Chapter 11
Feeling blissfully relaxed, Richard let her lead him out of the conservatory and down a path lined with paving stones.
The rain has eased to a thin drizzle, not that he would have noticed if it were still pouring down.
He would have let her lead him anywhere at that moment; if she’d demanded he sign over all his worldly property and take a vow of poverty, he would have done it.
All that mattered was that she was here, still barely clothed, holding his hand.
He’d thrown his shirt back on, but left behind everything else—at her suggestion.
She glanced mischievously over her shoulder, her dark eyes shining and her hair trailing in tousled locks down her back.
“Guess what it is,” she said as she led him, fingers loosely woven through his, toward a round stone building with high windows.
“A . . . folly?” He had to search for the name. Clemency had admired one on the grounds of the too-rustic home he had not taken—and thank God for that.
Evangeline laughed as she pushed open the wooden door. “Of a sort!” She went inside and turned to watch his reaction.
Richard stopped in the doorway and regarded it with astonishment.
He had indeed seen such a thing before, though not in England.
Some previous owner of Wyndham House had been a Roman enthusiast, for he stood facing a full, if compact, Roman bathhouse.
To his left, through a narrow stone doorway, he could see a circular plunge bath, which would be cold water.
In front of him, through another doorway, was a larger pool, steam rising from the water’s surface.
“I have never seen a bath like this in England.”
She grinned. “It’s the reason I bought this house.” She stripped off the last of her clothing, hanging it on pegs on the wall to his right.
“Very wisely so,” he murmured, admiring her openly. She blushed, but didn’t hide herself as she strolled toward the hot bath. Richard pulled the shirt over his head and tossed it toward the pegs, unwilling to take his eyes away from her, before following.
She moaned in pleasure as she lowered herself into the water, reclining on the submerged bench that ran around the pool. He stepped down into the water, hissing at the heat of it, and sank down opposite her.
Evangeline lay back and rested her head on the tiles.
Her hair was beginning to curl around her face in the damp heat, giving her an unexpectedly impish look.
Richard was charmed. He swirled his hands through the water, exhaling through his teeth as the heat began to seep into his bones. “This is amazing.”
“I didn’t build it,” she said, her voice warm and easy. “Some prior owner had that brilliant thought. But oh, my, when I saw it . . . I had to have this house.”
“I see why,” he murmured. “This surpasses any pond.”
She laughed. “It’s a great deal of work to prepare a hot bath, but I do admit I revel in it.”
“Who would not? I have not been this warm since . . . now that I think of it, never in England.” He spread his arms along the edge of the bath.
She tipped her head to one side and gave him a wry look.
“The water is warmed by coals shoveled into the space beneath the floor of this caldarium. When I set off this morning in search of Louis, my companion teased me that she would prepare it, expecting I would return soaked to the skin and half-dead of cold.”
“Well,” he said, “it is true you grew very wet.”
A small, satisfied smile played across her lips.
Her hair floated like a mermaid’s in the water around her shoulders and breasts, as it had that day he discovered her swimming in the pond.
She folded one arm behind her neck and put back her head, exposing her long, pale throat to him.
“She said it to tweak me, setting out on such a forbidding day. But now I find I must thank her very sincerely.”
Richard smiled. “I hope so. This is divine.”
For a few moments they both half-floated in peaceful silence. There was a very dreamlike air about the whole thing, which Richard later blamed for what he said next. “I am not attempting to change the terms you proposed,” he said, eyes still closed, “but may I ask how you chose them?”
He supposed some men would feel offended by her demands. But the truth was, most affairs did not last; they hardly knew each other, aside from the irresistible attraction they both felt. She must have been treated badly by a past lover, a mistake Richard would do his very best not to repeat.
“Oh my.” Amusement lurked in her voice. “It is a frightening and sordid tale. Surely you don’t mean to ruin what has been, thus far, a day of unparalleled pleasure?”
Satisfaction surged through him at that. Yes, it had been.
Perhaps it was the aftermath of that unparalleled pleasure, or soaking in hot water, but something made her talkative.
“I’ve had two marriages, which is more than enough for anyone,” she told him.
“Not only that, both were cruel disappointments.” She gave a mock shudder.
