea.
“But you said the dukes and marquesses would not come to us,” said Zoe.
“I’m afraid to imagine what will be said about this,” said Priscilla.
“You said I could not hope to meet such men,” said Zoe. “But here is one.” And she wasn’t about to let him get away if she could help it.
“Ooooh,” said Mama. She fell back upon the pillows.
“Look what you’ve done to Mama!”
“The girl is hopeless.”
“Of course he’ll tell all his friends.”
“Papa, do something!” Gertrude cried as she flung herself into her chair.
Papa only looked briefly over his shoulder, his glance going from Zoe to the tall, fair-haired, shockingly handsome man with the decanter and glass in his long-fingered hands. The Duke of Marchmont’s beautifully shaped mouth had fallen open. His eyes had widened slightly.
As she watched, he closed his mouth and shuttered his eyes again.
She’d seen those stunningly green eyes wide open, for one dizzying heartbeat in time, when they’d first lit on her. The impact had nearly toppled her from her chair. She’d felt for a moment like the little girl spinning helplessly until landing on her bottom on a muddy patch of grass.
“I cannot wait,” she said. “Marchmont, you are the highest of rank here. Tell them to be silent and let me speak.”
“We shall never live this down,” Augusta said. “What a tale he’ll have for his friends at White’s.”
Marchmont slowly filled his glass. When that was done, he said, “I must have heard aright, else your sisters would not be shrieking at quite that pitch. You have asked me to marry you. Is that correct, Miss Lexham?”
The last time her heart had pounded so hard was on the day she’d fled the palace of Yusri Pasha and found the gates of the European quarter closed to her. Then she’d been terrified of what would happen to her if she was caught.
Yet she’d been exhilarated, too, to risk everything in one desperate bid for freedom.
This appeared to be her only chance to live the life for which she’d taken that desperate risk.
However grand his rank or handsome his face or splendid his physique, this was still a man, she told herself.
Though he hid his eyes, she knew he was mentally taking off her clothes and liked what he saw.
She felt, rather than saw, the slight tension in his posture: the alertness of the predator when it marks its prey.
A harem slave would be tearing off her garments about now.
Zoe knew she could not entice him in that way. Not here, at any rate. Not now. She must appeal to him from mind to mind. It must be business. The way men did it.
Or at least it must seem so.
She adjusted her shawl and her own posture, making herself as alluring as she could without being too obvious about it, while she filled her mind with the ritual formulae employed on similar occasions.
In a logical and orderly fashion, she summarized for the duke her sisters’ and absent brothers’ assessment of the situation and their reasons for wanting to send her away.
“They say the only other solution is for me to marry a man of the highest rank,” she went on. “They say others must defer to him. They say that a man so highly placed will want an innocent girl of eighteen. I am not truly innocent, and I am not eighteen, but I am a virgin.”
“Ooooh,” said Mama.
Zoe went on determinedly, “Yusri Pasha gave me as a second wife to Karim, who was his eldest son by his first wife. But Karim could not make his…his…”—though Marchmont kept his eyes half closed, she knew the duke regarded her intently—“his instrument of delight. The limb a man uses for pleasure and to make children. What is it called?”
Shrieks from the sisters.
Zoe ignored them. “No one will tell me what it is in English,” she said. “If I ever learned the word, I have forgotten it.”
He made an odd sound in his throat. Then he said, “Membrum virile will do.”
The two older sisters put their heads in their hands.
“He could not make his membrum virile hard,” Zoe said. “He was sickly, you see. He was unable to be a true husband, though he was so fond of me, and I did everything they taught me to awaken a man’s desire. Everything. I even—”
“Zoe,” her father said in a strangled voice, “it is unnecessary to explain in detail.”
“One wishes it were not necessary for her to speak at all,” a sister muttered.
“One wishes the floor would open up and swallow one.”
“We shall never, never live this down.”
“Never mind them, Miss Lexham,” said Marchmont. “Please continue. I’m all ears.” He drank some more.
“I shall be an excellent wife to you,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound as desperate as she felt.
She told herself that if this didn’t work, she’d go to Paris or Venice as she’d threatened, though those had never been her first choices.
She wanted to live in her native land and have the life she’d dreamt of for twelve long years.
It looked as though the Duke of Marchmont was her one chance to have that life.
He was handsome and young and healthy and not excessively intelligent, and he desired her. He was perfect.
Fate had thrown him in her way. A gift. All she had to do was hold onto him.
Don’t panic, she counseled herself. You know exactly what to do. You spent twelve years learning it.
“I know all the arts of pleasing a man,” she went on. “I can sing and dance and compose poetry. I learn quickly and will learn how to behave correctly in…in good society…if you will help me, or find me teachers.”
She was not calm enough. Her English was faltering as a consequence, but she plunged on.
“I know widows are worthless, but I was never a wife of the body. I remain a virgin, and a virgin is valuable. Too, I have jewels, enough to make as great a dowry as a maiden would have. I shall be a loving mother to your children. All the children of the harem were fond of me. In truth, it made me sad to leave them, and I shall be happy to have children of my own.” She paused and glanced at her sisters. “But not too many.”
“Not too many,” he repeated. He drank some more.
“I know how to arrange a household,” she said. “I know how to manage servants, even eunuchs—and they can be impossible. Their moods are more changeable than a woman’s.”
“Eunuchs. I see.”
“I know how to manage them,” she said. “I was the only one in all the household who could.”
The other two sisters put their heads in their hands. Mama covered her face with her handkerchief.
Marchmont emptied his glass and set it down.
His slitted green gaze came back to Zoe.
She couldn’t truly see it, so secret he was in the way he used his eyes, but she certainly felt it.
His slow, assessing look traveled from the top of her head to her toes, which curled in reaction.
All of her body seemed to curl under that gaze, as though she were a serpent stirring, lured out of the darkness into the warmth of the sun.
She felt the stirring and curling inside, too, low in her belly.
“That is a most tempting offer,” he said.
The room fell oppressively silent, and it seemed to Marchmont that his voice echoed in it. “To be able to manage eunuchs is a rare accomplishment, indeed.”
The four harridans made no sound. Their youngest sister had succeeded in doing the impossible: She’d rendered them speechless.
“Well?” she said into the lengthening silence.
He poured himself more wine. The effort not to laugh was sure to do him a permanent injury.
He was sure he’d never, in all his life, heard anything so hilarious as Zoe-not Zoe’s marriage proposal or her sisters’ reaction to it.
That alone was worth the thousand pounds he’d lost in the wager. Hell, it was probably worth the price of marriage. He’d be laughing about it for years to come, he didn’t doubt.
But years to come was a very long time, and marrying now would be inconvenient. For appearances’ sake he would be obliged to give up his mistress for a time, and Lady Tarling hadn’t yet begun to bore him.
“It devastates me to decline,” he said, “but it would be grossly unfair to take advantage of you in that way.”
“Does that mean no?” said Zoe. Her soft mouth turned down.
Marchmont eyed her grown-up, delectably curving body. “It is no,” he said, “with the greatest regret. Were I to consent, I should be marrying you under false pretenses. I can accomplish what you require without your having to shackle yourself to me permanently.”
He knew that without him she had virtually no hope of a welcome in Society. He was the one man in London who could do what she needed done for her—and he owed it to Lexham to do it. Marchmont had not the smallest doubt in his mind about this. No amount of wine could wash that great debt away.
Her frown eased and her expression sharpened. “You can?”
“Nothing could be simpler,” he said.