“I daresay it’s very bad luck to marry me. I am doing the gentlemen a kindness.”
For a moment he was shocked speechless. Disappointments he could understand, but bad luck? What had happened to her husbands? He would have to ask Clemency. “Perhaps the third time would be the charmed one,” he suggested.
“Perhaps, but I’m not inclined to risk it.” She gave an odd little huff of a laugh. “By rights, I ought to have had at least one decent marriage, to atone for the other. It seems terribly unfair for both of them to have been bad.”
“A criminal injustice,” he agreed lightly, since that seemed to be how she preferred to keep things.
She shook one finger in the air, splashing him a little. “Precisely!” Then she laughed. “But the criminal, if there were one, would be my own father.”
He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling for a moment. It was arched and vaulted to a single point in the middle, as if to guide all the steam to one focus. “Not just bad luck, then?”
“Oh, no.” She swept out one arm, sending a small wave of water into his chest. “This may shock you to learn, but I was wild as a girl. So very, very wild and ungovernable,” she whispered with a coy smile.
He smiled, because she looked wild and playful as she said it and he loved that look. “Surely not. I refuse to believe it.”
“No, it’s true,” she said, eyes twinkling.
“Wild, incorrigible, reckless . . .” Her voice trailed off and for a moment the impishness faded and she looked sad.
Then with a start she smiled again. “Naturally the only cure was a staid and respectable marriage, and my father knew just the man to moderate my high spirits. Cunningham was so much older than I—” She stopped short, then burst out laughing.
“Old! I’ve just realized: he was the same age I am now! ” She laughed harder.
Richard heaved a melodramatic sigh, trying to conceal his surprise. She must have been a girl. Such strange customs the English had. “Years of life do not make one steady and wise any more than youth makes one vibrant and wild.”
“True,” she agreed, her eyes still sparkling. Her foot slid up his shin. “See how wild and reckless I still am, inviting a stranger into my private bathhouse.”
Richard took hold of her foot and pulled it firmly into his lap. “We are hardly strangers, I hope.” Her face went blank in shock for a moment, but then he dug his thumbs into her sole, and she let out a breathy moan of delight.
“I always wondered if Cunningham ever wanted to do my father harm, for saddling him with me,” she mused. “Not only did my spirits not moderate, I believe I drove him mad.”
“I don’t wonder.”
“Oh, not in any good way. He might have genuinely wanted to murder me.” Evangeline flexed her foot in his grasp, and he obligingly rededicated himself to her arch. “He expected I’d give him children, but not once was it even suspected.”
Richard thought about that. “Did it distress you?”
“Lord, no! It was awful enough to be his wife. At least it was only my own person and happiness I had to preserve against him. He would have been a strict and distant father, dictating every facet of his heir’s life, and I would have fought him fiercely to protect my child.
Better for us all that no such child ever existed. ”
“Ah.” He was quiet again for a moment, still rubbing her foot, propped on his thigh. “I do not blame you, then. It is difficult to mourn such men.”
She clicked her tongue. “That’s the thing, you see. I didn’t mourn him. He was a respectable man, but when he died, I was so relieved to be free of him.” She sent him another sideways glance. “See what a sinner you’ve taken up with.”
He shrugged. “He ought to have lived a life that inspired more affection.”
She blinked at him. “Oh my. I see you shan’t be a good influence on me at all.” But she said it in a tone that suggested deep approval of that fact.
“I have no desire to influence you to be anything you are not.” He returned her look with a heated one of his own. “I admire you precisely as you are now.”
She arched her back, and his gaze dropped at once to her breasts, exposed above the steaming water. “You’re a wild and reckless one, Sir Richard.”
“Indeed. And we are only beginning to know each other.” She laughed at that, and he grinned. “I have found that there are few accurate predictors of how wild, or staid, one may be. I have known hell-raisers who have achieved their seventieth year, and placid men still at university.”
“So it’s something immutable within us?”
He lifted one shoulder, slowly working his massage up her ankle.
“No. A wild young man might settle down in his maturity—in fact, I believe this is the expected course, with wild young men. And a somber, respectable woman may reach a point where she no longer cares what anyone thinks of her, and casts off all inhibitions.”
She raised her arms in the air with a smile, as if to say Such as I, and he laughed.